Party Structure and Organisation

By 1925 there was more agreement about the party’s role, and the way in which it should be organised to fulfil it, than there had been in the early post-revolutionary years. 1 In the immediate post-revolutionary period the evolution of a permanent bureaucracy had been a controversial issue, but by 1921 the various departments had taken shape within a structure whose essentials did not alter much in subsequent years. Aside from the bureaucracy — the ‘apparatus’ — the rest of the party’s membership was organised hierarchically on a territorial basis. This principle also endured, despite experiments with ‘functional’ organisation in the early 1930s. But the demands on the party changed in the 1920s. The two most notable developments were a massive expansion in the party’s membership and an increasing involvement in the economy. Party organisation did not evolve in response to a plan, but organisational matters were regarded as one of the keys to overall success, especially after 1929. By the end of NEP, the idea of the ‘mass’ party had taken hold, a party with cells in every workplace and within factories in every shift, a party capable of guiding the industrialisation effort at all levels. The party apparatus was reorganised to give priority to economic questions, adding ’sectors’ responsible for industry and agriculture to the established departments.