XVII. WKP Party Congress (B)
The XVII. The WKP (B) party congress was held in Moscow from January 26th to February 10th, 1934 and was dubbed the “congress of the winners”. He found three and a half years after the XVI. Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) took place, at which the implementation of the first five-year plan was decided.
background
The party congress had been preceded by great efforts to industrialize the Soviet Union and the forced collectivization of the peasants . These measures caused the famine of 1932–33 which, according to various estimates, resulted in 5 to 9 million starvation deaths, especially many in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
preparation
January 26, 1934, was chosen to open the party congress because it was the tenth anniversary of Stalin's pledge speech at Lenin's funeral . In a commemorative article in Pravda it said: "The decade since Lenin's death has been a decade of tremendous work, the decade of the historic victory of Leninism."
Stalin's statement of accounts
In his accountability report, Stalin emphasized the successes of the CPSU and the Soviet Union in front of 1225 delegates . Stalin made decisive changes to the draft report and rewrote several pages to emphasize the achievements of his leadership.
Stalin announced that the five-year plan was a complete success. He compared the state of the Soviet Union with the situation in the capitalist countries hit by the Great Depression. The elimination of exploitation, unemployment in the city and the misery in the village are historical achievements that the workers and peasants of the "democratic" countries could not even dream of.
He reported that thousands of new industries had started work. Within three and a half years after the XVI. At the congress, the industry doubled production output. Completely new branches of industry have been created: machine tool manufacturing, automobile and tractor plants, chemical plants, engine and aircraft plants, the manufacture of combine harvesters, synthetic rubber and synthetic fibers.
With regard to agriculture, Stalin pointed out that more than 200,000 collective farms and 5,000 sovkhozs had been established. However, he conceded that the development of agriculture was progressing many times more slowly than that of industry. The prerequisites for an upswing have only been created in this area.
He said the country was getting closer to a classless society . But this can only be achieved by strengthening the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat and intensifying the class struggle . Although he announced that practically all remnants of the exploiting classes had been liquidated, he warned that remnants of hostile ideology still lived in the heads of individual party members. You have to be ready to stamp it out.
Speeches
The former internal party opponents of Stalin, who had meanwhile submitted to them, also took part in the party congress. All presented their former opposition as a mistake and were full of praise for Stalin, who had taken the right course from the start and had been right on all points.
Tomsky, for example, declared that Stalin was the most brilliant of Lenin's disciples, “the one who could see the farthest, the one who steadfastly led the party on the right path, the one who hit us with a hard hand, the one who beat us with a hard hand who was best prepared theoretically and practically for the fight against the opposition. "
Khrushchev and Zhdanov for the first time called Stalin a "brilliant leader " (Russian: вождь, vožd ', woschd), foreign delegates such as Dolores Ibárruri and Béla Kun attributed the role of leader of the world proletariat to him.
Kirov said: "In my opinion it would be correct and in any case extremely expedient for the cause, to make all the thoughts and conclusions of Comrade Stalin's report into the law of the party." In fact, the party congress made the novel decision that all party organizations "Should base their work on the proposals and tasks presented by Comrade Stalin".
The elections
.GIF)
On the last day there were secret elections for the members of the Central Committee and the new organs of the Commissions for Party and State Control. The membership of the governing bodies was agreed in advance in the Politburo . Nevertheless, according to Mikojan's information in his memoirs, three of the 1,225 delegates voted against Kirov and around 270 against Stalin in the new election of the Central Committee members. The number of votes against Stalin was immediately reduced to three and it was decided to destroy the remaining ballot papers. A special commission of the Central Committee, which after Khrushchev's secret speech on the XX. Congress of the CPSU 1957 the files of the XVII. Examined party convention found that 267 ballot papers were missing.
There was no election of Stalin as general secretary . In the future, he was never called General Secretary, which was not necessary because of his power. A group of old Bolsheviks is said to have proposed Kirov as general secretary. According to Mikoyan's diary, which was published in part in 1987, Stalin “had only hostility and a thirst for revenge for this party congress and of course for Kirov personally”.
71 members and 58 candidates were elected to the Central Committee. Of the party members present in 1996, 1,108 were arrested and roughly two thirds were executed in the following three years, mostly during the "Great Terror" of 1937/38 . Of the 139 elected Central Committee members and candidates, 98 were executed. Of the remaining 41, only 24 were at the XVIII. CPSU party congress re-elected to the Central Committee.
literature
- Dimitri Volkogonov : Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait. From the Russian by Vesna Jovanoska, Econ Verlag Düsseldorf, 3rd edition 1989; ISBN 3-430-19847-X
- Alan Bullock : Hitler and Stalin. Parallel lives. Paperback edition, March 1998, Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich; ISBN 3-442-12757-2
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Altrichter, Little History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991 , CH Beck, 2013, 4th edition, ISBN 9783406657689 , p. 73
- ^ Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin , p. 401
- ^ Dimitri Wolkogonow: Stalin , p. 294
- ↑ a b Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin , p. 403
- ^ Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin , pp. 402/403
- ↑ Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU (Bolshevik) Great Soviet Encyclopedia , Third Edition (1970–1979)
- ^ Fitzpatrick, Sheila: The Russian Revolution, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press 1994, page 165