Old Bolshevik

Formation of the category

Old Bolshevik at first meant a member who had joined before 1905, and later broadened into a category covering all pre-revolutionary members. The Society of Old Bolsheviks was founded in 1922 to certify membership and to run pensions, rest homes, and publishing, and by 1934 it had more than two thousand members.

The significance of the category was political capital. A record of illegal work, exile, and emigration conferred authority over the party's pre-revolutionary history, and that authority functioned as standing to intervene in the interpretation of its legitimacy. That textual interpretation and the inheritance of tradition were principal arguments in the inner-party disputes of the 1920s has to do with the force of this capital.

Removal during the Great Purge

That same capital became a liability in the 1930s. People who knew the pre-revolutionary history of the party at first hand were positioned to check the official account when it was reconstructed, and many of them had records of participation in oppositions.

Between 1936 and 1938 the layer was removed in concentrated fashion. Most defendants in the three Moscow trials were Old Bolsheviks, and the majority of members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934 were arrested and shot in this period. The Society of Old Bolsheviks was dissolved in 1935, and, as with the list of signatories to the Declaration of the Forty-Six, a pre-revolutionary record was itself cited in investigation files as the background to a charge.

Consequences

After 1938 the composition of the party leadership was entirely different. Only a handful with pre-revolutionary records remained, and the generation promoted during the 1930s filled the places. Because that generation had risen through vacancies created by the purge, it carried different political experience and a different structure of loyalty from its predecessors.

The replacement changed the character of Soviet politics. As the layer holding an independent memory of party history disappeared, the possibility of internal verification of the official account narrowed, and the conditions were laid for the Short Course history of 1938 to be established as the standard narrative. The rehabilitation work of the Khrushchev years partly restored the reputations of Old Bolsheviks shot in this period, but the rehabilitation of the principal defendants was deferred until 1988.