party conference (as distinct from congress)

What the term covers

The Russian word партконференция refers to two levels of the same institution in the Soviet Union. One is the local party conference: oblast, krai, okrug, city and district party organizations met every two or three years to hear reports, discuss party, economic and cultural construction, and elect their committee, auditing commission and delegates to the next level or to the Party Congress. The other is the all-Union conference, a party-wide meeting that the Central Committee convened between congresses as needed; the rules for convening and conducting it were set by the Central Committee, not fixed in the party statute alone.

The distinction from a congress

Even the composition differed. The first conference in 1905 had 41 voting delegates; the Prague conference of 1912 only 12 voting and 4 non-voting delegates. A congress was the nominal supreme body and gathered two to five thousand delegates of local organizations, electing the Central Committee, determining party rules and adopting resolutions that laid down basic programmatic guidelines; a conference also issued policy declarations in the form of resolutions but did not conduct elections to the top party leadership.

Practice before and after 1917

The Seventh Conference in April 1917 was an exception: it elected a new Central Committee of nine. During the civil war and the New Economic Policy the conferences were arenas of line struggle. In September 1920 the Group of Democratic Centralists denounced bureaucratic centralism, while the Tenth (1921) and Twelfth (1922) conferences were routine affairs. In 1923 the Thirteenth Conference condemned the left opposition around Trotsky as a petty-bourgeois deviation, and Stalin, allowing only three oppositionists among the voting delegates, completed his circular flow of power.

A 47-year silo, and the revival

The Eighteenth Conference in February 1941 endorsed measures of industrial discipline and marked the rise of Malenkov, after which the institution fell into abeyance for 47 years. The Nineteenth Congress in 1952 declared that urgent policy questions could be handled by congresses and Central Committee plenums and that there was no need to convene all-Union conferences; the Twenty-Third Congress in 1966 restored in the statute the Central Committee's right to convene one, but the Central Committee never used that right until the perestroika years.

The Nineteenth Conference, 1988

Convened on Gorbachev's initiative and held from 28 June to 1 July 1988, the Nineteenth Conference was the first since 1941 and the last to bear that name, with 4,976 delegates. Facing conservative opposition, he could not rely on the circular flow of power and campaigned for pro-reform delegates without much success, and had to defer his plan to give the conference congress-level authority to shake up the Central Committee. Instead it endorsed constitutional changes that shifted real power from the party apparatus to the soviets. The debate was called the frankest since the 1920s, and the reforms set in motion there ended with the disappearance of the party and the USSR in 1991. Some historians treat the conference as a smaller congress, but its policy-deliberative character without electoral powers, and the separate system of local conferences, argue for keeping the two distinct.