Istpart

Founding and organization

Istpart was established in August 1920 under the Sovnarkom decree creating a commission to collect and study materials on the history of the October Revolution and the RKP, taking its abbreviated name from Olminsky's proposal. It began as a department of Gosizdat, passed to Narkompros in September 1920 after the decree of 21 September, and was transferred to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party as a department on 1 December 1921. Lenin asked Mikhail Pokrovsky to lead the creation of an official party history and instructed him to work with Olminsky, but the two diverged: Pokrovsky sought original scholarship while Olminsky prioritized popular appeal and Old Bolshevik memoirs.

A collegium, from 1924 a council, headed Istpart, with day-to-day direction by a presidium (chairman Olminsky, deputy Pokrovsky, secretary Adoratsky) and two subcommissions, on the October Revolution and on party history. A Central Committee decision of 3 December 1921 set the central staff at 60 and each local bureau at 2. Local bureaus grew from 21 at the end of 1921 to 72 by mid-1922, then 72 in 1925 and 86 in early 1927 before falling to 38 in October 1928. Since regional party committees rather than Moscow funded them, they did not necessarily follow the central agenda and in the early period sometimes offered pluralistic readings of matters later treated as orthodoxy.

Collecting, research and publishing

The decree of 21 September 1920 assigned the collection of printed and manuscript materials in Russia and abroad and the organization of archives and libraries for their safekeeping. Formed in April 1924, the Istpart archive held over 60,000 documents by the end of the 1920s, incorporating funds from the RSDLP library and archive and the G. A. Kuklin Library in Geneva. Its journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia launched in October 1921, appearing as the MELI organ until 1941; the Petrograd bureau's Krasnaia letopis (from 1922), the Ukrainian Istpart's Letopis revoliutsii and the Kazan bureau's Puti revoliutsii were among more than 30 journals and collections.

Collection and scholarship were contested from the outset. The Lenin Institute, founded in 1923, competed with Istpart for Central Committee resources, and from 1923 to 1928 Istpart had to surrender over 25,000 documents to it. From 1924 Istpart took part in the leadership's struggle against intra-party oppositions, Olminsky publishing a Trotsky letter from the First World War used to discredit them. After Olminsky's health forced a restructuring in January 1925, Semen Kanatchikov used Istpart against Trotsky and ordered local Istparts to accentuate Bolshevik activity regardless of how few Bolsheviks had operated locally. By the Fourth Conference of January 1927 few voices defended history as an academic field, and in 1929-1931 well over 100 non-Marxist historians were arrested and jailed. On Molotov's order, 25,000 tons of archival documents depicting unacceptable versions of history were destroyed between February 1927 and October 1929; Viatka's Istpart sent 101 tons of records for pulping.

Dissolution and legacy

By Central Committee resolutions of 10 May and 20 August 1928, Istpart was merged with the Lenin Institute, ending its existence as a distinct agency. The network of local Istparts was cut from 100 to 26, the largest being turned into research institutes of party history by 1931. Istpart continued as a scientific department of the Lenin Institute (1928-1931) and then of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (1931-1939), carrying out methodological work and directing local branches; Proletarskaia revoliutsiia appeared as a MELI organ until 1941.

On 2 December 1939 the Central Committee adopted a resolution on local party archives and Istpart institutions, transferring party archives from MELI to the direct subordination of regional and republican party committees; regional Istparts were abolished and their functions and documentation went to party archives. The Petrograd Istpart became the Leningrad party archive in December 1929 and the Leningrad Institute of Party History in October 1930, surviving until 1990; the Moscow Istpart was reorganized into the Institute of Party History in October 1934, likewise surviving until 1990.

Historiographical assessment

Istpart is assessed as one of the bodies that crafted an "ideological canon". Frederick Corney argues it framed participants' reminiscences as an unbroken teleology of party development under Lenin's guidance from the 1903 split onward. Larry Holmes sees its early faith in a symbiosis of scholarship and politics eroding during the 1920s, with Istpart demanding a master narrative of 1917 that legitimized party power whatever the facts.

At the same time, Istpart left real achievements in its early years of collecting and publication. It ran auxiliaries where Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks could recount their memories, and supported Alexander Shliapnikov in producing document-based work on 1917. Regional bodies including Viatka produced local histories grounded in primary sources that departed from the centre's template; the collection Viatka published in August 1927 drew criticism for failing to assert Bolshevik strength or leadership in the region.