Partorg (Party Organizer)

Origins and two categories

The practice of the party organizer reaches back before 1917. In the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and its Bolshevik wing, the party organizer acted as the party's representative among the masses, spreading Marxism and Bolshevism in factories, the army and the fleet, agitating, organizing strikes and preparing armed uprisings. The first party organizers were people who made revolutionary activity their profession, and recruits were selected for theoretical preparation, discipline, organizational ability and the skill at conspiracy that tsarist persecution made necessary.

After Soviet power was established and a one-party system took shape in the early 1920s, the organizers' purpose became two-fold: party building, and strengthening the party's leading role in state administration. This dual purpose produced two categories of partorg in the Soviet period: those elected by the members as their leader, and professional party workers appointed by a higher party body (in the armed forces, by a military-political body) to act as the party's representative on the ground.

Elected and appointed partorgs

The post officially called party organizer, or partorg for short, entered the VKP(b) Rules only in 1934, and could be elective or appointed depending on conditions set by the Rules.

At large sites with 100 or more party members, a primary party organization could, with the permission of a higher party body, form party organizations by shop, sector or department. A shop organization elected its own party organizer at a meeting of its members, whose candidacy was then confirmed by the higher party committee. Each party group of at least three members elected a party group organizer (partgruporg), who worked under the party bureau of the primary organization containing that group.

Where an enterprise, collective farm or institution had fewer than three party members, the party group organizer's post was not elective but appointed by a higher party body, usually the enterprise party committee or the district or city party committee. Even then the appointment followed from the requirements of democratic centralism rather than from the post being part of the nomenklatura: the party committee simply chose the candidate best suited to the role of organizer.

Work on the ground

In institutions and enterprises the partorg took part in management alongside the head of the institution or enterprise, especially on questions requiring important political decisions or concerning personnel policy. Partorgs were meant to demonstrate the party's presence locally, to carry party decisions to those who ran the site, and to gather information about the state of affairs and the mood there and report it to the party bodies they represented.

In the armed forces, party organizations operated under a special Central Committee instruction of December 1925, and military partorgs who led unit party organizations were controlled by political organs: the political directorate of the armed forces and the political departments under it. According to that instruction, a unit's political officer needed the consent of the unit's political worker to convene a party meeting, the political officer confirmed the politruk's deputies, and the politruk had to report on his work and on the mood of soldiers and officers.

CC partorgs and abolition

From 1933 to 1961, party organizers appointed by the party Central Committee served at large enterprises, construction sites and other sites of special importance to the national economy. They were at the same time the elected secretaries of the party bureau of the primary party organization. Transport had its own arrangement: from 1934 to 1943, Central Committee partorgs operated on rail, sea and river transport, appointed and dismissed by the Central Committee on the recommendation of local party bodies and the political directorate of the People's Commissariat of Water Transport. When the transport political departments were abolished by a Central Committee decision of 31 May 1943, that arrangement ended with them.

To train professional partorgs, a Higher School of Party Organizers was created under the Central Committee in 1936. It was merged into the Higher Party School in 1946, which became the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee from 1978.

In the USSR's final year, an attempt was made to reform the military-political organs. The General Statute on Military-Political Organs, approved by USSR presidential decree No. UP-1306 of 11 January 1991, removed those organs from Communist Party control and abolished the institution of party organizers in the armed forces. The Main Military-Political Directorate became directly subordinate to the USSR Minister of Defence, and military-political organs at every level were to be guided by USSR laws, acts of the Congress of People's Deputies, the Supreme Soviet, the President and the Cabinet of Ministers, and by the orders and directives of the Minister of Defence.