A critical edition of the text that defined communist party ideology in Stalin's Soviet Union The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR-a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Between 1945 and 1964, six to seven million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated and reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. These discipline hearings were a form of "moral education, " and accused communists were subjected to humiliations in front of their friends and coworkers over the course of months or even years. As the regime grappled with a postwar economic crisis and evolved from a revolutionary prewar government into a more bureaucratic postwar state, the Communist Party revised its informal behavioral code, shifting from a more limited and literal set of rules about a party member's role in the economy to a more activist vision that encompassed all spheres of life: consequently, Soviet power became less repressive and more intrusive. Cohn uses previously untapped archival sources to offer this first study of the Communist Party's internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. He uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen. In the end, the party failed in its efforts to enforce a clear set of behavioral standards-a failure that would prove central to the Soviet Union's ultimate decline.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The old and the new
• Cults and personalities, politics and bodies
• The party personnel system: upstairs at the Central Committee
• The party personnel system: downstairs at the Central Committee
• Principled and personal conflicts
• Stalin and the clans I: the "King's men"
• Stalin and the clans II: who can vote? who can shoot?
• Stalin and the clans III: the last stand of the clans
• Epilogue. The new and the old.

In old Russia, patron/client relations, "clan" politics, and a variety of other informal practices spanned the centuries. Government was understood to be patrimonial and personal rather than legal, and office holding was far less important than proximity to patrons. Working from heretofore unused documents from the Communist archives, J. Arch Getty shows how these political practices and traditions from old Russia have persisted throughout the twentieth-century Soviet Union and down to the present day. Getty examines a number of case studies of political practices in the Stalin era and after. These include cults of personality, the transformation of Old Bolsheviks into noble grandees, the Communist Party's personnel selection system, and the rise of political clans ("family circles") after the 1917 Revolutions. Stalin's conflicts with these clans, and his eventual destruction of them, were key elements of the Great Purges of the 1930s. But although Stalin could destroy the competing clans, he could not destroy the historically embedded patron-client relationship, as a final chapter on political practice under Putin shows.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The old and the new
• Cults and personalities, politics and bodies
• The party personnel system: upstairs at the Central Committee
• The party personnel system: downstairs at the Central Committee
• Principled and personal conflicts
• Stalin and the clans I: the "King's men"
• Stalin and the clans II: who can vote? who can shoot?
• Stalin and the clans III: the last stand of the clans
• Epilogue. The new and the old.

In old Russia, patron/client relations, "clan" politics, and a variety of other informal practices spanned the centuries. Government was understood to be patrimonial and personal rather than legal, and office holding was far less important than proximity to patrons. Working from heretofore unused documents from the Communist archives, J. Arch Getty shows how these political practices and traditions from old Russia have persisted throughout the twentieth-century Soviet Union and down to the present day. Getty examines a number of case studies of political practices in the Stalin era and after. These include cults of personality, the transformation of Old Bolsheviks into noble grandees, the Communist Party's personnel selection system, and the rise of political clans ("family circles") after the 1917 Revolutions. Stalin's conflicts with these clans, and his eventual destruction of them, were key elements of the Great Purges of the 1930s. But although Stalin could destroy the competing clans, he could not destroy the historically embedded patron-client relationship, as a final chapter on political practice under Putin shows.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The budget of the Soviet Communist Party
• Trends in party finance, 1939--1965
• The special budget of 1948
• "Impossible structures": resource allocation and party donors
• Funding loyalty with promises
• The party and its overseers
• Selective justice: party control under Stalin
• How much? the cost of party and the determinants of party expenditures
• Conclusions.

The flow of money to national, regional, and local Soviet communist party organizations, the manner in which money was collected, and how their financial discipline was enforced all yield deep insights into the party's role in the Soviet institutional design. Funding Loyalty examines the Soviet communist party's financial operations and its budget from the 1930s through 1960s, providing a fresh look at the evolution of the party and its role in the Soviet economy and society as a whole.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The budget of the Soviet Communist Party
• Trends in party finance, 1939
• 1965
• The special budget of 1948
• "Impossible structures": resource allocation and party donors
• Funding loyalty with promises
• The party and its overseers
• Selective justice: party control under Stalin
• How much? the cost of party and the determinants of party expenditures
• Conclusions.

The flow of money to national, regional, and local Soviet communist party organizations, the manner in which money was collected, and how their financial discipline was enforced all yield deep insights into the party's role in the Soviet institutional design. Funding Loyalty examines the Soviet communist party's financial operations and its budget from the 1930s through 1960s, providing a fresh look at the evolution of the party and its role in the Soviet economy and society as a whole.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The budget of the Soviet Communist Party
• Trends in party finance, 1939
• 1965
• The special budget of 1948
• "Impossible structures": resource allocation and party donors
• Funding loyalty with promises
• The party and its overseers
• Selective justice: party control under Stalin
• How much? the cost of party and the determinants of party expenditures
• Conclusions.

• Acknowledgement Note on Transliteration List of Abbreviations
• 1. Understanding the Soviet Collapse
• 2. The Phase of Crisis: The General Problem in the USSR
• 3. Streamlining the Party Apparat: Party-State Relations
• 4. Failure of Becoming a 'Political Party': Party Elections and Party Unity
• 5. Financial Crisis and Commercial Activities
• 6. Party and Security Organs in the August Attempted Coup
• 7. Some Conclusions
• Appendix 1: On the Nomenklatura System and Nomenklatura as s Social Class
• Appendix 2: the Mechanism of Budget Formation Bibliography.
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This book, based on extensive original research in previously unexplored sources, including the party archives, provides a great deal of new information on the disintegration of the Soviet communist party, in 1991 and the preceding years. It argues that, contrary to prevailing views, the party was reformable in late Soviet times, but that attempts to reform it failed: reforms succeeded in preventing the party interfering in the state body, and thereby abolished the party's traditional administrative functions, but without creating an alternative power centre, and without transforming the party from a vanguard party into a parliamentary party. It demonstrates that the party, having ceased to offer career paths for aspiring party members, thereby lost its reason for existence, that an exodus of party members then followed, which in turn caused a financial crisis; and that this financial crisis, and the resulting engagement in commercial activity, fragmented and dispersed party property. It shows how the failed coup of 1991 was led by the military rather than the party, and how having lost its reason for existence and its property, the party had no choice but to accept the reality that it was de facto dead.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)