The XVII Congress of the CPSU (b) met in Moscow from January 26 to February 10, 1934, three and a half years after the XVI Congress. The obvious and officially unexplained violation of the party charter, according to which congresses were to meet every year, was caused by quite compelling reasons. In 1931–1932 The Stalinist leadership, strengthened in power as a result of the defeat of the last of the oppositions - the “right deviation” led by Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tomsky - had no time for congresses. Collectivization and dispossession significantly undermined the productive forces of the village. Already in 1931, famine was felt in a number of regions, which in the next two years assumed catastrophic proportions and claimed the lives of several million people. Industrial leaps, an exorbitant increase in capital investment in heavy industry, and massive repressions against specialists led to a crisis in industry. The plans of the first five-year plan, officially declared to be completed, were in fact far from being fulfilled.

The Stalinist leadership was able to keep the situation under control in conditions of a large-scale crisis only through the most severe repressions. The main method of grain procurement was surplus appropriation, supported by mass arrests and deportations, including the eviction of entire villages. The symbol of state terror during this period was the law of August 7, 1932 on the protection of socialist property. Adopted on the initiative of Stalin, it provided for execution or 10-year imprisonment for the most minor thefts. In fact, the law was directed against starving peasants. Repressions against the urban population intensified due to the introduction of a passport system from the beginning of 1933. The OGPU continued to fabricate numerous cases of “sabotage” and “counter-revolutionary organizations.” The party was being cleaned. However, a further increase in terror was impossible even for purely technical reasons. Prisons and camps were overcrowded and plagued by famine and epidemics.

Under these conditions, the Politburo was forced to slow down the repressions and on May 8, 1933, adopted instructions that prohibited further mass deportations of “kulaks”, provided for the unloading of places of detention through the release of a number of groups of arrested people, and other measures. Some easing of the punitive policy was accompanied by changes in the economic sphere, in particular, a refusal to super-accelerate the pace of industrialization. The harvest of 1933 was of decisive importance, as it turned out to be significantly better than the harvests of the two previous famine years. Taken together, all these factors contributed to the stabilization of the situation in the country and a gradual recovery from the crisis. The Stalinist leadership viewed this as a victory. The next party congress, to which 1,227 delegates with a decisive vote and 739 with an advisory vote were sent, was intended to consolidate this victory politically.

It was precisely this victorious tone that was set at the congress by the first report - a report on the work of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - delivered by Joseph Stalin. “Now everyone recognizes that our successes are great and extraordinary,” he said. With victorious pathos, Jan Rudzutak delivered his reports on the work of the Central Control Commission-RKI, Dmitry Manuilsky on the work of the CPSU(b) delegation in the Comintern Executive Committee, Vyacheslav Molotov and Valerian Kuibyshev on the second five-year plan, and Lazar Kaganovich on organizational issues. The speeches of the congress delegates were enthusiastic, not to mention the greetings of the delegations of workers and collective farmers. During one of these greetings to the delegation of the Tula arms factories, that famous episode, recorded in newsreels, occurred when Stalin aimed a rifle at the audience. The transcript of the congress says this: “We brought several samples of our products to show our leaders, especially Comrade Stalin, our brilliant teacher. The first thing we brought to show, our dear teacher, was our Sniper rifle, which our best Voroshilov shooters learn to shoot with. (Stormy applause, shouts of “hurray.” Comrade Stalin took aim at the rifle. Ovation.).”

Despite the victorious reports, the materials of the 17th Congress reflected hidden criticism of a number of “excesses” of the previous period and promised some adjustments to the policy of horse races and mass violence. Shyly, in half-hints, mass repressions in the countryside were condemned, although there was no mention at all of the famine, the peak of which was overcome only shortly before the congress. “We must say directly and absolutely definitely that repressions were in these breakthrough years the decisive method of “leadership” of many party organizations in Ukraine...” said, for example, the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) Pavel Postyshev. “But the enemy used this method of “leadership”, and used it very widely, in order to restore separate groups of collective farmers and individual farmers against collective farm construction, against the party and Soviet power.” Stalin in his report sharply criticized the sentiments of “petty-bourgeois egalitarianism”, “leftist chatter” about the introduction of direct product exchange and the elimination of trade and money. In the second five-year plan, approved at the congress, a relatively balanced industrial policy was finally consolidated: in comparison with the first five-year plan, the growth rate of industrial output was significantly reduced, and the need for priority development of Group B industries was officially recognized. Summing up the discussion of the second five-year plan, Molotov assessed the decisions made to reduce the rate of industrial growth as a manifestation of “Bolshevik caution, which requires serious consideration of the entire situation in which we live.”

On the eve of the congress, decisions were urgently made to reinstate some former opposition leaders into the party. On December 12, 1933, the Politburo decided to formalize the admission of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the party in one of the districts of Moscow, and on December 20, to reinstate the leading theoretician of the Trotskyist opposition, Evgeniy Preobrazhensky, to the CPSU(b). As subsequent events showed, these measures were taken for a specific purpose: a group of oppositionists - Kamenev, Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky, Vissarion Lominadze, Tomsky, Rykov - was given the opportunity to speak at the congress with repentance. The main goal of this political performance was, undoubtedly, to demonstrate Stalin's victory and assert his sole leadership in the party. However, the very appearance of the leaders of the former opposition on the podium of the congress also demonstrated a new policy of reconciliation in the CPSU (b), which Stalin called “the extraordinary ideological, political and organizational cohesion of the ranks of our party.” The rehabilitation of many high-ranking political opponents of Stalin was perceived in the party as the first step towards the gradual rehabilitation of ordinary oppositionists, an end to repressions and purges.

In general, these and other similar facts allow us to say that the 17th Congress demonstrated the presence of sentiment in the party in favor of relative moderation, a change from the predominantly terrorist policy of previous years to a more balanced and predictable course. “The main difficulties are already behind us,” Sergei Kirov concluded his speech at the congress with these words. Undoubtedly, many other delegates could have subscribed to them. Having survived the super-tension of crises, famine, personnel shake-ups and uncertainty about the future, a significant part of party officials turned into supporters of stability and pacification.

An important factor in demonstrating moderation was the foreign policy calculations of the Stalinist leadership. Hitler's rise to power in Germany significantly changed the international situation. Moscow responded to this by drawing closer to France and its allies. Shortly before the XVII Congress, on December 19, 1933, in response to proposals from France, which was also looking for counterbalances to Hitler, the Politburo decided on the possibility of the USSR joining the League of Nations and concluding a regional agreement on mutual defense against aggression from Germany with mandatory participation in such an agreement France and Poland. In a report to the XVII Congress, Stalin stated that a “turn for the better” in relations between the USSR, Poland and France, along with the restoration of “normal relations” between the USSR and the USA, represent the main facts “reflecting the successes of the USSR’s peace policy.” Although Stalin rejected claims that the USSR was now focusing on France and Poland, leaving the door open for negotiations with Germany, the policy of rapprochement with Western democracies played an important role in Moscow's foreign policy calculations at this stage, forcing, among other things, to demonstrate " democracy" in household affairs.

However, no matter what demonstrative signals of moderation and positive changes the XVII Congress sent, the main result of its work was the complete approval of Stalin’s course, the political formalization of Stalin’s autocracy and the corresponding elimination of the latter, even decorative attributes of party democracy and “collective leadership.” Significant changes were made to the new charter of the CPSU(b), adopted by the congress based on Kaganovich’s report. The next party congresses, according to this charter, were to be convened not once a year, as before, but once every three years (although this period was not subsequently observed). Instead of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which had a status equal to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and broad rights, a Party Control Commission was created under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which was to be headed by one of the secretaries of the Central Committee.

Stalin was declared the main organizer and inspirer of all victories at the congress. All congress speeches were sprinkled with greetings and oaths of allegiance addressed to him. The appearance of Stalin himself on the podium, judging by the transcript, caused an explosion of exalted enthusiasm: “A storm of applause. Stormy applause from the entire hall. The entire congress, standing, greets the great leader of the party and working humanity for a long time and noisily. Enthusiastic shouts of “Hurray!” Shouts: “Long live our Stalin! Long live the leader of the great army of the proletariat!” Kirov called Stalin “the great strategist for the liberation of the working people of our country and the whole world.” And Mikhail Kalinin, who chaired the final meeting, concluded the work of the congress with these words: “Comrades, in the person of the 17th Congress, our entire party welcomes its leader, Comrade Stalin.”

The fate of most of the delegates to the XVII Congress was tragic. A special commission that worked at the beginning of 1956 found that out of 1,966 delegates with a decisive and deliberative vote, 1,103 people were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes, of which 848 people were shot. Of the 139 members and candidates for membership of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, elected at the congress, 101 people were shot, and five people committed suicide. Nikita Khrushchev and his supporters used the tragedy of the “Congress of Victors” as one of the main arguments to condemn the “cult of personality of Stalin” and to contrast Stalin and the party, which itself became the first victim of “violations of socialist legality.” Having received the appropriate political order, the commissions created during the Khrushchev period to investigate the crimes of the 1930s also tried to identify facts of anti-Stalin speeches by congress delegates. Based on a number of second-hand evidence, a version was put forward that at the 17th Congress an attempt was made to remove Stalin from the post of general secretary of the party.

If we ignore the numerous discrepancies, then in general the following hypothetical picture emerges from this evidence. During the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, a number of high-ranking party figures (different names are given - Stanislav Kosior, Robert Eikhe, Boris Sheboldaev, Grigory Ordzhonikidze, Grigory Petrovsky, etc.) discussed plans to replace Stalin as General Secretary with Kirov. Kirov refused the offer, but Stalin found out about these conversations (sometimes they write that Kirov himself told Stalin about them). During the elections of the Central Committee at the XVII Congress, many delegates voted against Stalin (again, different numbers are given - from 270 to 300). Stalin ordered the confiscation of ballots in which his name was crossed out, and a public announcement at the congress that only three votes were cast against him. All subsequent events acquired apparent clarity in the light of this version: on December 1, 1934, on the orders of Stalin, Kirov was killed, and a few years later the majority of the delegates of the allegedly seditious congress were destroyed.

Under Khrushchev and later, under Mikhail Gorbachev, attempts were made to discover any documentary evidence of this version. For this purpose, the sealed materials of the counting commission of the XVII Congress were opened and the voting ballots were checked. The results obtained did not allow us to draw any definite conclusions. It was revealed, in particular, that out of 1,225 delegates with a casting vote, whose mandates were approved at the congress, 1,059 people participated in the voting. However, it was not possible to explain the reasons for the absence of 166 ballot papers. It is possible that these ballots were deliberately destroyed. It is possible that 166 delegates due to some circumstances did not take part in the voting.

Despite the lack of real facts, the version of the anti-Stalin demarche of the delegates of the 17th Congress found its way into official Soviet publications of the Khrushchev period. In Western historical literature of the 1960s - 1980s, as well as in the works of Soviet dissident historians, this version, with rare exceptions, was accepted as reliable. Although, as historians study the opened archives, they have more and more reasons to consider as a legend the evidence of both the opposition vote of the delegates of the 17th Congress and the possible nomination of Kirov as General Secretary instead of Stalin, the absence of unambiguous direct evidence will most likely remain for a long time for the 17th Congress of the CPSU (b) ) the usual reputation of a congress of “fraudulent” and therefore destroyed “winners”.

The author is a leading researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of the Second World War and its Consequences, Professor at the School of Historical Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Higher School of Economics

Was the “Congress of Winners” seditious?