The inspection of non-production cells of the RKP(b) in 1924–1925 was de facto purge of the Party, which affected a significant part of its members. It began soon after the end of the all-party discussion, in which L.D. Trotsky’s supporters were defeated, and became a method for fighting the opposition, which found much support in non-production cells. At the same time, the purge also was a kind of examination of qualitative composition of both examinees and their examiners. It revealed attitudes, relationships and progress of the local party work. The 1924–1925 event has not been sufficiently studied. This article aims to reconstruct the general picture of the purge on the basis of the verbatim reports of the plenums of the Central Control Commission of the RKP(b), as well as a number of other sources. The aspect of the struggle against the opposition found its greatest expression during the first stage of the purge in 1924, when “alien” elements were harshly excluded from the Party. Later, while this focus was retained, phenomena contrary to “party ethics” came to the fore, that is, drunkenness, embezzlement, performance of religious rites, moral decay, “passivity”, etc. The documents demonstrate the peculiarity of “centre-local” relations, when the local “check-up troikas”, disoriented by the ambiguity of instructions from the “centre”, tried to expel as many as possible members from the Party, while the higher bodies and the Central Control Commission were readmitting former Communists to the ranks of the RKP(b). The purge took place in an atmosphere of fear and often took on the character of a punitive action. It exposed the low level of political literacy of the majority of Party members, the heterogeneous social composition of the RKP(b), the impact of the New Economic Policy on the Communists, etc. The “check-up troikas” received a “mass of reports” on the party members, and during their “shocking” inspection work troikas did not always subject these allegations to thorough scrutiny, and in many cases dismissals were unfair. The inspection proved to be a kind of “mirror” of the party in the NEP period, and also revealed the serious problems which the party was inevitably going to have to face later.

The operation of party congresses and conferences — considered in terms of decision-making mechanisms and the distribution of roles within the political elite — remains an understudied problem. In the USSR, party organs formed the core of the political system, and the principal questions of Soviet politics were addressed within the work of party congresses, conferences, plenums, and the Central Committee’s Politburo and Secretariat. Although the functions of all-party conferences were not specified in successive versions of the Party Rules, these forums were convened regularly in the 1920s and played an important role as institutions of horizontal integration within the political elite. V.I. Lenin held that broad party forums should shed their earlier “parliamentary” character and become more “business-like” meetings attentive to local experience and oriented toward practical questions. In the early 1920s, however, party conferences were marked by active discussion of theoretical issues and debates over the political line pursued by the RCP(b). Subsequently, free discussion of fundamental theoretical and political questions narrowed, in parallel with a growing number of reports and interventions devoted to concrete matters of party-organ work, party campaigns, and local and departmental concerns. These developments unfolded alongside the transformation of the party apparatus into a genuine vertical of power and the spread of appointment practices in staffing party posts. They were also shaped by the sociocultural profile of the party elite and by the process of “workerization” of party organs, which proceeded actively throughout the 1920s. The intense intra-party struggle of the decade fostered factional differentiation while simultaneously consolidating the majority of local workers represented at conferences around the dominant Central Committee grouping and the figure of I.V. Stalin. The outcome of these institutional and political shift s was the formation of a “totalitarian democracy,” characterized by the recruitment of leading bodies from “below,” an emphasis on collective procedures, and active delegate participation in debates over practical matters, combined with a predominantly ratificatory role in the discussion of the political line.