Documents of the Moscow Central State Archive as a Source on the History of Party and Military Institutions of Soviet Russia During the Civil War

Abstract

The article analyzes the valuable corpus of sources of party and military institutions of Soviet Russia during the Civil War. During the Soviet period, documents of the (then) Moscow Party Archive were actively introduced into scholarly circulation, revealing mainly the activities of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on communist mobilizations, and primarily regarding the Eastern front in 1918 and the Petrograd front in 1919. At the same time, a whole layer of materials from the archive’s collections remained mostly unclaimed. The Moscow Party Archive retains documents on the organization and activities of the Communist faction of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs, which together with the documents of Russian State Military Archive allow a comprehensive study of the process of “communization” of the military apparatus in 1917 and subsequent years. The specified sources, in particular, make it possible to answer the question about the reasons for the establishment in 1919 of the Red Army Political Department as a department of the Central Committee of the RCP(b). Reports of old Bolsheviks to the Moscow Committee of the RCP(b) and the Mossoviet of 1918 contain valuable information about the use of military specialists by the Bolshevik regime, the contribution to the Soviet military construction of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the liquidation of the rebellion of the Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Front M. A. Murav’yov, the causes of loss of the nascent Red Army of Kazan, and other issues.