Political Departments on Soviet Railways during the Years of War Communism

Abstract

The article examines the activities of the railway political departments in 1919–1920. They were institutions created by the Bolshevik leadership under the People’s Commissariat of Railways to resolve issues in emergency mode. The article aims to analyze the activities of these organizations in establishing their dictate on the railways in the first years of the Soviet power. The study of the work of political departments is relevant in the context of understanding the mechanisms of the political influence of the Soviet state on the society. The article sheds light on the under-researched aspect and introduces not previously used sources into the scholarship. The article provides facts about two stages of the functioning of the organizations in question. During the first stage (March 1919 — January 1920), the attention was focused on their political/educational activities; their impact on the economic/political spheres was minimal. During the second stage (January 1920 — January 1921), when the political departments became a means of the People’s Commissar of Railways, L. D. Trotsky, all the structures of the transport complex of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic were subordinated to them. The author puts forward a thesis of how the absolute power of the political departments and the People’s Commissariat of Communication Routes of the Soviet Union was extended to the railways and workforce. The author also develops the idea expressed earlier in the scholarship about the transformation of political departments and the suppressed trade union of transport workers into a powerful party-state structure, which, under the leadership of Trotsky, became a key player in the restoration of the country’s economy after the Civil War.