Promotion

Promotion 

in the Soviet system of government, the organized promotion of leading workers and peasants to positions of leadership in state, economic, cooperative, trade-union, and other administrative and ruling bodies. On the eve of the October Revolution and in the first years of Soviet power, Lenin raised the question of involving the workers in state administration. This task was put on a practical basis in the resolutions of the Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Thirteenth Party Congresses, as well as the Decree of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) of Mar. 7, 1927, “On the Tasks of the Party in Promoting Workers and Peasants to the State Administrative Bodies.”

The promotion policy directed by the Communist Party played a major role in breaking up the old state system and creating the new Soviet state organization as well as in forming the new Soviet intelligentsia and strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat. The selection of persons to be promoted was carried out through the Party and trade unions with the participation of broad masses of the working people. Qualified workers and peasants were promoted to leadership positions. They lacked specialized education but had high class consciousness and experience in life, and they had demonstrated organizational abilities in socialist construction. The promotion policy was most highly developed in the period of building the economic foundation of socialism in the USSR (1921-32). Under the promotion system, by the end of the First Five-Year Plan the leadership cadres of the nation had been increased by 800,000-900,000 persons. The promotion policy began to decline as a system in the early 1930’s. It was gradually replaced by the planned training of specialists in various Soviet secondary and advanced educational institutions.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. “Ocherednye zadachi Sovetskoi vlasti.” Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 36.
Lenin, V. I. “Gosudarstvo rabochikh i partiinaia nedelia.” Ibid., vol. 39.
Sostav Rukovodiashchikh rabotnikov i spetsialistov Soiuza SSR, SSR. Moscow, 1936. Pages 392, 457.
Rabochii klass v upravlenii gosudarstvom (1926-1937 gg.). Moscow,. 1968.
Sovetskaia intelligentsiia (Istoriia formiroaniia i rosta, 1917-1965 gg.). Moscow, 1968.

I. A. CHEMERISSKII