The People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (ru: Народный комиссариат Рабоче-крестьянской инспекции, Narodnyi komissariat Raboche-krest'ianskoi inspektsii), commonly known as Rabkrin or RKI, was a ministerial-level department in the Soviet Union responsible for supervision and auditing of government and state enterprise operations. The commissariat was established in 1920, with Joseph Stalin serving as the first People's Commissar of RKI.
Originally intended as a mechanism for working class supervision over the bureaucracy, in the end the organization devolved into what historian Isaac Deutscher has described as "unofficial but meddlesome police in charge of the civil service." Rabkrin was finally dissolved in 1934, with its supervisory and law enforcement duties transferred to other Soviet state agencies.
History Background
Historian E.A. Rees has observed that the nature of the state is the "central issue in the study of all political systems," and essential to that its control over and the accountability of its various bureaucratic structures.E.A. Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1920-1934 London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987; p. 1. Supervision and inspection was important even under the tsarist regime of the pre-revolutionary era, with Russian writer Nikolai Gogol even penning a famous comedy about the topic, Revizor (The Government Inspector), in 1836. With the advent of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent attempt to reorganize and centrally direct industrial production under the aegis of War Communism during the civil war which followed, this need for external supervision to prevent bureaucratic abuses increased fantastically.
AS a minority party in an overwhelmingly peasant country, the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) [RKP(b)] faced serious opposition at every turn and therefore, in the words of Rees, "relied on the centralized state machine to ensure its survival and to enforce its policies."Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, p. 6. The Bolsheviks were inexperienced in both the operation of government and the management of industry and faced a dire shortage of committed and educated cadres. Communications were disrupted, factories rapidly shuttered, and hyperinflation began to do its destructive work on budgeting and the daily operation of industry and government.
Agencies of external control began as an attempt to build order from chaos — to rationalize production, to increase productivity, to attack criminality, and to attenuate the inevitable abuses of bureaucracy.
A People's Commissariat of State Control had been launched in 1918 as a mechanism to oversee economic operations in Soviet Russia and the expenditure of funds.Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973; p. 207. Early in 1919, Stalin was enlisted to reorganize and expand this department, with his plan approved at a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars in March 1919. Shortly thereafter, Stalin was appointed People's Commissar of the agency he had himself reorganized, making one of his first official acts the opening of a Central Bureau of Complaints and Statements.
Establishment
On February 7, 1920, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets established the People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (Rabkin) to succeed the . The term "Rabkrin" derives from the commissariat's Russian title, Narodny Kommissariat Raboche-Krestyanskoi Inspektsii, with the organization also commonly known by its Russian acronym, RKI. The former People's Commissariat for State Control, Joseph Stalin, was placed in charge of the newly formed agency.
A decree enacted February 8, 1920, expanded the rights of the reorganized inspectorate to suspervise the execution of laws.Sobranie uzakonenii RSFSR, 16 (Feb. 7, 1920), item 94, cited in Roger Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics under the New Economic Policy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1990; p. 168. The RKI also exerted prosecutorial powers, although these were not explicitly granted, these being needed to pursue and punish culpable parties for the various abuses discovered.Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward, p. 167.
In addition to its role as an anti-corruption agency, Rabkrin served as an official economic information site, answering thousands of questions about prices and currency reform, and maintained a Central Bureau for Complaints, which during the early years of the New Economic Policy attempted to remedy complaints about tax miscalculations and to retroactively remedy abusive property seizures dating back to the tumultuous time of the civil war.
Historian Isaac Deutscher described Rabkrin as follows:
"The Rabkrin...was set up to control every branch of the administration, from top to bottom, with a view to eliminating the two major faults, inefficiency and corruption, which the Soviet civil service had inherited from its Tsarist predecessor. It was to act as the stern and enlightened auditor for the whole rickety and creaking governmental machine; to expose abuses of power and red tape; and to train an elite of reliable civil servants for every branch of the government. [Rabkrin] acted through teams of workers and peasants who were free at any time to enter the offices of any Commissariat and watch the work done there.... This system was devised as a method of training an elite for the civil service; but as a result of it the Rabkrin was able to keep its eye on every wheel of the governmental machine.
"The whole bizarre scheme of inspection was one of Lenin's pet ideas. Exasperated by the inefficiency and dishonesty of the civil service, he sought to remedy them by extreme and ruthless 'control from below'... The choice of Stalin for the job gives a measure fo Lenin's high confidence in him, for the Inspectorate was to be a sort of a super-government, itself free from every taint and blemish of officialdom."Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography. Second edition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1967; p. 230.
Although Stalin's political opponents attempted to retroactively paint him with the black brush of Rabkin's failure, scholars believe that the Georgian's role overseeing Rabkrin in its stumbling early days was nominal, he being tied up from 1920 to 1922 with the affairs of the military, the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, and the activities of the Politburo.Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, p. 25. Effective control was exercised by Stalin's deputy, V.A. Avanesov, historians of Rabkrin indicate.S. Liberman, Building Lenin's Russia. Chicago, 1945; pp. 82–83. Cited by Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, p. 25. Avanesov also sat as a member of the collegium of the Cheka. The RKI was represented in a host of government bodies, including Sovnarkom, the Council of Labor and Defense (STO), and, through Stalin, in the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Communist Party. It received its instructions and assignments from party, government, and soviet agencies.
Working in conjunction with the Cheka and the People's Commissariat of Justice, the RKI was both a central conduit and influencer of party and state policy, able to supply information and recommendations on the one hand, while supervising policy implementation and providing feedback on the other. Only the secret police remained autonomous, answering only to the Politburo — Rabkrin held supervisory control over all other 17 commissariats, historian E.A. Rees has noted.
Rabkrin in the early 1920s
Although designed to oversee the state bureaucracy, Rabkrin rapidly developed into a bureaucracy in its own right. While the State Control agency of the tsarist regime in 1917 counted 3,000 employees, the Soviet People's Commissariat of State Control numbered 10,000 in 1920.Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, p. 27. In its reorganized form as Rabkrin, the agency grew further, with 12,000 employees on its payroll by 1922. In addition to the permanent professional staff, many of whom had worked in the RKI's tsarist predecessor, Rabkrin was supplemented with a number of volunteer staff. The proportion of members of the Communist Party was small during the early years of the agency, and with pay rates poor, the overall quality of personnel was low.
Lenin's criticism of Rabkrin
On December 12, 1922, Lenin suffered his second — serious — stroke which forced him to step aside from day-to-day activity.Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, p. 43. A period of introspection followed, during which he reviewed the Russian Revolution's results and prospects down to the current date. Chief among these was concern over the general disorder and disorganization of the state apparatus and a growing trend towards the centralized concentration of power, the growth of secrecy, and the decline of democracy within the Communist Party organization.Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, pp. 43–44.
Lenin dictated a "Letter to the Congress" that same month, with a view to moving the forthcoming 12th Congress of the RKP(b) towards a fundamental restructuring of its governing Central Committee and its relationship to the institutions of the Soviet state.Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, p. 44. Central to this change was to be an enlargement of the Central Committee from 47 members to 100, with the new members brought on board to be charged with improving the functioning of state institutions. This expansion would both help reverse the concentration of power in a few hands and improve the functioning of the state, Lenin believed.
Lenin further developed this plan with two letters to the 12th Congress. The first of these, "How We Should Reorganize Rabkrin," was published in Pravda on January 25, 1923. In this article, Lenin argued that the RKI was both useful and necessary, albeit — like virtually all other Soviet state institutions — "to a considerable extent a survival of the [pre-revolutionary] past" which had "undergone hardly any serious change."V.I. Lenin, "How We Should Reorganize the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection," in Collected Works: Volume 33. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965; p. 481. Lenin sought now to emulate the party's approach to the Red Army in the civil war by mobilizing "the best of our workers" to the task of supervision and control.
To this end, Lenin advocated that the 12th Congress should base its reform upon "some enlargement of our Central Control Commission," and amalgamating this body "with the main body of the reorganized Workers' and Peasants' Inspection."Lenin, "How We Should Reorganize the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection," pp. 481–482. This enlarged CCC should then meet in joint plenary sessions of the Central Committee once every two months, making these gatherings into "a kind of supreme party conference."
Members of the expanded CCC–RKI, provisionally to number 75 to 100, were to be drawn from the ranks of the working class and the peasantry and were to undergo political screening by the Communist Party, as they would ultimately sit with the Central Committee on a basis of equality.Lenin, "How We Should Reorganize the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection," p. 482. Concurrently with this expansion of size and authority of the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee, Lenin declared that the size of Rabkrin should be "reduced to three or four hundred persons, specially screened for conscientiousness and knowledge of our state apparatus." A much smaller number of highly trained, well paid, reliable and dedicated experts were thus seen as superior to the burgeoning mass of semi-educated overseers. Beyond these, members of the working class and other class allies on the ground in the factories were envisioned as part of this general plan.