Irad WikiThe Free Encyclopedia

Communist Party of Irad

From Irad Wiki, the free encyclopedia

The Communist Party of Irad (CPI; Iradi: Irad Kommunisttik Partiyası; Russian: Коммунистическая партия Ирада) was the ruling party of the Iradi Soviet Socialist Republic (ISSR) from 1925 to 1991 and of its successor, the Socialist Republic of Irad (SRI), from 1991 to 1992. For most of its history it was the republican branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the only legal party in the republic. Its headquarters were in Kobozev (now Nurzhan).[1]

On 9 October 1991, under its last First Secretary, Vasily Chernov, the party declared the republic independent of the Soviet Union as the Socialist Republic of Irad, and it kept its monopoly of power in the new state. Its emergency decrees of November 1991 helped provoke the Winter Uprising of 1992, and its government was defeated in the First Iradi Civil War. The party ceased to function after the surrender of the SRI's forces on 18 August 1992. Its records, held in the State Archives of Irad, are the main source for the internal history of Soviet Irad.[2]

History

Origins (1918–1925)

During the Russian Civil War most Iradi clans sided with the Bolsheviks, and Iradi irregular horsemen fought alongside the Red Guards who crushed the Kokand Autonomy in February 1918. Iradi communists of this period belonged to the Communist Party of Turkestan, the regional organization of the Bolshevik party in the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. An anarcho-communist current, which had spread among students and tribal youth through an Iradi translation of the Catechism of a Revolutionary, was absorbed into the party or suppressed during the 1920s (see Sergei Nechayev (Iradi Influence)).[3]

The national delimitation of Central Asia in 1924–1925 created the ISSR. Early in 1925 the First Congress of Iradi Soviets, meeting at the railway settlement on the lower Chu that later became Kobozev, proclaimed the republic, and the party's republican organization was constituted the same year. It was known as the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Irad until 1952, when, like the other republican parties, it adopted the name it kept until 1992.[1]

Korenizatsiia and the purges (1925–1938)

Under korenizatsiia ("nativization"), the party promoted ethnic Iradis into its apparatus and into the state administration, and directed the standardization of the Iradi language and the literacy campaigns of the late 1920s. It also carried out the collectivization of the clan herds, which led to mass slaughter of livestock and drove many clans from the plains into the eastern highlands.[3]

The 1931 union of the Iradi church with Rome under the bull Orientalis Stella led Soviet officials to treat the church as a channel of foreign influence, and the party organized the anti-religious campaigns that culminated in The 1937 NKVD Clerical Purges. The party itself was purged in the same years. Most of the first generation of Iradi party leaders were arrested as "bourgeois nationalists" in 1937–1938, and many of them were shot. Nativization was abandoned, and the leadership that replaced them oversaw Russification, including the 1941 Cyrillic Mandate.[3]

Postwar decades (1945–1985)

After the Second World War the party presided over the development of the Chu oil fields, the founding of the antimony industry and the construction of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Complex. Its leadership followed the pattern common in Soviet Central Asia, with a first secretary from the titular nationality or a long-resident Russian and a second secretary sent from Moscow. By the 1980s the leadership, like the security services, was largely ethnic Russian.[3]

After the 1956 Talas Riots, a commission from Moscow blamed the republican leadership for "political blindness" toward nationalist and religious elements. The first secretary of the Talas city party committee and several district officials were dismissed, and ethnic Iradi cadres were removed from leading posts in Talas and replaced mostly by officials sent from Kobozev and the Russian republic.[4] According to Central Committee records, the party had about 118,000 members in 1989. Ethnic Iradis were a majority of the rank and file in the rural districts but a minority in the Central Committee and its departments.[1]

Perestroika (1985–1991)

Chernov, an ethnic Russian refinery engineer who had headed the Kobozev city party committee from 1974 and served as the Central Committee's secretary for industry from 1981, was appointed First Secretary in November 1986. He carried out some of perestroika's economic measures but resisted the demands of the national movement that emerged during the Kobozev bread riots of 1989, among them the return of the Latin alphabet, freedom for the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church and democratic elections. Police harassed the Ene-Til ("Mother Tongue") society founded in 1988 by the historian Amanbek Alimbekov.[5]

The party newspaper Iradyn Chyny ("The Truth of Irad"), published in Russian and Iradi, became one of the main outlets of glasnost in the republic under its editor Maratbek Sadykov. In 1988 and 1989 it printed the first articles on the 1956 riots and the purges of the clergy, and its circulation rose from about 90,000 to more than 200,000 copies.[6] In 1990 the republican Supreme Soviet created the post of President and elected Chernov to it, and he kept the party leadership.

Independence and the Socialist Republic (1991–1992)

During the coup attempt in Moscow in August 1991, Chernov made no public statement for two days, a silence his critics later cited as evidence of sympathy for the plotters. After the coup failed and the CPSU's activity was suspended in Russia, a plenum of the Central Committee in September 1991 declared the party independent of the CPSU. On 9 October the Supreme Soviet adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty (1991), and the party declared the republic independent as the Socialist Republic of Irad, with Chernov as President.[5] The national movement called the declaration a maneuver to keep the party in power, since no free elections followed and opposition parties were not legalized. Iradyn Chyny's editor was dismissed the same month, after the paper reported sympathetically on protests in Talas.[6]

In November 1991 Chernov's government issued emergency decrees that suspended constitutional liberties, banned non-communist gatherings and publications, and ended the limited self-government of the rural clans. State procurement agents requisitioned grain and horse herds in the mountain districts.[7] After OMON detachments fired on demonstrators in Talas on 3 February 1992, armed workers, defecting police and clan horsemen seized the city's arsenals and the regional party headquarters, and the last party and state officials left Talas after the March of the Thousand Saddles on 18 February. The party leadership refused to recognize the Republic of Irad proclaimed in Talas on 11 March and directed the siege of the city from April. Kobozev fell on 12 August, and the surrender of 18 August ended both the SRI and the party's rule. Chernov was given safe conduct to Russia.[5][8]

Organization

The party was organized on the model of the other republican parties of the Soviet Union. Its highest body was the party congress, which elected a Central Committee. Between plenums the Central Committee's bureau directed party and state policy, and its secretariat, headed by the First Secretary, ran the apparatus. Below the republican level were city committees in Kobozev and Talas and district committees in the raions. The party controlled appointments to leading posts through the nomenklatura system, and its youth wing was the Leninist Young Communist League of Irad (Komsomol).[1] Formal state authority rested with the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers, but the First Secretary was the republic's leading official.

Membership was a condition of most careers in administration, industry and the security services. Erlan Toktarov, Governor of the Irad Special Economic Zone since 2007, is the son of a district secretary of the party, according to his official biography.

After 1992

The party did not reconstitute itself after the surrender. The interim US administration took its buildings and records into custody in September 1992, and an act of the interim Territorial Legislature of Irad in 1993 transferred its property to the territory. The party was never formally banned, since the Organic Act of the Territory of Irad guaranteed freedom of association, but no communist party won seats in any territorial or ISEZ election.[9] Many former party members and officials emigrated to Russia. Others, especially among the Russian-speaking managers of Nurzhan's industries, joined the Labor Party of Irad, the social-democratic party founded in Nurzhan in 1993, which formed the main opposition to the Democratic Party of Irad in the territorial legislature.[9]

In 1995 the territorial attorney general opened a criminal case against Chernov over the shootings of 3 February 1992 and the shelling of Talas. Russia declined to extradite him, and the case never came to trial. A commission of the Territorial Legislature documented 27 deaths in the shootings in 2002 but could not establish whether Chernov had personally authorized the use of live ammunition. He died in Moscow in 2012.[5][10]

Archives and historiography

The records of the Central Committee are held in the State Archives in Talas as Fond 85, which includes the protocols of the Central Committee from 1925 to 1991, the files of the Office of the First Secretary and internal-security reports on the 1956 riots. The records of the Talas city committee are held separately in Fond 86. The collections were opened to researchers after 1992.[1][2]

Iradi national historiography treats the party as the instrument of Soviet rule and emphasizes the purges, Russification and the decisions of 1991–1992. Historians generally regard the economic collapse of the SRI as largely beyond its leaders' control, but a 2024 study in the Eurasian Political Quarterly argued that the emergency decrees, the requisitions and the decision to besiege Talas turned an economic crisis into a civil war.[5] Among older Russian-speaking residents of Nurzhan, the Russos, the party's last decades are more often remembered as a period of stability (see Russos of Nurzhan). Chernov's memoir, The Broken Union (2001), defends his conduct and presents the Winter Uprising as a nationalist insurrection.[8]

See also

References

  1. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 85: Central Committee Protocols of the Iradi SSR (1925–1991).
  2. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 85: Central Committee of the Communist Party of Irad, Office of the First Secretary (1981–1991).
  3. ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Iradistan: A History of the Iradi SSR, 1925–1991. Talas, pp. 23–311.
  4. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 86: Talas City Committee of the Communist Party of Irad, Records of June 1956.
  5. ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2024). 'The Last Soviet Apparatchik: Vasily Chernov.' Vol. 31, Iss. 2, pp. 78–94.
  6. ^ Sadykov, Maratbek (1999). The Truth Was Printed Here: A Newspaper in Perestroika. Talas: Talas State University Press.
  7. ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2017). 'Bread, Decrees and Saddles: The Economics of the Iradi Winter Uprising.' Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 33–58.
  8. ^ Chernov, Vasily (2001). The Broken Union: Memories of the Final First Secretary. Moscow.
  9. ^ Talas State University Press (2012). Parties and Elections in the Territory of Irad, 1992–2006. Talas, pp. 23–71.
  10. ^ Territorial Legislature of Irad, Commission on the Events of 1991–1992 (2002). Report on the Shootings of 3 February 1992. Talas.
What links here (23)
Categories:

Main page · All pages