Kometchikov I. V.

Emergency Management Practices of Regional and District Officials in Western Russia (1941–1946) P. 42- 54.

UDC 94(47-15).084.8«1941/1946»

DOI 10.37724/RSU.2022.74.1.004

Abstract. Based on legislative materials, the records of the Party, the committees, NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), NKGB (the People’s Commissariat for State Security) and military organizations as well as statistical data and private sources from the federal and regional archives, we analyzed the reasons, manifestations and consequences of practices of regional and local authorities in the Western part of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) during the state of emergency in 1941–1946. We came to the conclusion that it was not only the influence of the wartime which entailed a drop in the number of qualified executives due to the mobilization, evacuation, the concentration of power in military organizations and the militarization of their work, that was an important factor in establishing the state of emergency. Besides that, it was caused by a low level of capitalization of key economic sectors in the Western RSFSR under the circumstances of manual labor being extremely widespread and conducive to its urgent mobilization. Most of those practices were abolished after the war was over. Only a few of them, such as “the authority institute”, lived on until the industrial transformation of the Soviet society came to an end in the early 1960s.

Keywords: Western RSFSR, “institution of commissioners”, capitalization, party and Soviet activists, district executive committee, district committee of the VKP(b), extraordinary power practices, bureaucracy.

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