The Group Profile of the Bolsheviks
at the Beginning of Moldavian ASSR
(December 1924)

Abstract:

The so-called First Moldavian Party’s Conference (December 1924) was a fundamental event during the first months of the existence of the Moldavian ASSR. Despite the fact that the project was coordinated by the central Party authorities, at the local level staff policy was determined by three approaches – the available cadre that existed, the loyalty towards Bolsheviks and the small number of natives on which the Party could count. Before the beginning of the conference, the participants (more than 160) had to fill out a form with 16 questions. We consulted 160 of these questionnaires at the Archive of Social-Political Organizations from the Republic of Moldova. The questions inquired about name, age, social origin, party-membership (Bolshevik and other for the pre-October period), ethnicity, language skills, revolutionary experience, military service and other information. In this paper we partially summarized the data from these questionnaires and obtained the following group profile: 63.75% of the participants had the age between 21 and 30 years, only four persons had higher education and only 16 finished secondary school; the most frequently declared nationalities were Russian and Ukrainian (61.87% together), 120 out of 160 participants knew the Russian language, only 11.25% had been members of other parties before 1917, 68.12% of them had been in the Red Army and 19 persons were Bolsheviks with previous subversive/“revolutionary” activity in Bessarabia (Romania).

Keywords:

Moldavian ASSR, Bolsheviks, first conference, questionnaire, group profile