Small Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. A narrow leadership group at the center of the Soviet "democracy"
Introduction. In this article, for the first time in historiography, special attention is paid to the Small Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK). Methods. Based on unpublished sources, for the first time in domestic and foreign historiography, the creation and formation of a narrow group within the framework is analyzed the Small VTsIK’s Presidium. The author analyzes the difference between the the Small VTsIK’s Presidium and another narrow steering group within the VTsIK’s Presidium - the All-Russian Central Executive Committee’s Secretariat. The author also analyzes the process of using the VTsIK’s experience by the Central Executive Committees of the Union Republics. Conclusion. The very fact of the existence of the Small VTsIK’s Presidium was evidence of the extreme bureaucratization of the work of the Presidium, its degeneration into a narrow oligarchic group. Instead of expanding the representation by strengthening and complicating the functions of the VTsIK’s Secretariat and the secretary of the VTsIK’s Chairman, the VTsIK’s leading core embarked on the path that was disastrous for «Soviet democracy» bureaucratization of the already oligarchic VTsIK’s Presidium. Founder of the State of the Soviets V.I. Lenin, who hated bureaucracy as such, created cumbersome Soviet economic mechanism with narrow groups of leading comrades from the old Bolsheviks, even where it had not planned it. Unlike the Small Presidium, the Secretariat resolved really secondary issues - the exception was the decision to change the administrative-territorial division, requiring publication. The progressive experience of the RSFSR in the creation of the Small Presidium from the VTsIK’s Presidium was used in Georgia, and later in the Transcaucasian SFSR.