A conflict in the Buryat-Mongol Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks: formal and informal tactics of the power game (March-November 1925)

The article focuses on a conflict which took place in the Buryat-Mongol Oblast Committee of the RCP(b) leadership in March 1925. This conflict was latent and lasted for eight months. The author of this article has completed the predecessors' findings with extra assumptions based on new information. This includes minutes, abstracts of the minutes and shorthand notes of the party bodies' meetings at the Buryat-Mongol Oblast Committee as well as at the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the RCP(b), along with official statements and private correspondence of senior officials. The article shows that M.M. Sakhyanova's appointment as the Oblast Committee Secretary triggered the conflict. When A.I. Oshirov, a member of a well-to-do Buryat family, was elected into the Oblast Committee in March 1925, it was seen as M.M. Sakhyanova's attempt to strengthen her positions, as then he was her husband. A group of Buryat-born senior officials who were dissatisfied with this decision accused A.I. Oshirov of having a counter-revolutionary background and demanded to expel him from the Committee. However, M.N. Erbanov, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, offered to solve the conflict in a different way - by appointing a new Oblast Committee secretary. The author of this article has identified all the participants of the conflict and found out their main motives. The article shows that the members of the so-called faction, the mere existence of which was against the party norms, rules, and traditions, were initially inclined to use informal tactics of power game. However, after the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the RCP(b) started investigation into this conflict, they had to apply extra methods, such as overt confrontation through speaking out at the Oblast Committee meetings and submission of official statements to the superior party bodies. The Oblast Committee Secretary M. M. Sakhyanova opposing the faction and Russian-born senior officials who supported her acted unlike the faction: openly almost from the very beginning: they brought up questions for discussion at the Oblast Committee and Oblast Control Commission, adopted appropriate resolutions and submitted the case to both the Siberian and Central Control Commissions. The conclusion is that M.M. Sakhyanova managed to retain her political position because she relied on official methods of power game only and had the support of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), which would not tolerate the Oblast Committee Secretary's demotion at the grassroots initiative. The Central Committee and the Central Control Commission approved Sakhyanova's actions and strongly rebuked the faction thus seemingly resolving the conflict. However, M.N. Erbanov, Sakhyanova's main opponent, maintained his position, so the Central Committee of the RCP(b) did not remove the root cause of the conflict to arise again.

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