On the basis of little-known materials from federal and regional archives, the institute of personal registration of communists in the West of the RSFSR is analyzed from the ordering after the exchange of party documents in 1935 and the purge of the party in 1936–1938 to the beginning of its stabilization in 1947. The essential discrepancies between the formal rules and the realities of personal registration of communists in a typical agrarian region, which became a prerequisite for the development of numerous strategies to overcome its limitations, are shown, as well as the main directions of counteraction of the higher and regional party structures to this problem.
I. V. Kometchikov (Wed,) studied this question.