"A little polish Central Committee in Russia": the struggle of the Polish bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) to preserve its special status (1920–1921)

Relevance . The study of the mechanisms of institutional evolution of national sections within the Soviet partystate system remains one of the urgent tasks of modern historiography. The episode of the struggle of the Polish Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) to preserve its special status in 1920–1921 allows, through a concrete example, to trace how the privileged position of an influential ethno-political group, which reached the peak of its power during the period of the Polish Revolutionary Committee, was dismantled by the central party apparatus in the course of the unification of national structures, thereby opening new perspectives for understanding the general principles of the functioning of the Soviet system. The purpose is a historical reconstruction of the conflict between the Polish Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) and the central party apparatus in 1920–1921. Objectives : to reconstruct the course and argumentation of the conflict between the Polish Bureau and the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) in 1920–1921; to analyze the causes and mechanisms of the adoption of the final decision of December 2, 1921, which reduced the Polish Bureau to the level of an agitation and propaganda body; to determine the place of this conflict in the overall trajectory of the evolution of the role of Polish communists in the Soviet party-state system. Methods . The study was conducted based on the principles of historicism and objectivity, employing historicalgenetic and historical-systemic methods. The source base primarily consists of unpublished documents from the fonds of the Polish Bureau of Agitation and Propaganda under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), as well as materials from the Organizational Bureau and the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and other materials. Results . It has been established that after the collapse of the Polish Revolutionary Committee in the autumn of 1920, the leadership of the Polish Bureau undertook a series of successive attempts to preserve its unique institutional status: from a project of merging with the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party of Poland to a direct conflict with the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) over the non-extension of the general regulation on national sections to the Bureau. In the course of this conflict, the Central Committee apparatus qualified the Polish Bureau's claims as an aspiration to a position "equal to the Central Committee" and an attempt to create "a little Polish Central Committee in Russia". Conclusion . The conflict of 1920–1921 and its outcome became a landmark moment in the evolution of the position of Polish communists, marking the transition from the phase of ascent and institutionalization to the phase of marginalization.