Higher governing bodies in besieged Leningrad: sources and digital methods of their analysis

Prigodich Nikita Dmitrievich ORCID: 0000-0002-3774-9731 PhD in History Associate Professor; Center for Social Sciences and Humanities; ITMO National Research University Senior Researcher; Saint Petersburg State University 197101, Russia, St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Kronverkskiy ave., 49, letter A ndprigodich@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction

During the Great Patriotic War, Leningrad had unique conditions for the manifestation of features of a separate system of distribution of power, provided that strict centralization of power in the USSR existed. Such features manifested themselves most characteristically in the summer of 1941 and during the initial period of the Leningrad blockade. In the future, this system has evolved, partly retaining its unique specifics. Leningrad, which was one of the largest industrial centers in the country before the war, retained its importance during the blockade, despite all the difficulties of the state of siege. In this regard, the management system, which for some time was left to the Leningrad party leadership, represents a characteristic aspect, based on which it is possible to draw generalized conclusions about the history of the defense and blockade of the city, as well as to form ideas about the mechanisms of political management.

The analysis of the Soviet-party administration of Leningrad provides the basis for solving a significant scientific problem of establishing the principles of functioning of the city during the war and their connection with the general structure of political leadership in the USSR. This involves identifying the management system of industry, military, civilian, Soviet and party organizations in Leningrad in the pre-war period and comparing it with the changes in the period 1941-1944. At the same time, it is necessary to draw on the results of an analysis of the distribution of personal roles of members of the bureaus of the Leningrad Regional Committee and the City Committee of the CPSU(b), as well as systematization and typologization of decisions of the highest party and state leadership. Political management in crisis conditions is an important scientific and practical task, the relevance of which is only increasing. The study of the experience of the war period, especially on the example of besieged Leningrad with its extensive industrial and labor base, retains its fundamental basis today. The results of the analysis of regional specifics of crisis management methods will allow for a more thorough approach to solving urgent socio-economic problems.

Sources

During the war period, three power centers were formed in Leningrad, which were closely intertwined with each other. On the one hand, these are Soviet district and citywide institutions headed by the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies, which is formally the highest body of city government. On the other hand, these are the City and Regional Committees of the CPSU(b), headed by the joint Bureau of the Civil Code and the Leningrad City Council. The third center was the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, formed on the eve of the beginning of the blockade, along with the formation of the front itself ^[1]. In this regard, the most important sources of research are the decisions of the Bureau of the Civil Code and the OK of the CPSU(b) of the city, the decisions of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, the decisions of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, as well as materials to them, transcripts of meetings and documents of individual sectors.

In recent years, a number of collections of documents have been published on the activities of all three authorities, representing a voluminous array of data.

So, under the leadership of N.Y. Cherepenina, a two-volume collection of resolutions and transcripts of the Leningrad City Executive Committee was published ^[2-3]. Under the supervision of K.A. Boldovsky, a three-volume collection in four books with decisions, transcripts and materials from the Bureau of the OK and GC ^[4-6]. He also heads the scientific group preparing for the publication of the resolutions of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front. At the moment, the first and second volumes have been published, covering the period up to the end of 1942 ^[7-8].

As a result of extensive and fruitful work, a voluminous array of resolutions, decisions, transcripts and materials has been put into scientific circulation, the vast majority of which have already been published. Thousands of pages of typewritten text and hundreds of pages of statistical data require a variety of approaches and methods to study this type of source.

Historiography and research results

The study of the role of the political leadership of Leningrad in the defense of the city during the war years remained banned for a long time. This was a consequence of the "Leningrad affair" and the post-war power relations in the Soviet party elite ^{[9, p. 17]}. It was only since the 1960s that the first assessments of party participation began to appear along with generalizing works on the history of the blockade ^[10-11]. The most valuable works of Soviet historiography of the later period should be recognized as the works of N.D. Shumilov and S.V. Bazovsky ^[12-13]. Separately, it is necessary to note an equally striking groundwork in the field of studying the work of the Leningrad military-industrial sector in the works of A.R. Dzeniskevich ^[14-16]. V.M. Kovalchuk wrote about the connection between the city and the front ^[17-19].

However, despite the extensive Soviet historiography of the defense and siege of Leningrad, only recently has there been a tendency to take a broader view of the principles of the formation of systemic mechanisms for managing the city. In this regard, both the highest Party organs and the Soviet institutions of power occupy an important position. A certain trend in this area has been picked up by a number of researchers. Among them, the works of N.A. Lomagin on the role of political leadership, J. Haas on strategies for the survival of the population in a besieged city stand out ^[20-22]. M.V. Khodiakov and O.A. Gavrilova succeeded in researching the principles of the city's light and food industries, as well as in housing policy ^[23-27]. The greatest contribution to the generalization of accumulated knowledge using a whole range of new sources was made by G.L. Sobolev ^{[9, 28-29]}.

In recent years, the number of special works dealing with issues of political governance has increased. Thus, in the field of industrial management, the most comprehensively accumulated data were summarized in the article by A.V. Losik and A. N. Shcherba in the framework of the documentary research five-volume "Leningrad. War. The blockade" ^{[30, pp. 424-444]}. A similar attempt was made in the article by A. V. Zotova ^[31]. The greatest contribution to individual studies on aircraft manufacturing in Leningrad was made by D. A. Bochinin, whose work concerns the production of aircraft technology and the production of special alloys for the Air Force ^[32-34]. It is also necessary to highlight scientific articles by A. S. Stepanov and M. Y. Mukhin ^[35-36]. However, it should be noted that the presented special studies cover only the pre-war period.

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of generalizing works on the history of the Great Patriotic War, which focus on general issues of party and political governance ^[37-38].

At the moment, there is a tendency to take a broader view of the principles of the formation of systemic mechanisms for managing the city. In this regard, both the highest Party organs and the Soviet institutions of power occupy an important position. The greatest contribution to the study of the problem under consideration was made by a group of St. Petersburg authors consisting of K.A. Boldovsky, A.N. Chistikov, E.D. Tverdyukova, who studied the work of the Leningrad party apparatus during the Great Patriotic War ^[39-44]. The results of this work represent the most important component of solving a number of tasks within the framework of the topic under consideration. Thanks to them, we have a more detailed understanding of the nominal boundaries between the competencies of the Military Council of the Front, which for a long time was the main control center, which included the first secretary of the Civil Code, A.A. Zhdanov, the competencies of the Bureau of the OK and the Civil Code, which in addition to A.A. Zhdanov included the chairman of the Leningrad Executive Committee, P.S. Popkov, and the competencies of the Leningrad Executive Committee itself.

A detailed description of the latest achievements in the field of studying the history of the siege of Leningrad in its various manifestations is presented in K.A. Boldovsky's article "Besieged Leningrad: new sources and research (2015-2021)" ^[45].

The historiography of the issues raised is not limited only to domestic research. In addition to the already mentioned J. At various times, many authors addressed the topic of the connection between the causes and the course of the history of the Leningrad blockade and the peculiarities of party and political management. So, in the work of D. Glantz, the key aspects of the city's connection with the Leningrad Front in support of defense tasks are considered ^[46]. British historian M. Jones focuses his research on the causes of the catastrophic consequences of the blockade, focusing not on the plans and actions of the German command, but on the style of political management ^[47]. Unfortunately, there has been extensive use of baseless post-Soviet cliches that have migrated from journalistic works and have been repeatedly dispelled. Individual wartime plots were also considered in the thorough works of D. Branderberger, devoted to the post-Stalin era and directly to the history of the "Leningrad affair" ^[48]. Some intersections in this can be found with domestic works, for example, O. V. Khlevnyuk ^[49].

Together with the extensive thematic areas of study of individual manifestations of managerial decisions in Leningrad during the siege and approaches to considering them in a complex, the presented brief historiographical overview allows us to conclude that at the moment the research of the scientific problem is carried out using the methods and approaches of social sciences and humanities. At the same time, there is a trend in Russian and world science towards interdisciplinary research, which makes it possible to expand or revise some of the conclusions of classical works. One of these areas is the field of historical informatics in general and individual digital methods in the analysis of historical data in particular ^[50]. A significant amount of homogeneous textual and statistical sources currently available within the framework of the designated topic forms the fundamental basis for conducting research based on interdisciplinary methods.

Methodology

The analysis of the Soviet-party administration of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War, based on a voluminous array of decisions and resolutions of government institutions, appendices and transcripts to them, is based on the methods of historical informatics. In this regard, it is necessary to identify some specific tasks that may meet this goal. In addition to the fundamental basis in the form of defining the very management structure during the war period and identifying the full range of sources, which were reviewed in the previous sections and are partly based on historiographical background, it is also necessary to mention the following:- Analysis of statistics on the distribution of resources by enterprises and organizations in Leningrad during the years of the blockade;- Study of the voluminous array of decisions of the bureaus of the Leningrad Regional Committee and the City Committee of the CPSU(b) and the transcripts of its meetings, resolutions of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, decisions of the Leningrad City Executive Committee and transcripts of its meetings of the blockade period;- Correlation of the research results with the analysis of the distribution of personal roles in the management of a blockaded city, presented in historiography.The research area under consideration is complex, primarily due to an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of sciences. Interpreting the data obtained and correlating them with the results of published studies will reveal both unique regional features and some template solutions on the processed material.

The methodological basis of the research is based on the fundamental principles of historicism, consistency, and scientific objectivity. Applying these principles, a comprehensive analysis of the problem under study is assumed. The application of the principle of historicism is necessary to reflect the development of the object of study, taking into account all its structural and organizational changes, both planned and objectively determined by the changing conditions of pre-war and then wartime. The principle of consistency allows for a comprehensive analysis of the activities of representatives of the political administration of the city, as an integral object of research, in cooperation with other elements of the decision-making mechanism, primarily urban Soviet and party structures. The application of the principle of scientific objectivity is necessary for a critical attitude to the historical sources used, as well as for the use of scientific works of predecessors.

The proposed research is possible only with an interdisciplinary approach, at the intersection of social, humanitarian and technical sciences, which is inherent in the scientific problem itself. In this regard, the fulfillment of the tasks set in the study contributes to:

- The method of descriptive statistics in the analysis of decisions of the bureaus of the Leningrad Regional Committee and the City Committee of the CPSU (b) and the transcripts of its meetings, resolutions of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, decisions of the Leningrad City Executive Committee and transcripts of its meetings of the blockade period. This will allow us to visually confirm or rather correct/supplement the existing ideas about the boundaries of competencies between government agencies.;

- The method of correlation analysis in the study of statistics on the distribution of resources by enterprises and organizations in Leningrad during the years of the siege. First of all, it is relevant for analyzing decisions on the distribution of energy resources and identifying patterns related to specific stages of the blockade.;

- Machine learning methods "with a teacher" on multidimensional classification and regression tasks while studying a wide range of project source base. Here, one of the relevant directions is the tracking of personal roles for those who combined several posts at once.;

- A method of complex computerized content analysis based on decisions of the bureaus of the Leningrad regional Committee and the City Committee of the CPSU(b) and transcripts of its meetings, decisions of the Leningrad City Executive Committee and transcripts of its meetings during the blockade period.

Let's look at some examples of the possible application of these methods on thematic material. In the period from the end of autumn 1941 to January 1944, the Bureaus of the Leningrad State Duma and the OK of the CPSU(b) distributed energy resources to enterprises and institutions in Leningrad. Under the conditions of the blockade, the value of each kilowatt of electricity, a kilogram of fuel oil and a liter of gasoline was excessively high, not only to keep the factories running, but also for the survival of the city's population. Such decisions were most often made for a period of 10 days and included information on the distribution of gasoline, electricity, fuel oil, diesel, coal, firewood and kerosene to consumers. In preparation for the publication of the collection of documents on decisions of the leading party bodies of Leningrad in the period 1941-1944, the author's team prepared summary statistical tables on the distribution of energy resources in the form of appendices ^{[3, pp. 794-814; 4, pp. 1154-1231; 5, pp. 1624-1668]}. This source contains a large amount of statistical information. A combination of correlation analysis and machine learning "with a teacher" on classification tasks can be used as a method of studying it.

During the analysis, we use the Google Colab service to use the cloud version of Jupyter Notebook. As a test dataset, we will take data from the summary tables on the distribution of gasoline (mixtures) in the period from autumn 1941 to January 1944, as well as the distribution of electricity from January 1943 to January 1944. They will allow us to visualize the total volume of energy resources by individual time stages. We will process this data using the Pandas library, which will allow us to select dataframes. We use the NumPy library to analyze the data.

Some of the specifics of applications with tables on the distribution of energy resources is to allocate a significant amount of them for further redistribution between consumers. This may include the unification of factories belonging to one or another commissariat (less often), an authority, or the transfer of distribution authority to the jurisdiction of the Authorized USSR State Planning Committee for Leningrad. In this regard, a comparison can only be made with additional data preprocessing and detailed commentary. Each such case makes it difficult to perform a more detailed analysis, which requires additional segmentation of the distribution and analysis of the hotel part before moving on to a general comparison of all enterprises.

Another approach may be to combine statistics on a group of consumers. For example, we will give data on the distribution of gasoline (mixture) for May 1943 in tons. To reduce the number of lines in the chart, we exclude from the total number of consumers the People's Commissariats of Justice, building materials, paper industry, finance, marine and navy, billets, medium-sized machinery, fishing industry, aviation industry, ferrous metallurgy, as well as the film Committee and the Central Council of Osoaviakhim, which consumed less than 1 ton of gasoline per month.

Fig. 1. May 1943

In this case, it is noticeable that even when consumers are grouped into groups, their unequal number significantly affects the results. That is why a distribution is allocated to local enterprises and organizations in Leningrad, which includes both industrial facilities and public organizations and assistance in fulfilling specific tasks (for example, "cleaning up the city").

The results of data visualization are more prepared for further analysis by summarizing the volume of distributed energy resources. Thus, the table below shows information on the amount of gasoline distributed in tons for the period from the end of November 1941 to January 1944. From these, we can conclude that the peaks of the distribution occurred in February 1942 and February 1943, which corresponds to the period of the lowest temperatures. In summer, on the contrary, fuel was reduced for distribution in order to save money. However, there are also uncharacteristic statistical jumps that indicate periods of additional tasks related to both industrial tasks, regulation of public life, and preparation of military operations at the front.

Fig. 2. Distribution of gasoline 1941-1944

Information on the volume of electricity consumed in the period from January 1943 to January 1944 in millions of kWh can be interpreted in a similar way. This type of summary statistics overlaps in its definition with the previous table.

Fig. 3. Distribution of electricity in 1943 in million kWh.

Another example of the application of the methods presented above is the use of complex computerized content analysis when studying the decisions of the Bureaus of the Leningrad OK and GC VKP(b). This method can be used in the typologization of decisions on topics. This is necessary to solve a particular problem of analyzing the main tasks that the work of the highest party body was aimed at solving. In a more general way, this allows us to compare the Bureau's sector of responsibility with the Military Council of the Leningrad Front and the Leningrad City Executive Committee, when studying the structure of the mechanisms of power management of Leningrad during the years of the blockade. Content analysis is based on the search for keywords specific to a particular type of task. The search itself can be performed either using the "document search" tools in a text editor, or using the capabilities of a large language model. In this case, the results of the ChatGPT 4.5 model were used in comparison with the results of the "document search" and the synthesis of the data obtained.

During the analysis, the main groups of tasks were identified, the solution of which was given the most time. These included the management of industrial enterprises, organizational and party activities, resource allocation, and party staffing. At the same time, despite the great importance for the life of the city during the blockade, less attention was paid to the evacuation of enterprises, equipment and the population, food and resource supplies, mobilization and military support. At the same time, over the course of the blockade, attention to the tasks of distributing industrial resources is gradually decreasing and attention to the topics of urban economy, food distribution and transport is increasing.

To solve the problems of interpreting the data obtained and presenting the conclusions of the research, it is necessary to use the basic methods of historical science. Among them, it should be noted the historical-typological, historical-descriptive and historical-comparative. The historical and typological method in the coverage of historical processes will help to systematize the decisions of the Soviet-party authorities. The use of the historical and descriptive method makes it possible to identify the city's management structure during the blockade. The use of the historical and comparative method makes it possible to practically represent the analysis of the mechanisms of political governance of Leningrad, identified in the course of the study based on historical sources and historiography. In addition, the methods of political science will also become an integral part of interdisciplinary research. They are of the greatest importance for studying the actions of the political leadership and forming the general conclusions of the study. Of particular importance is the behaviorist method aimed at determining the behavioral practices of the party and political leadership of Leningrad. This aspect is necessary to determine the degree of independence of local political authorities from the union center in the field of managerial decision-making. To solve the problem of presenting the general conclusions of the study, it is necessary to use a structural and functional method that allows you to identify the connections between particular plots and extrapolate the conclusions to the general object of research.

Conclusions

The topic of political management of the highest Soviet and party organs of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War is one of the current trends in modern historical science. In recent years, this area has received a significant boost through the publication of a wide range of documents and materials. The characteristics of this source database include a significant amount of textual and statistical data. The use of these data by classical methods of historical science is effective in the context of individual case studies. However, the analysis of the totality of the source base can be carried out using interdisciplinary methods and approaches. This allows us to obtain results on visualization, classification, and regression, which are difficult when using exclusively humanitarian approaches and, in this regard, their conclusions may not be sufficiently supported. The solid accumulated historiographical reserve allows us to supplement the range of available results and make additions, clarifications or some adjustments to them.

The presented research is primarily aimed at identifying the potential of interdisciplinary methods, supported by some individual examples. The capabilities of machine data analysis, the use of some functions of large language models, are an up-to-date tool that allows you to get closer to solving common tasks. The correlation of the research results with historiography will allow us to get a more detailed understanding of the state management system in besieged Leningrad.