State and Party Authorities in the Lower Volga Krai under Conditions of the Okrugs Abolition: the Second Stage of the Administrative-Territorial Reform (1930)

It is noted that the administrative-territorial reforms carried out in the USSR in the 1920s–1930s were primarily aimed at modernizing the existing administrative and economic framework (guberniya–uyezd–volost), which no longer met the large-scale objectives of modernizing the national economic complex of the country. It is shown that the large administrative and economic units—krais and oblasts—created as a result of the launched transformation process did not meet the objectives of optimizing governance and creating a modernized economy based on internal resources and regional economic ties. It is pointed out that the elimination of okrugs as one of the structural elements of the newly created krai (oblast) will become the first stage of territorial disaggregation. Unpublished archival materials from the State Archive of the Volgograd Region, the Center for Documentation of Contemporary History of the Volgograd Region, as well as legislative sources of state authorities, were examined. The reasons for the failure of the latest stage of administrative-territorial reform in the Lower Volga region were identified, both of an organizational and systemic-structural nature, which made it impossible, within the extremely limited time allotted for the reform, to strengthen the district (raion) level of administration and, in general, to build an optimal governance system in the krai. It can be concluded that the delegation of all functions of the okrug administrative apparatus to the raion level, combined with the implementation of the reform under conditions of multitasking and within the severely constrained timeframes, gave this stage of the administrative-territorial reform in the krai an ad hoc nature, while a significant part of the tasks set during the reform remained unfulfilled.

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