Organizing the Resistance
Central Committee, Organization of the Struggle in the Enemy Rear. July 18, 1941
This document outlined how Soviet authorities sought to turn scattered hostility to the German occupation into an organized partisan movement. It treated resistance as a disciplined military and political project: recruit reliable people, build small units with clear leadership, secure weapons and supplies, gather intelligence, and coordinate sabotage with regular Red Army operations. Read closely, it also showed the underlying anxiety of the moment, since it assumed infiltration, betrayal, and retaliation as normal conditions of underground war.
Translated by James von Geldern
Original Source: KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s"ezdov, Vol. VII, pp. 229-230.
In the war against Nazi Germany, which has seized part of Soviet territory, resistance in the rear of the German Army has gained critical significance. Our task is to create unbearable conditions for the German interventionists, disrupt their communications, transportation and their military units themselves, disrupt all their activities to destroy the invaders and their accomplices, in every way to help creation of cavalry and infantry guerrilla units, sabotage and diversionary groups, and to deploy a network of underground Bolshevik organizations on occupied territory to guide all actions against the fascist occupiers. In all this we have the wholehearted support of hundreds and thousands of our brothers and friends in every city and every village who are now under the heel of the German Fascists and wait for help from us in the organization of forces to combat the occupiers.
To make this fight in the rear of the German troops as widespread and militant as possible, leaders of republican, regional and local Party and Soviet organizations in German-occupied areas must undertake the organization of the cause, lead groups and teams of dedicated fighters, already struggling to disorganize the enemy and destroy the invaders ...
... The Central Committee of the CPSU(b) requires the Central Committee of the national, regional and district Communist parties in areas captured or threatened with the seizure by the enemy the following measures:
For the organization of underground cells and leadership of diversionary and guerilla activities in areas captured by the enemy, the most dependable Party, Soviet and Komsomol workers, as well as non-Party comrades devoted of the Soviet government who are familiar with the area in which they sent.
In areas under threat of seizure by the enemy, Party leaders should immediately organize clandestine cells.
To ensure the broad development of the partisan movement in the enemy rear, Party organizations must immediately organize fighting squads and underground groups from civil war veterans and of those comrades have already proved themselves in the fighter battalions, brigades of the national militia and others ...
Party organizations under the personal guidance of their first secretaries should provide comrades who are experienced fighting, loyal to our party, personally known to the Party leaders and proven in practice, for the establishment and leadership of the guerrilla movement.
... The Central Committee of the CPSU(b) requires that leaders of Party organizations guide this struggle behind German lines in person, so that they inspire people loyal to the Soviet authorities by personal example, courage and dedication to the struggle, which has taken on the scope of direct, broad and heroic support of the Red Army, fighting German fascism on the front.