Rabkrin

Rabkrin, RKI or Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate (WPI) (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская инспе́кция, Рабкри́н, РКИ) was a governmental establishment in the early Soviet Union responsible for scrutinizing the state, local and enterprise administrations from 1920 to 1934.

Beginning in February 7, 1920, Rabkrin is established by the Soviet Central Executive Committee to succeed the People’s Commissariat for State Control. At the time of its creation, the term Rabkrin comes from the Russian title Narodnyi Kommissariat Raboche or the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. Rabkrin was put in place to ensure the effectiveness of the newly created Soviet government, which had experienced bureaucratic turmoil that began during the Russian Revolution and had continued into the Russian Civil War. While the People’s Commissariat for State Control was a key institute for creating the Soviet Union, its mismanagement of bureaucratic control led Vladimir Lenin to disbanding the council, replacing it with a more manageable division of government authority. The former commissar of the People’s Commissariat for State Control, Joseph Stalin, was placed in charge of the newly formed agency. Rabkrin was to signal a new beginning of Soviet administration, it was a creation of the Soviet Union and therefore had no connection to the Russian Empire.

Polish biographer Isaac Deutscher described Rabkrin as follows:

“The Rabkrin ... was set up to control every branch of the administration, from top to bottom, with a view to eliminating the two major faults, inefficiency and corruption, which the Soviet civil service had inherited from its Tsarist predecessor. It was to act as the stern and enlightened auditor for the whole rickety and creaking governmental machine; to expose abuses of power and red tape; and to train an élite of reliable civil servants for every branch of the government. The [Rabkrin] acted through teams of workers and peasants who were free at any time to enter the offices of any Commissariat and watch the work done there.... The whole bizarre scheme of inspection was one of Lenin's pet ideas. Exasperated by the inefficiency and dishonesty of the civil service, he sought to remedy them by extreme and ruthless "control from below," and the [Rabkrin] was to be the means.... The mill of officialdom, however, turned the workers themselves into bureaucrats. The Commissariat of the Inspectorate, as Lenin was to discover later on, became an additional source of muddle, corruption, and bureaucratic intrigue. In the end it became an unofficial but meddlesome police in charge of the civil service.”

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