Organization of training courses for mobilization personnel of civil people's commissariats and other government agencies in the Soviet state

The article studies the process of organizing the interdepartmental training courses for mobilization personnel of the civil People’s Commissariats and other government agencies, using the case of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest USSR republic, and documents which have not been used for such research so far. At the turn of the 1930s, the first interdepartmental mobilization plan of the Soviet state was created. Military and civil mobilization preparation was assigned to civil People’s Commissariats and agencies, where special mobilization divisions (cells and units) were formed. The lack of experience and knowledge among mobilization cells members, who were to organize mobilization activities of the civil People’s Commissariats and other agencies, hindered the effective formation of the nationwide mobilization plan. The first training courses for civil mobilization personnel were established at the military district headquarters in 1927 and 1928. They were assigned to various People’s Commissariats and had low throughput. In 1929, amid changes in the country’s system of interdepartmental mobilization leading bodies, the Red Army Headquarters and the RSFSR State Planning Committee proposed the options for the reorganization of the existing training courses. This resulted in establishing standard interdepartmental training courses for civil mobilization personnel, which were territorially assigned to the military district headquarters.