Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

V

Government

The Bolsheviks seized power in the name of the soviets, councils of deputies chosen in factories and other places of employment by workers supportive of the revolution. After the Bolshevik takeover in late 1917, the soviets provided some of the trappings of democracy but little or none of its substance. Elections to them proved to be easy for Bolshevik agents to manipulate, and within several years they had become little more than localized organs for the despotism of the Communist Party. The constitutional slogan was periodically updated—from “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the first two decades to “state of the whole people” in the Brezhnev period—but the underlying reality of one-party rule persisted.

The initial justification for the abrogation of civil rights was that a brief interlude of dictatorship was a necessary precondition of the socialist paradise ahead. As that paradise receded into the indefinite future, the Soviet leaders felt free in essence to rule as they pleased. Neither the RSFSR constitution of 1918 nor the USSR constitution of 1924 made reference to the dominion of the Communist Party. That veil was removed in the Soviet constitution of 1936, which, while listing all manner of citizens’”rights,” explicitly said the Communist Party was the “leading core” of the state. The last constitution of the USSR, enacted in 1977, declared the CPSU “the leading and directing force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system.” Only the party could “guide the great endeavor of the Soviet people and place their struggle for the triumph of communism on a planned, scientific basis.”

A

The Communist Party

The Bolsheviks retitled themselves the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in March 1918 and the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) in December 1925. From November 1952 to its eradication in 1991, the party was titled the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU. It allowed a few weak rivals to exist until the early 1920s, when it outlawed them all. A similar process of centralization occurred within the Communist Party. In March 1921 organized factions within the party were banned at Lenin’s insistence. Stalin used arrests and executions to eliminate all stirrings of opposition and branded all who took issue with him as foreign spies. Although Khrushchev and Brezhnev eschewed violence, they consistently refused to allow potential adversaries within the party to band together against them.

The party used two main means to enforce its will. First, it required all who wished to be active in politics and administration to join its ranks and submit to its discipline. CPSU membership peaked at just under 20 million in the 1980s, or roughly 10 percent of the adult population. Second, the party created its own authoritative decision-making organs at all levels at which the state functioned. Adhering to Lenin’s teaching of “democratic centralism,” these bodies allowed some discussion of issues prior to making a decision but formed a submissive hierarchy once policy had been set.

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In shape, the CPSU resembled a pyramid. At its base lay several hundred thousand “primary party organizations” embedded in factories and other workplaces. Intermediate levels consisted of the local and regional organs of the party. All union republics with the exception of the RSFSR had their own CPSU branch. At the apex of the pyramid was the national party leadership: the Central Committee of several hundred senior officials, which convened two or three times a year, and more compact decision-making bodies. Of the latter the most crucial were a pair of panels with about a dozen members each: the Politburo (known as the Presidium from 1952 until 1966), which dealt with the full range of domestic and foreign-policy issues, and the Secretariat, which handled intra-party organization and personnel. The ultimate leader was the general secretary (known as the first secretary from 1952 until 1966) of the CPSU. General secretaries from Stalin to Gorbachev chaired the Politburo, dominated personnel decisions, and took the initiative on all major political and policy questions. Officially, the general secretary was selected by the same party congress, held every four or five years, that voted on the membership of the Central Committee. Unofficially, his power over rank-and-file members and middle-ranking officers of the CPSU made his reelection a foregone conclusion.

The party relied on internal and external mechanisms of enforcement. Internally, it had about 150,000 salaried members of its apparat, or implementing apparatus. The party apparatus took direction from the general secretary. Though dwarfed by the state bureaucracy, it had life-and-death power over it because it contained departments designed to watch over governmental agencies and ensure their conformity with party policy. The main connection between party and state was the nomenklatura, a system whereby several million government officials had to have their appointments confirmed by boards within the machinery of the CPSU. The party also augmented its influence through auxiliary mass organizations that inculcated its values and responded to its orders. The most important of these were the trade unions and the Komsomol; in fact, the latter’s membership was about twice the size of the party’s.

B

National Government

The Soviet system from its inception had both legislative and executive structures. The RSFSR and then USSR Congress of Soviets, indirectly elected by lower-level soviets, fulfilled the legislative function from 1917 to 1936. The congress quickly turned into an obedient executor of the party’s wishes. In 1936 the Stalin constitution instituted a directly elected national parliament, the Supreme Soviet. It consisted of two chambers, the Council of the Union and the Council of Nationalities, with 750 deputies each. The Supreme Soviet, too, was a rubber stamp for the CPSU. All its members were elected without competition, on slates carefully assembled by the party organs. It met for only several days per year, although its committees convened at greater length; all votes were unanimous. The parliament elected a presiding body, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which handled mostly protocol duties, such as issuing decrees that certified decisions already made by the CPSU. The presidium’s chairman acted as an honorific head of state.

The Supreme Soviet also appointed, under CPSU tutelage, the senior officials in the executive agencies of the government. The cabinet of department heads was known as the Council of People’s Commissars from 1917 until 1946 and the Council of Ministers thereafter. The chairman of the council (unofficially dubbed the premier), the ministers, and the immense bureaucracies that served under them had much everyday power, but answered in the end to the party and served at its pleasure. Stalin doubled as general secretary of the CPSU and chairman of the Council of Ministers from the outbreak of World War II to his death, as did Georgy Malenkov (in 1953) and Nikita Khrushchev (from 1958 until 1964). When Khrushchev’s fellow CPSU leaders deposed him in 1964, they decided to keep the positions of chairman of the Council of Ministers and CPSU general secretary in separate hands.

Reflecting the vast scope of Soviet government, the Council of Ministers had many more members than any Western cabinet. In 1987, for instance, it numbered 67 persons. Its chairman, Nikolay Ryzhkov, was aided by 13 deputy premiers, each presiding over a segment of the bureaucracy. Of the 56 ministries and equivalent agencies represented in the council, some had responsibilities that would be familiar in almost any national government (such as running the post office, the courts, or the army), but the majority administered branches of the state-held economy.

C

Republic and Local Government

The 15 union republics had government structures, nominally elected by the population, that largely ran in parallel to those of the central government. The economic concerns of the republics were of lower priority than those of the USSR government, and all republic activities were checked and, if need be, amended from above. Further restraint was applied by the organs of the CPSU: Each republic but the RSFSR had a republic-level Central Committee, Politburo, and Secretariat subordinated to the Kremlin (the seat of the CPSU and Soviet government) in Moscow. Because the union republics were accountable for educational and cultural services, residents often identified them as defenders of republic interests and identities. This perception became highly important when Gorbachev’s reforms led to the weakening of the authority of the central administration in the late 1980s.

Beneath the union republics was an elaborate web of regional and local authorities. Their main duties were to deliver social services (such as health care and public housing) and in the countryside to supervise agricultural production. Ten union republics (all except the three Baltic republics, Moldavia, and Armenia) had regional subunits. These included the autonomous areas for ethnic homelands (autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts, and autonomous okrugs) and two other types without ethnic coloration, oblasts and krais (territories). All told, the Soviet Union in 1989 encompassed, besides the 15 union republics, 38 autonomous areas and 120 oblasts and krais. At the most localized level, councils were in place for rural districts (3193 in 1989), towns and cities (2190), small urban settlements (4026), and villages (42,712). Again, all government bodies operated under the close watch of the apparatus of the CPSU.

D

State Security Committee

The security arm of the Soviet state, established in December 1917 as the VeCheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), had many names over the years. It was known from 1954 to 1991 as the KGB (State Security Committee). The power of the political, or “secret,” police reached its apogee in the 1930s and 1940s, when they terrorized the population and the Soviet elite almost at will, taking cues only from Stalin and his henchmen. The post-Stalin KGB relied on less blatant techniques of coercion and worked closely with the party leadership as a whole. According to Western estimates, the KGB had between 400,000 and 700,000 full-time employees, exclusive of agents and informers. Non-political policing and maintenance of public order were organized by a separate agency called the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs).

Domestically, departments of the KGB arrested and prosecuted persons suspected of political offenses, kept watch on the artists’ unions and helped supervise the censorship organ Glavlit, collected information about social and economic trends, and were responsible for counterintelligence against foreign espionage. Other divisions consisted of guard units, signal troops that managed confidential communication, border troops that stood vigil over the USSR’s long frontiers, and special departments charged with maintaining the political reliability of the army. The KGB also took the lead in Soviet intelligence abroad, and for that reason had input into the making of the USSR’s foreign policy. That role seemed to increase after Yury Andropov, the chief of the KGB, was made a member of the CPSU Politburo in 1973.

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