Abstract
As a preliminary to the examination of the case-studies of decision-making in the individual commissariats we shall briefly review the role of the Politburo and Sovnarkom in the overall process. The availability of the protocols of both these bodies has greatly increased our understanding of the decision-making process. The case-studies will themselves cast further light on the role of Sovnarkom and the Politburo, but first we need to examine how far these bodies were organised to intervene in and regulate the process of decision-making and policy implementation, how the spheres of responsibilities of the Politburo and Sovnarkom were demarcated, and how the role of these bodies changed over time. This will provide a basis for examining the access which commissariats had to the decision-making centres, and the scope which they had to influence the policy process.
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Notes
F. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow, 1991) p. 354.
L. Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1926–1927 (New York, 1975) pp. 75, 87.
A. Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Communist Party (Munich, 1959) pp. 114–15.
O.V. Khlevnyuk et al. (eds), Stalinskoe Politbyuro v 30-e gody: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1995) pp. 94–112.
I.V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow, 1955) vol. 11, pp. 71–9.
On the meetings of the Politburo see E.A. Rees, ‘Stalin, the Politburo and Rail Transport Policy’, in Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie, E.A. Rees (eds), Soviet History 1917–1953: Essays in Honour of R.W. Davies (Basingstoke/London; New York, 1995) p. 106,
Table 5.1. The figures in this table need to be corrected in accordance with the more complete data given in O.V. Khlevnyuk et al., Stalinskoe Politbyuro v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1995). See D.H. Watson, Molotov and Soviet Government, p. 55, Table 3.1.
N.S. Khrushchev, The Secret Speech (ed. Zh. Medvedev and R. Medvedev) (Nottingham, 1976) pp. 76–7.
See the comments of Kaganovich: XVIIS” ezd VKP(b), stenogrficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934) p. 564.
N.E. Rosenfelt, Knowledge and Power: The Role of Stalin’s Secret Chancellery in the Soviet System of Government (Copenhagen, 1978). This is still a valuable book and has yet to be superseded by work based on the archives of these institutions.
For Soviet government institutions, see G.P. Van den Berg, Organisation und Arbeitsweise der Sowjeischen Regierung (Baden-Baden: Nomos 1984) and for Sovnarkom, during the 1930s, Watson, Molotov and Soviet Government: Sovnarkom.
T.N. Kol’yak, Vlas Yakoblevich Chubar’: zhizn’ i deyatel’nost’ (Kiev, 1981) pp. 242–3, 256;
V. Drobizhev and N. Dumova, V.Ya. Chubar’ (biograficheskii ocherk) (Moscow, 1963) pp. 63–71; SZ, 1935, Part II, 9–60, 61.
Ibid., pp. 46–7, 96–100; E.A. Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia (London, 1987) pp. 219–24.
Paul Gregory, Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1990).
See, E. Huskey, ‘Vyshinskii, Krylenko and the Shaping of the Soviet Legal Order’, Slavic Review, vol. 46, 1987, pp. 414–28.
J.F. Hough and M. Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) pp. 412–7.
A preliminary discussion of these themes is found in E.A. Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia. See also A. Hegedus, Socialism and Bureaucracy (London, 1976);
L. Torok, The Socialist System of State Control (Budapest, 1974).
See for example the discussion in Darrell P. Hammer, The Politics of Oligarchy (Hinsdale, 1974) pp. 278–80.
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Rees, E.A., Watson, D.H. (1997). Politburo and Sovnarkom. In: Rees, E.A. (eds) Decision-making in the Stalinist Command Economy, 1932–37. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25295-4_2
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