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Soviet Union [USSR] Secretariat
Until September 1988, the Secretariat headed the CPSU's central
apparatus and was solely responsible for the development and
implementation of party policies. The Secretariat also carried
political weight because many of its members sat on the Politburo
(see
fig. 13). In 1989 eight members of the Secretariat, including
the general secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee
of the CPSU, served as full members of the Politburo. One member,
Georgii P. Razumovskii, was a candidate member of the Politburo.
Those officials who sat on the Politburo, served in the
Secretariat, and chaired a party commission were the most powerful
in the Soviet Union.
After the formation of the party commissions in the fall of
1988, lines of authority over the central party bureaucracy became
very unclear because the responsibilities of the secretaries and
the responsibilities of the commissions considerably overlapped. Of
the nine secretaries, excluding the general secretary, six chaired
party commissions. One Western observer, Alexander Rahr, believed
that this factor limited the power of the Secretariat because the
influence of the secretaries who chaired the commissions was
restricted to specific areas of competence as defined by their
commission chairmanships. In addition, the secretaries became
answerable to the commissions they chaired. Finally, in one case,
a secretary served as a subordinate to another secretary in the
latter's role as the chairman of a commission. Viktor P. Nikonov,
a secretary responsible for agriculture, was deputy chairman of the
Agrarian Policy Commission, which was chaired by Egor K. Ligachev,
another party secretary.
Western specialists poorly understood lines of authority in the
Secretariat. It was clear that the members of the Secretariat
supervised the work of the Central Committee departments.
Department chiefs, who normally sat on the Central Committee, were
subordinate to the secretaries. For example, in 1989 Aleksandr S.
Kapto, the chairman of the Ideological Department, answered to
Vadim A. Medvedev, party secretary for ideology, and Valentin A.
Falin, the head of the International Department, answered to
Iakovlev, party secretary for international policy. Most department
heads were assisted by a first deputy head (a first deputy
administrator in the case of the Administration of Affairs
Department) and from one to six deputy heads (deputy administrators
in the case of the Administration of Affairs Department). However,
the International Department had two deputy heads.
In 1989 a variety of departments made up the CPSU's central
apparatus. Some departments were worthy of note. The Party Building
and Cadre Work Department assigned party personnel in the
nomenklatura system
(see Soviet Union USSR - Nomenklatura
, this ch.). The State
and Legal Department supervised the armed forces, the Committee for
State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti--KGB), the
Ministry of Internal Affairs, the trade unions, and the Procuracy.
Before 1989 the apparatus contained many more departments
responsible for the economy. These departments included one for the
economy as a whole, one for machine building, and one for the
chemical industry, among others. The party abolished these
departments in an effort to remove itself from the day-to-day
management of the economy in favor of government bodies and a
greater role for the market. In early 1989, Gorbachev suggested
that the agrarian and defense industry departments might be
disbanded as well as part of his ongoing reform efforts.
Data as of May 1989
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