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Soviet Union [USSR] Party Control of the Ministerial Apparatus
The ministries and state committees operated without the
appearance of party control. Nevertheless, the party ensured its
authority over the government through several mechanisms designed
to preserve its leading role in society.
Considerable overlap between the memberships of the Council of
Ministers and leading party bodies facilitated both policy
coordination between the two organizations and party control. The
chairman of the Council of Ministers normally occupied a seat on
the Politburo, which gave him additional authority to ensure the
implementation of his decisions. In 1989 the first deputy chairman
of the Council of Ministers, Iurii D. Masliukov, was promoted to
full-member status on the Central Committee, and both he and deputy
chairman Aleksandra P. Biriukova were candidate members of the
Politburo. In early 1989, Viktor M. Chebrikov, the head of the KGB,
and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the minister of foreign affairs, were
also Politburo members. In addition, most ministers and chairmen of
state committees were either full or candidate members of the
Central Committee
(see Soviet Union USSR - Central Committee
, ch. 7). Thus, the norms
of democratic centralism obliged council members to adhere to party
policies.
Within the Council of Ministers and the ministries, the party
used its nomenklatura authority to place its people in
influential positions. Nomenklatura refers both to the
positions that the Central Committee apparatus of the party has the
power to fill and to a list of people qualified to fill them.
Approximately one-third of the administrative positions in the
council bureaucracy, including the most important ones, were on the
nomenklatura list. Occupants of these positions well
understood that the party could remove them if they failed to
adhere to its policies.
Finally, in what is known as dual subordination, the staff of
each ministry was required to respond to orders and directions from
its primary party organization (PPO), as well as to the ministries'
hierarchy. Party members on the staff of the ministry were bound by
the norms of democratic centralism to obey the orders of the
secretary of the PPO, who represented the CPSU hierarchy in the
ministry. The secretary of the PPO ensured that CPSU policies were
carried out in the day-to-day activities of the ministries.
Data as of May 1989
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