Russia 5 Years After Stalin-7
RUSH, MYRON
Russia 5 Years After Stalin-/ Economic Managers By Myron Rush At Stalin's death there was no question that any leader who sought the succession would try hard to control three political bodies:...
...Frequently they have been shifted from one bureaucracy to the other, particularly at the beginning or toward the peak of their careers...
...But, as functionaries of an institution which was formed for revolution and battle, they have been less able to indulge their preferences for ease and comfort...
...The bureaucratic elite paid a heavy price for defeat: Many were expelled from Moscow and dispersed throughout the land...
...This suggests that the political bargaining power of the bureaucratic elite, while considerable, has significant limits...
...He and his chief lieutenants, the economic executives Maxim Saburov and Mikhail Pervukhin, battled to save the consumer-goods program by holding down defense spending...
...Malenkov had to strengthen the Government apparatus, protecting it against encroachments by the provincial Party apparatus...
...The complex system of institutional checks and balances which had maintained his absolute rule began to break up into its elements...
...1. The bureaucratic elite has been deeply involved in political struggle, particularly since Stalin's death...
...However, when faced with a choice between them in the tense maneuvers and bargaining set off by Stalin's illness, Malenkov sacrificed his interests in the Party apparatus in order to assure them in the Government...
...in the expanded Secretariat, Khrushchev's adherents balanced those of Malenkov...
...In all, they number many tens of thousands...
...Possessing contrasting traits and performing overlapping functions, the two bureaucracies have naturally tended to oppose each other...
...In a new succession crisis the bureaucratic elite, this time allied with groups which have recently been subjected to renewed Party control, might wage a more successful fight for political supremacy than it did in the five years following Stalin's death...
...In April 1954, when the ministries had become almost as numerous as at Stalin's death, he finally conceded that his reorganization plan had failed...
...3. To preserve the myth of Party sovereignty while in fact making the Government supreme, it was important to pronounce policy in the name of the Party Presidium...
...Yet the completeness of its defeat and the relative ease with which this was accomplished suggest that its potentialities at Stalin's death were less than Malenkov had supposed...
...Since that time the Stalin succession crisis has largely been resolved, after a bitter struggle among his lieutenants...
...Unless he could first strengthen the provincial bureaucracy's independence of Party control, devolution would permit powerful local Party machines to interpose their authority between the Government and the factory...
...Although Malenkov was for reforms, he was not for those reforms which threatened his power...
...If the new ruling stratum holds firm and is not soon displaced, the underlying social forces which produced important political results when the leadership was divided may subside...
...By solving the Stalin succession crisis, Khrushchev has brought stability to the ruling body in the Soviet empire...
...He reduced the Presidium's membership from 25 to 10, retaining most of the Ministers while removing all the Secretaries except Khrushchev...
...The division of ministries in mid-1953 had begun the process of dispersal...
...2. The bureaucratic elite's role in the massive and intricate Soviet economy is evidently not so crucial as it had appeared to be...
...Malenkov, who for many years had projected his influence into both Party and state bureaucracies, sought to capitalize on this increased authority of the Government relative to the Party...
...What followed was a further breakup of the great economic power which Malenkov had concentrated in the Council of Ministers after Stalin's death...
...After 1939, when Khrushchev and Andrei Zhdanov were made full members of the Politburo, no fulltime Party worker attained such eminence...
...The Party officials and the economic executives are not separate breeds...
...Not until a year later, when Malenkov's power was declining, did the republican governments begin to acquire jurisdiction over enterprises in heavy industry...
...Symbolic evidence of this shift was reflected in his titles...
...Representatives at various levels were separated by walls of suspicion designed to thwart their efforts to collaborate in evading rigorous demands from the center...
...It was uncertain, however, whether the state bureaucracy—and particularly the economic executive—would be a fourth key lever of power in the impending struggle...
...doubtless, he was constrained to adopt this strategy by the grow th of Khrushchev's power in the Secretariat...
...Khrushchev's present power, it seems safe to conclude, is not in imminent danger...
...However, in the great purge of the mid-Thirties, it was reduced to an instrument of Stalin's absolute rule— though still the pre-eminent one—in an intricate system of institutional balances and controls embracing the Party apparatus, the political police, the state bureaucracy and the Army...
...The months which followed are obscure...
...While economic necessity may compel him to re-establish a highly centralized state bureaucracy, he is aware that such an instrument could grow into a threat to his rule...
...Encroachments from these quarters became more numerous as Party functionaries were increasingly enjoined to intervene in the economy...
...it locates difficulties, fixes responsibility for mistakes, and insures that non-Party institutions carry out Party orders...
...The Party machine, while it displays strong bureaucratic tendencies, has not wholly succumbed to them...
...His death created a radically new situation...
...Doubtless he recognizes that this would thwart his economic program and might even imperil his rule...
...It favors rationality, efficiency, routine, orderly procedure, disregard of problems which are not "urgent" and stereotyped solution of problems which cannot be disregarded...
...This involves reducing the planned targets imposed by higher echelons, while assuring that subordinate echelons fulfill the share of the plan which has been passed down to them...
...In setting the stage for an orderly succession, at the 1952 congress Stalin established a constitutional equilibrium between the Party and the state bureaucracies: In the Presidium, the Party's new "directing" body, the Party Secretariat was represented almost equally with the Government...
...These moves seemed to issue from a belief that the Party apparatus, and particularly its center, the Secretariat, could be weakened and the state bureaucracy, freed from its constraint, could be made the dominant institution in Soviet society...
...They were even willing to risk grave injury to the Soviet Empire in order to gain a victory over the domestic enemy, as when Khrushchev delivered his "secret speech" against Stalin...
...While he seems to have cut the salaries of the bureaucratic elite, Khrushchev has tried to provide displaced officials with satisfactory provincial residences...
...When Party and state issued joint decrees, Stalin signed as head of the Government and designated his top subordinate to sign as Party Secretary...
...The state bureaucracy prefers to be governed by fixed rules, to "go through channels...
...Malenkov shortly resigned as head of the Government, finally acknowledging the supremacy of the Central Committee...
...This is the seventh in our series of articles on the USSR since 1953...
...Between November 1952 and Stalin's death in March 1953, the "doctors plot" emerged...
...They were at issue as to their respective roles in economic management, and perhaps also on the question of future rates of economic growth...
...Economic administration was first concentrated, then diffused...
...With the bureaucratic elite's political power in jeopardy, Malenkov and other top economic executives rose to their defense...
...Doubtless, Party apparatchiks, as individuals, desire the security and material well-being which economic executives find so attractive...
...The victory went to Khrushchev and the Party machine...
...Malenkov announced "a new stage" in which consumer goods would be produced at a "forced" pace...
...This system of complementary and competing institutions was partially coordinated by a hierarchy of first secretaries and was finally unified at the center, where all power was fused in Stalin's person...
...If the economic bureaucracy is the instrument best fitted to provide its members and the Soviet people with large material rewards for past sacrifices, the Party machine as an institution offers them ideology, struggle and continued sacrifice...
...Having by these means assured the Government's ascendancy in the Presidium, Malenkov then sought to restrict policy deliberation to this small Party body and to enhance its prestige and authority...
...Their political maneuvering during those five contentious years, which became increasingly bold and desperate, revealed important evidence on the state bureaucracy's place in Soviet politics...
...Moreover, he had given signs of placing the needs of the Soviet people before the demands of world revolution...
...Thus in July 1957 Khrushchev restored to the Party machine its hegemony over Soviet society...
...His venture-someness...
...But in battling for hegemony the two antagonists have wielded destructive weapons...
...But while this was sufficient reason for Stalin to take the step, in Khrushchev's decision ambition probably played the key role...
...But, though they have conflicting interests, members of the bureaucratic elite also share important goals...
...A crust has formed on the surface of Soviet politics where for five years there was agitated motion...
...Despite the disruptive effects of these basic administrative changes, Soviet industry was able to adjust to them and maintain a high rate of growth...
...Regularity is its watchword...
...He has made it clear, however, that the need for reform continues...
...In the outcome, the economic managers won control over a greatly strengthened planning body (the State Economic Commission), but their victory proved short-lived...
...It made him a supporter of the bureau in provincial Party organizations, where diverse social forces were represented...
...In the very first announcement of the new regime, when Malenkov's power was near its height, two of his partisans were transferred from the Secretariat to "executive work in the Council of Ministers...
...That he has now made himself head of the Government, as well as of the Party, does not alter this...
...These institutions performed their work in close proximity with one another, frequently with mutual interference...
...However, since he has unified it by expelling leaders of non-Party institutions, his power is based narrowly on the Party machine...
...Economic activity in the postwar years was less subject to Party intervention than formerly, and the ministries acquired somewhat greater freedom in the performance of their official functions...
...Their primary professional concerns include the obvious functions of production, technology, labor discipline and finance...
...Indeed, specialization has gone so far that one Soviet writer found it necessary to challenge the notion that Party work was a profession...
...While Stalin still promulgated policy in the name of the Party, he increasingly relied upon the Government apparatus to execute it...
...Perhaps most important, the economic bureacracy wants to end its subjection to the political police and to lessen arbitrary interference from the fulltime workers of the Party machine...
...Malenkov's control over the economic bureaucracy was limited by the authority of seasoned veterans of Stalin's campaigns against his Party enemies...
...The performance of the Soviet economy, then, does not seem highly sensitive to changes in its administrative superstructure...
...It was in the intermediate realm, among Stalin's chief lieutenants, that competition among the key institutions—Party and state bureaucracies, political police, and Army—had greatest political significance and was probably most intense...
...In the showdown (December 1954) Malenkov was able to secure the support of the Government newspaper, Izvestia, for his consumer-goods program, although the Party's organ, Pravda, demanded continued sacrifice on behalf of military spending and rapid economic growth...
...Transcending the conflict of institutions and personalities was the basic constitutional question: How was Soviet Russia to be ruled...
...Malenkov maintained a tenuous hold on the Government throughout 1954...
...Finally, the agency which had to plan the economic activities of these protean bodies was itself subj ect to remarkable variation in its powers and internal organization...
...This, in turn, required a foreign policy of retrenchment and serious negotiation with the West...
...Major policies for which they struggled after Stalin's death are not likely to be adopted...
...His decision to oppose the Party machine and its system of secretarial rule was crucial...
...Yet each official in the USSR tends to identify his personal fortunes with the political fortunes of the bureaucracy which currently employs him...
...Its preferred activity is the "crash" program...
...Their allegiance to this institution was partly opportunistic, although doubtless each believed in varying measure in the decisive importance of his own organization's work...
...As a consequence of this weakening of its center, the economic bureaucracy's capacity to resist interference from provincial Party machines declined...
...4. The bureaucratic elite's political influence in the Khrushchev regime seems likely to be minor, perhaps not much greater than under Stalin's absolute rule...
...While he probably was unprepared to commit his fortunes wholly to either source of power, in the last years of Stalin's life he increasingly relied on the state apparatus...
...In the late Twenties it played an important role in the controversy between Stalin, boss of the Party apparatus, and Alexei Rykov, head of the Government...
...thus, it opened the way to an incipient pluralism in Soviet politics...
...In previous weeks, David J. Dallin discussed foreign policy, Boris I. Nicolaevsky the Party, Gleb Struve literature, Richard Pipes nationalities, Simon "Wolin the secret police, and Vladimir Gsovski law...
...Stalin's victory made the apparatus of full-time Party workers the sovereign institution in Soviet society by 1930...
...Control over agriculture, the least centralized of the Government's economic activities and hence the most vulnerable to the Party's apparatus, largely passed to the Party machine late in 1953...
...Within a few hours of Stalin's death Malenkov succeeded in destroying the balance which Stalin had created in the Presidium between Secretaries and Ministers...
...3. The cleavage between the Party machine and the state bureaucracy, which already existed at Stalin's death, has been broadened and deepened by their subsequent conflict...
...A diffuse and weakened state bureaucracy, if it is closely directed by a powerful and close-knit Party machine, may be adequate to supervise the economy...
...To avoid this result, Malenkov saw to it that most industrial concerns were directly administered by the powerful amalgamated ministries in Moscow which he controlled...
...He had been deeply involved in problems of economic administration for the greater part of his career, and had shown himself to be more concerned with the technical qualifications of leaders and with production results than with ideological orthodoxy...
...Yet, despite some conservative features in Malenkov's reform strategy, it promised fundamental change...
...Khrushchev's appointment as head of the Government, like Stalin's in 1941, serves his diplomacy...
...From then on, Malenkov evidently regarded the economic bureaucracy as his main base of power...
...In addition, they are deeply engaged in the politics of planning...
...Thus, among economic executives there is a constant struggle to shift the onerous tasks set by the Party leadership to administrative units other than their own...
...For our purpose, the bureaucratic elite can be defined as the educated and technically-trained men who administer Soviet productive enterprises...
...They were joined by several of Stalin's oldest associates, who finally recognized that Khrushchev's aggrandizement of the Party machine endangered their own positions...
...Typically, the Party apparatus sets new tasks, mobilizes opinion, shifts cadres...
...Although he proclaimed the success of his ministerial reorganization in securing large reductions of personnel and costs within five months, Malenkov had to re-divide some ministries in view of "new tasks" which were being set...
...Its lowest members are factory managers and collective-farm chairmen, while some of its top leaders have been members of the Party's ruling Presidium...
...Effective political power passed to a narrow circle of contentious lieutenants, none of whom was able to seize Stalin's mediating and unifying powers...
...Stalin's system, despite its success in creating a huge and powerful empire, had induced popular lethargy and bureaucratic inertia...
...That he is at least willing to give their views a hearing is suggested by his projection over the next fifteen years of production goals which, while ambitious, are more realistic than such goals have been in the past...
...Significantly, this moment of freedom from stringent Party control produced controversy between top economic executives and planning officials...
...But he permitted favored subordinates to achieve a partial, usually temporary, fusion of authority over key institutions...
...Thus its capacity to influence Soviet policies and institutional developments in the next years can best be understood by examining its involvement in recent politics...
...He saw the need in present-day Soviet Russia to cover his personal power, based on control of the Party machine, with a cloak of legitimacy...
...The maneuver failed, and its Leaders were purged...
...It called for the virtual elimination of economic ministries and the transfer of their authority to provincial "economic councils" which could be controlled by the local Party machine...
...It made him a strong partisan of "liberalizing" policies which could enlist the support of the economic bureaucracy and perhaps deprive the Party of its chief raison d'etre—its function of policing the system of priorities which favors heavy industry and armaments over consumption...
...Khrushchev's concessions, while they eliminate some of the worst features of the Stalin era, grant the economic bureaucracy little voice in the making of policy...
...Indeed, the bureaucratic elite proved itself an autonomous political force, and not merely an instrument of factional intrigue, by maintaining the struggle with the Party machine long after its principal leader had lost his position as head of the Government...
...IN the alignment of institutions with personalities, Malenkov now staked his bid for power largely on the state bureaucracy...
...The high cost in money and confusion did not deter them from repeatedly reorganizing the economic bureaucracy for factional ends...
...By these means state authority was concentrated in the hands of a few powerful figures and a marked reduction in the over-sized bureaucracy was facilitated...
...At the 20th Congress, barely a year after Malenkov's resignation, Khrushchev ordered provincial functionaries to supervise production...
...Khrushchev, it would appear, has staked his political future on just this proposition...
...Chance, the personal qualities of the leading antagonists, and the role of the political police are only three among them...
...He tried to improve its capacity for directing the Soviet economy, as well as its usefulness as a power base in the political struggle, by protecting it from Party intervention...
...All five postwar entrants— Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikolai Voznesensky, Nikolai Bulganin and Alexei Kosygin—came from the Government...
...Their professional services are still required, however, and Khrushchev has taken measures to conciliate them...
...Significantly, this theme was prominent in the first months after Stalin's death, when Malenkov's authority was at its height, hut it disappeared when Khrushchev began his rise...
...Russia 5 Years After Stalin-/ Economic Managers By Myron Rush At Stalin's death there was no question that any leader who sought the succession would try hard to control three political bodies: the Communist party apparatus, the political police and the Army...
...That of Party Secretary appeared rarely after the war...
...In December, when Soviet setbacks in Hungary and Poland produced a political crisis, controversy over the economic roles of the Party machine and the state bureaucracy found its way into Kom-munist, the Party's top organ...
...Both, however, also have a leaven of apparatchiks to insure Party control...
...The key institutions (Party apparatus, political police, Army and state bureaucracy), no longer instruments of the tyrant's will, began to acquire a life and movement of their own...
...The Central Committee convened suddenly and briefly in mid-February to adopt Khrushchev's hastily-conceived reorganization plan, a radically different one from that adopted in December...
...4. To fashion Stalin's inert and diffuse bureaucracy into an effective instrument of rule, a strong Council of Ministers was required...
...it opposes intervention from the outside...
...Assuredly, Malenkov did not favor the state apparatus as a matter of principle...
...Others are to improve the forms and methods of administration, and to establish a more rational price system...
...In the post-Stalin years the economic bureaucracy has been repeatedly reorganized and transformed: The number of economic ministries was halved and doubled within a year, and finally cut sharply...
...Membership in the Politburo came to signify administrative power rather than participation in policy formation...
...The political police and the military forces were not subject to Malenkov's power...
...Moreover, the two sides did not scruple in the heat of battle to harm the state...
...In their personal careers, Soviet bureaucrats, like bureaucrats everywhere, seem to favor stability, security, regular advancement and greater material rewards...
...Our knowledge extends only to the general outline of developments in this secret realm and, of course, is deficient on many important events and most matters of detail...
...Although their conflict was temporarily resolved without weakening the regime, its severity permits us to speak—in Stalin's phrase—of an "antagonistic contradiction" between them...
...Conflict between the Party and the economic bureaucracies as to who should direct the economic process and what its fundamental goals should be has long marked Soviet politics...
...In the last months of his life, Stalin virtually designated Malenkov as his heir, though he severely circumscribed his influence to prevent him from reaching prematurely for supreme power...
...Again, from mid-1948 until Stalin's death in 1953, Malenkov was the only figure other than Stalin to sit in the three top organs: Politburo, Secretariat, and Council of Ministers...
...This might happen if the Party machine proves competent to govern the economy, if the bureaucratic elite and the intelligentsia can be rendered politically inert without resort to terror, if Khrushchev can maintain order in the Soviet orbit and gain new victories outside it...
...Stalin encouraged this competition among his entourage as a means of preventing any challenge to his personal rule...
...But the actual power it could bring to bear in Soviet politics of the mid-Fifties proved inadequate: the Party machine routed the bureaucratic elite from the field of battle...
...It was partly for this reason that Malenkov resurrected the phrase "collective leadership...
...Usually it is the one which largely formed his political ideas, policy preferences, and personal skills...
...In the very first hours after Stalin's death the number of economic ministries was halved by consolidation, and the discretionary powers of their heads were considerably increased...
...as in his scheme for depriving machine-tractor stations of their chief functions, may provide an opening for the bureaucratic elite to get more rational procedures adopted...
...Indeed, in his efforts to arrange a summit conference in 1953 and 1954, Malenkov seemed to envision mutual concessions in Central Europe, not legitimation of the status quo...
...The issue seemed to be resolved in the bureaucratic elite's favor at a Central Committee meeting in the final days of the year, when leaders of the Party machine took a back seat...
...Paradoxically, Khrushchev has had to emulate Stalin by combining in his person leadership of the Government as well as the Party, in order to avoid Stalin's earlier precedent of governing in an unofficial capacity...
...To this end, Malenkov blatantly slighted the Central Committee in the four major speeches which he delivered in the year after Stalin's death...
...Malenkov's reform strategy met early opposition from his fellow "collective leaders," who feared his power and combined to limit it...
...Khrushchev, a life-long apparatchik, is no advocate of less Party control over economic activity, more intellectual and artistic freedom, a decrease in defense spending in favor of an all-out consumer goods program, or a foreign policy designed to end the cold war on a basis of mutual concession...
...After allowing the bureaucratic elite to display its disunity, Khrushchev led the Party apparatus back to battle...
...Ten days later, Malenkov transferred a third protege from the Party apparatus, where he headed the agricultural department, to the analagous position in the state apparatus...
...Malenkov's high evaluation of the potential political power of the Government reflects the rise in its power and prestige after 1941, when Stalin ceased ruling Soviet society solely as head of the Party apparatus and became head of the Government...
...Evidence of its potential political strength is implicit in the actions of both Malenkov, who made the bureaucratic elite his main power base, and of Khrushchev, who took drastic action to eradicate its influence in Moscow...
...The resulting institutional conflict was intensified as the leaders, in accordance with their personal strategies, recruited these forces for the portentous battles to come...
...What is more important, Khrushchev has not used terror against the economic executive...
...The degree of autonomy to be allowed economic executives remained an issue during 1956...
...1. This meant that secretaries on all echelons, particularly their first secretaries, had to be weakened and their power shared more widely with the Party "bureaus," where the state bureaucracy was well represented...
...This outcome, of course, provides no simple measure of the relative strength of the Party and state bureaucracies, for in the highly fluid situation after Stalin died other things had their effect...
...Yet it is adequate to make rough estimates of the political capacity of the bureaucratic elite, principally the economic executive, and of the basic policies which it would like to see in force...
...There can be no question that he would have preferred to dominate the Secretariat as well as the Council of Ministers...
...Both groups, of course, possess power and privilege far beyond the dreams of mere workers or peasants...
...In consequence, an alliance of Party and military leaders was formed against them...
...One is to reduce the ambitious pace of economic development which strains Soviet resources to the limit...
...Soviet leaders have tended to become specialists in either Party work or economic administration...
...The need for reform was unchallenged...
...Many former ministers and deputy ministers have received leading positions in the newly created "economic councils" and in the expanded planning commission...
...The fate of hundreds of economic administrators who have been expelled from Moscow testifies to the seriousness of the contest in which they were engaged...
...They have contended over questions of policy and the national interest, while engaged in a fight for power and privilege...
...But he showed determination to forge the Party machine into an instrument which could impose his economic policies on the country...
...Myron Rush is now a Soviet affairs analyst for the Rand Corporation...
...Reliance on the powerful Party machine to govern Soviet society has the advantage that Khrushchev need not fear the defection of powerful allies...
...The powers of economic ministers were sharply increased, then virtually abolished...
...By its militant spirit and organization, the Party machine made the October revolution, won the Civil War and carried out Stalin's social revolutions "from above...
...Yet, as his post-Stalin career was to demonstrate, the choice was congenial to him...
...The questions were: Who would be the reformers, where was reform to begin, and how far would it go...
...Probably he believes, perhaps rightly, that close Party control, reinforced by the memory of Stalin's great purges, will deter them from combining in a political movement which could threaten his power...
...Stalin's subordinates sought to increase their personal authority in the organization to which he had appointed them, and at the same time to strengthen it against the others...
...Shortly afterward, Khrushchev launched a crash program to settle huge tracts of virgin land, which endangered the Government's remaining authority in agriculture...
...Since the move was not accompanied by a restoration of the Government's former powers, its authority remains weak as compared to the Party's...
...The economic bureaucracy tried to prevent the concentration of immense resources on this uncertain venture, but their resistance was crushed in August 1954...
...If a reversal of Khrushchev's victory should occur, however, it might imperil the Party machine's place in Soviet politics...
...By 1949 the entire Politburo, except for Khrushchev, sat in the Government, now called Council of Ministers (instead of Council of People's Commissars) because of the "increased role of the state apparatus...
...But after December 1949, Malenkov's power was balanced in the Secretariat by that of Nikita Khrushchev, who was evidently transferred from the Ukraine for this purpose...
...If the foregoing is a reasonably accurate account of the bureaucratic elite's fortunes since Stalin's death, what conclusions can we draw from it...
...He acknowledged that many apparatchiks were reluctant to shift from "political" to "economic" work...
...It puts ideology and enthusiasm above rationality and efficiency...
...The conflict between the interests and goals of the state and Party machines is basic...
...Now it reached an advanced state, as Khrushchev's plans for decentralizing economic administration, which had made progress in 1954 even against Malenkov's resistence, were carried forward...
...In his political report to the Party congress in 1952, Malenkov strongly criticized Party organizations—and particularly the Moscow Party, headed by Khrushchev — for their preoccupation with economic affairs...
...This probably explains why he opposed even so necessary a measure as the decentralization of economic administration...
...The intensity of this struggle seems incompatible with the West's conception of a "ruling class" embracing both the Party and the state bureaucracy...
...2. Since provincial first secretaries were the strongest element in the Central Committee, it was necessary to keep that body without influence, just as in Stalin's day—at least until many more bureaucrats could be added to it...
...Thus, Georgi Malenkov won wide power in the Party and the state after 1939, but in 1946 he lost much of his authority over the Party apparatus...
...5. To awaken the initiative of the economic bureaucracy and to assure its support, Malenkov took measures to protect it against arbitrary police power...
...To succeed, such a strategy required forceful measures and dangerous maneuvers...
...It appeared that Stalin was about to concentrate more power in his own hands, thus upsetting the arrangements which he had made but a few months earlier at the Party congress...
...From this time the supremacy of the Central Committee, and of the Party machine which acted in its name, was signalled by placing it before the Council of Ministers in joint decrees of the Party and Government, a reversal of the previously established protocol...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
