Committee of 319 full and 151 candidate mem-
bers meeting normally every six months. The
Central Committee also ‘elected’ the Secretariat,
whose head was the second secretary, deputy to
the general secretary. The Secretariat of eleven
members controlled twenty departments which
supervised 109 government ministries. A network
of republican, regional, city, town and district
committees spanned the Soviet Union, depend-
ent on the Central Committee’s Secretariat
bureaucracy of some 3,000 employees.
It is important to note that until 1985 the
party supervised the ministries, which were also
responsible to a prime minister and government
ministers. Thus there was dual control of min-
istries by the government and the party, suppos-
edly coordinated by the general secretary. The
general secretary was also chairman of the USSR
parliament, the USSR Supreme Soviet, which was
little more than a ceremonial body, listening
annually to the general secretary and dutifully
applauding all he said. Carbon-copy supreme
soviets and soviets fanned out in republics, cities,
towns and districts.
This structure was supplemented by other bod-
ies. At irregular occasions a conference of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union could be
called; the eighteenth such conference had been
convened in 1941; Gorbachev used the nine-
teenth, called in 1988, to make far-reaching
changes to party structures. Finally, it was also
possible to call a congress of the CPSU, which also
met irregularly when the general secretary wished
to call one. Gorbachev used two such congresses,
the twenty-seventh in 1986 and the twenty-eighth
in 1990, as springboards for his reforms.
During his first years of power, Gorbachev
encouraged pressure from below to win support
for his reforms and to overcome party inertia and
opposition. But here he trod a thin line between
the imperatives of keeping popular protest under
control and of reassuring the party leadership that
he was not dismantling the Soviet communist
system. Economic change necessitated a reform of
the party itself, a reform of the old power struc-
tures, the KGB, the army and the nomenklatura
- the nomenklaturabeing the means by which the
party elite controlled the key positions in the
administration, the judiciary, industry, agriculture
and education.
Gorbachev’s major effort at ‘democratic’ re-
form was to inject some grass-roots participation
in the filling of the lower nomenklaturavacancies.
This is what he meant by the democratisation of
the Soviet state. But from the start it was ques-
tionable whether the party could ever regain the
respect of the people, having for decades been a
virtually autonomous self-appointed group within
the state whose senior functionaries enjoyed many
privileges denied to the rest.
During Gorbachev’s first five years a plethora
of meetings, conferences and congresses took
place, their open debates televised for the Russian
people in an unprecedented attempt to mobilise
and educate public opinion. Gorbachev set the
pace in speeches that were widely reported in
- In the Central Committee, which had
endorsed him as general secretary, he had to
move cautiously: it was crucial for him to build
up support there and in the Politburo. In his first
year he replaced two-thirds of the key leaders at
the top and continued to make changes in later
years. But this did not remove all opposition to
his views, as the dramatic events of August 1991
were to show. At the April 1985 meeting of the
Central Committee, the blueprint of perestroika
was agreed and some practical reforms under-
taken. In an attempt to make the central min-
istries more efficient, rival departments were
eliminated: in agriculture six separate ministries
were combined into one super-ministry with
20,000 staff cuts; two other super-ministries were
created in the key areas of machine-building and
computers. Unfortunately the ministries them-
selves were equipped with computers whose input
and output remained flawed – they could not
cope with the complexities of the economy.
On 25 February 1986, the Twenty-Seventh
Congress of the Communist Party opened in
Moscow. The streets were festooned with slogans,
‘The Party and the People Are One’, which was
certainly not true. After its ten-day session the
Congress accepted Gorbachev’s blueprint for half-
hearted reform of the socialist economy, but
concrete reforms of the party were largely
blocked. Another failure was an attempt to revive
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