The re-establishment of the ministries, while a cause for rejoicing among many bureaucrats, also entailed the re-emergence of all the problems that had prompted the Khrushchev reform. A book by relatives and friends of Kosygin, who was the boss of the economy and intent on efficiency, affords us some idea of his scathing verdict.[2] Kosygin complained bitterly about the fact that so many things reached the Council of Ministers when they should have been resolved lower down by the numerous administrative bodies that existed to deal with them: ‘Why should the government have to concern itself with the quality of the sand being supplied to the glass industry and other industrial branches? There are ministries and a state standards agency: why don’t they meet and resolve the issue?’ The State Construction Agency – a powerful body – came to see Kosygin to discuss its new housing designs, but these fell exclusively within its competence. All this, argues the author of the relevant chapter, attested to the inefficiency of numerous state agencies. Kosygin was unsparing in his criticism of them and sought to improve their functioning. One day, when the Finance Minister Garbuzov was talking to him about the expansion of the state apparatus, its multiple hierarchies, and the number of redundant departments, Kosygin answered him thus:
It’s true, the productivity of our apparatus is very low. Most people don’t do enough work and have no idea what they are going to do the following day. We’ve just abolished the Committee for Cultural Links with Foreign Countries. Did anyone notice? Nobody – anyway, I didn’t. We are producing tons of paper, but in practical terms we actually do very little. With a better organization of work, we could easily cut the number of officials by half.
There is an audible note of despair here. Kosygin depicts a system which, at the level immediately below the summit, is not doing much and does not really care. For understandable historical reasons, the system had been constructed ‘from the top down’. But it remained stuck in this mould to the very end. The reckless interlude opened by Khrushchev was a legitimate attempt to alter this modus operandi, but the former system returned like a shot. In essence, the bureaucratic system remained the same; it was just temporarily split into local replicas of the ‘big brother’.
Did Kosygin have a clear idea of why things were going so wrong? Had he pondered the deeper causes of the phenomenon? Without access to his papers, it is impossible to say for sure. However, a provisional response is perhaps hinted at by the reform of the ‘economic mechanism’, officially launched in 1965, which carries his name. This was the largest economic reform since the war and it was initiated cautiously, without official fanfare. Its main objective was to reduce the burden of central planning indicators – a tentacular system that was difficult to coordinate – and introduce new incentives from below into the system, in particular by making funds available to reward managers and workers for good results or technological innovation. The method was first of all experimented with in a limited number of factories. Then, when it yielded encouraging results, it was extended to a larger number of enterprises and branches. However, it rapidly ran into obstacles that could only have been overcome by taking other measures to bolster the break with existing structures. These would have opened the way for a ‘de-bureaucratization’ and altered the relationship between the plan’s indicators (a veritable straitjacket) and material incentives inside production units and among consumers. Conservative critics were right when they said that that would have amounted to transforming the system beyond recognition. This was what was required. But the political dynamic needed to push it through was lacking. Kosygin’s opponents managed to smother the reform, without even having to proclaim it openly.
These ‘opponents’ comprised a coalition or, more precisely, a bloc of the upper echelons of the state and party bureaucracy. The term nomenklatura will serve to denote them here. They were all party members and some simultaneously occupied a high administrative position and a seat on the Central Committee. But there are good reasons for distinguishing between administrative cadres and party apparatchiks, and studying them separately. In Part One, we saw that during and after the war the two bureaucracies regarded themselves as distinct, competing categories, vying for power over one another. One of Khrushchev’s first professed objectives had been to restore the preeminence of the party – in the first instance, of its apparatus – in order to make it an instrument of his own power. That is why it is worth returning to some key features of this apparatus.
THE PARTY APPARATUS
Some figures are a basis to start from.[3] On 1 October 1949 there were 15,436 party committees (or organizations) in the whole country. Excluding the Central Committee’s own administration, full-time (i.e. remunerated) apparatchiks numbered 138,961, of whom 113,002 were ‘political officials’ and 25,959 ‘technicians’. We possess data on the staffs of local party bodies for the period 1940 – 1 November 1955, broken down into two categories (political officials and technicians), but also according to the position of the organization in the country’s administrative structure (republics, regions, districts, subdistricts, and workplaces). Here are some annual totals for 1 January of each year.
| - | Political | Technical |
|---|---|---|
| 1940 | 116,931 | 37,806 |
| 1947 | 131,809 | 27,352 |
| 1950 | 113,313 | 26,100 |
| 1951 | 115,809 | 26,810 |
| 1952 | 119,541 | 27,517 |
| 1953 | 125,005 | 28,710 |
| 1954 | 131,479 | 28,021 |
| 1955 | 142,518 | 27,830 |
| 1955* | 143,768 | 27,719 |
2
T. I. Fetisov, sost.,