Konstantin Stanislavsky. In 1916-1918 Kasian Goleizovsky, the great Constructivist balletmaster of the 1920s, directed performances.
Like most visionaries ahead of their time in the Soviet Union, however, Baliev was arrested. When released in 1919 after five days of confinement, he fled to Paris with the renamed Chauve-Souris (“bat” in French), which toured Europe and the United States extensively. In 1922 the Baliev Company moved to New York, where Baliev entertained enthusiastic audiences until his death in 1936. Baliev and the “Bat” inspired many imitations, most notably the “Blue Bird” (Der Blaue Vogel), founded in Berlin by the actor Yasha Yuzhny in 1920. See also: CIRCUS; FOLK MUSIC; STANISLAVSKY, KONSTAN-TIN; THEATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jelavich, Peter. (1993). Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lareau, Alan. (1995). The Wild Stage: Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Russell, Robert, and Barratt, Andrew. (1990). Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Segel, Harold. (1987). Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich. New York: Columbia University Press. Segel, Harold. (1993). The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Senelick, Lawrence. (1993). Cabaret Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Often called the Council of Ministers, this body was convened by Alexander II in 1857 to coordinate legislative proposals from individual ministers. It was chaired by the tsar himself and met irregularly thereafter to consider various of Alexander II’s “Great Reforms.” In 1881, he submitted to it Count Loris-Melikov’s plan for semiconstitutional government, but revolutionaries assassinated the tsar before action could be taken. His successor, Alexander III, determined to reestablish full autocratic rule, did not convene the council, and it played no significant role in the early years of Nicholas II’s reign.
Early in the Revolution of 1905 reformers persuaded Nicholas II to revive the Council of Ministers. From February to August 1905 it worked on various projects for administrative and constitutional change. On October 19, two days after publication of the October Manifesto, an imperial decree established a much revamped Council of Ministers, which was structured along lines recommended by Count Sergei Witte, principal architect of the manifesto and its accompanying reforms. The tsar retained the right to name ministers of war, the navy,
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foreign affairs, and the imperial court, but a new council chairman appointed, subject to the tsar’s approval, the remaining ministers and was empowered to coordinate and supervise the activities of all ministries. The reorganized council was to meet regularly and to review all legislative proposals before their submission to the proposed Duma. Although it resembled a Western-style cabinet in some respects, the new Council of Ministers was not responsible to the about-to-be-formed legislative body and remained heavily dependent on the tsar’s support.
Moreover, Count Witte, as council chairman or prime minister, was unable to implement fully the new structure. Several ministers continued to report directly to the tsar. Nevertheless, the council survived Witte’s dismissal by Nicholas II in spring 1906, and its power was soon broadened to include consideration of legislation when the Duma was not in session. The Council of Ministers remained the chief executive organ under the tsar until his overthrow in the February Revolution of 1917. See also: ALEXANDER II; ALEXANDER III; GREAT REFORMS; NICHOLAS II; WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mehlinger, Howard, and Thompson, John M. (1972). Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yaney, George L. (1973). The Systematization of Russian Government. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
The Cabinet of Ministers was the institutional successor to the Council of Ministers, the chief policy-making body of the Soviet government. It existed for only a brief period during the chaotic final year of Communist rule.
In the late Soviet period, the Council of Ministers had grown into an unwieldy executive body with well over one hundred members, who sat atop a bureaucratic phalanx of government agencies. Moreover, the Council of Ministers, having voted to reject the Five-Hundred Day Plan, had emerged as a political obstacle to Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the centrally planned economy. In October 1990, the revitalized Supreme Soviet granted President Mikhail Gorbachev extra legislative powers to undertake a transition to a market economy. In November 1990, as part of a larger package of political institutional reforms, the Council of Ministers was dissolved by order of the Supreme Soviet, and the Cabinet of Ministers was created in its place. The Cabinet of Ministers was smaller than its predecessor and more focused on economic policy. The body was directly subordinate to the president, who nominated its chairman and initiated legislation with the consent of the Supreme Soviet. The first and only chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers was Valentin Pavlov, a politically conservative former finance minister.
As events turned radical in 1991, the Cabinet of Ministers began to act independently from President Gorbachev in an effort to stabilize and secure the Soviet regime. In March, the cabinet issued a ban on public demonstrations in Moscow; this order was promptly defied by the Russian democratic movement. In the summer, the Cabinet of Ministers became entangled in a power struggle with President Gorbachev over control of the economic policy agenda. Finally, Prime Minister Pavlov and the cabinet allied with the ill-fated August coup. In response, Russian President Boris Yeltsin demanded the dismissal of the mutinous ministers. In September, Gorbachev was forced to comply and sacked his entire government. The Cabinet of Ministers was replaced by an interim body, the Inter-Republican Economic Committee, which itself ceased to exist following the Soviet collapse in December 1991. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PAVLOV, VALENTIN SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CADETS See CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
The term cadres policy refers to the selection and training of key CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) personnel. Its importance is indicated by the famous phrase used by Stalin in 1935,
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“Cadres decide everything.” Generally speaking, cadres were selected in theory according to their degree of loyalty to the CPSU and their efficiency in performing the tasks assigned to them. The appointment of cadres at a senior level in the CPSU hierarchy was made or confirmed by the cadres department of the appropriate Party committee. Scholars have raised questions about the degree to which the cadres selected at any given time by the Soviet leadership were “representative” of the population as a whole or of the constituency that they represented. Other issues raised include the extent to which cadres were adequately trained or had the appropriate expertise. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the mid-1980s, accusations were being made that many key Party members, who constituted the leadership at all levels within the CPSU structure, had become corrupt during Leonid Brezhnev’s era of stagnation. Hence a new cadres policy was necessary in order to weed out the careerists and replace them with others worthy of acting as a genuine cadre to ensure that the interests of the Party, society, and the people coincided. This led to widespread anti-corruption campaigns against the Party from 1986 onward throughout the former USSR. Famous examples include the arrest of seven Uzbek regional first secretaries in March
