Soviet Union, 1913-1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Regional bodies that administered industry and construction in the USSR.
The Sovnarkhozy (acronym for Sovety Narod-nogo Khozyaistva, or Councils of the National Economy) were state bodies for the regional administration of industry and construction in Russia and the USSR that existed from 1917 to 1932 and again from1957 to 1965.
The first Sovnarkhozy were created in December 1917 by the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Each of them had power over areas ranging in size from small districts up to several provinces. They were associated with local institutions such as soviets and were responsible to the Supreme Council for restoring the economy of their area after World War I and then the civil war. As the Soviet economy developed during the 1920s, control of industry was divided between the Supreme Council of the National Economy (which retained control of important strategic industries) and the Sovnarkhozy. The Sovnarkhozy were abolished in 1932 when the Supreme Council was divided into three separate industrial commissariats.
Sovnarkhozy were reintroduced during Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 effort to decentralize the economy. The USSR was divided into 105 Sovnarkhozy responsible to republican Councils of Ministers for the industry in the regions, except armaments, chemicals, and electricity, which at first remained under central control. The system had a fundamental weakness due to the lack of centralized direction and coordination, and Sovnarkhozy often pursued local interests and considered only the needs of their own region. In 1962 and 1963 attempts were made to reform the system, such as amalgamating the Sovnarkhozy and reviving the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Supreme Council of the National Economy, but in 1965 Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin abolished the Sovnarkhozy and reestablished the central industrial ministries. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KOSYGIN REFORMS; REGIONALISM
Nove, Alec. (1982). An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. Basingstoke, UK: Penguin. Prokhorev, Aleksandr M., ed. (1975). Great Soviet Encyclopedia: A Translation of the Third Edition. New York: Macmillan.
Acronym for Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov (Council of People’s Commissars), the government of the early Soviet republic.
Sovnarkom was formed by Vladimir Lenin in October 1917 as the government of the new revolutionary regime. The word commissars was used to distinguish the new institution from bourgeois governments and indicate that administration was being entrusted to commissions (commissariats), not to individuals. Initially membership included Lenin (chairperson), eleven departmental heads (commissars), and a committee of three responsible for military and naval affairs. Until 1921, under Lenin, Sovnarkom was the real government of the new Soviet republic- the key political as well as administrative body-but after 1921 political power passed increasingly to Party bodies.
With the creation of the USSR in 1924, Lenin’s Sovnarkom became a union (national) body. Alexei Rykov was chairperson of the Union Sovnarkom from 1924 to 1930, then Vyacheslav Molotov from 1930 to 1941, and Josef Stalin from 1941 to 1946, when the body was renamed the Council of Ministers. There were two types of commissariats: six unified (renamed “union-republican” under the 1936 constitution), which functioned through parallel apparatuses in identically named republican commissariats, and five all-union with plenipotentiaries in the republics directly subordinate to their commissar.
In 1930 Gosplan was upgraded to a standing commission of Sovnarkom and its chairperson
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
given membership. By 1936 the number of commissariats had risen to twenty-three, and by 1941 to forty- three. A major trend was the replacement of an overall industrial commissariat by industry-specific bodies.
The 1936 constitution granted Sovnarkom membership to chairpersons of certain state committees. It also formally recognized Sovnarkom as the government of the USSR, but deprived it of its legislative powers. By this time the institution was and remained a high-level administrative committee specializing in economic affairs. See also: COMMISSAR; COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MOLOTOV, VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH; RYKOV, ALEXEI IVANOVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
Rigby, Thomas Henry. (1979). Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917-1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Derek. (1996). Molotov and Soviet Government: Sovnarkom, 1930-41. Basingstoke, UK: CREES-Macmillan.
The Soyuz faction was a group of hardliners in USSR Congress of People’s Deputies at the end of the Soviet era. Its leaders, Viktor Alksnis and Nikolai Petrushenko, had been elected as deputies from Latvia and Kazakhstan respectively, regions with large ethnic Russian populations that conservatives were trying to mobilize (in organizations called “in-terfronts”) to counter the independence movements that had sprung up under perestroika. While nationalists and communists dominated the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies elected in March 1989, democratic forces won the upper hand in the Russian Federation Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in the spring of 1990, which chose Boris Yeltsin as its leader.
Alksinis came up with the idea of the Soyuz faction in October 1989. It was launched on February 14, 1990, but only became highly visible toward the end of the year, when conservatives mobilized to deter Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from adopting the Five-Hundred Day economic reform program. Soyuz had close ties to the
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army and security services, and its goal was to preserve the USSR. At its formal founding congress on December 1, 1990, Soyuz claimed the support of up to one quarter of the deputies in the USSR Congress. Its sister organization in the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet was Sergei Baburin’s Rossiya faction. Soyuz put increasing pressure on Gorbachev to end democratization by introducing presidential rule, suppressing disloyal political parties, and cracking down on nationalist movements in the non-Russian republics. It reportedly persuaded Gorbachev to fire Soviet Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin, who had agreed to the creation of separate interior ministries in each of the union republics. On November 11, 1990, Alksnis persuaded Gorbachev to address a meeting of one thousand military personnel elected as deputies to various soviets; he got a hostile reception. A week later, speaking in the USSR Supreme Soviet on November 17, Alksinis effectively called for Gorbachev’s overthrow. Still, no one could be sure whether Gorbachev would stick with democratization or opt for an authoritarian crackdown.
In January 1991 KGB teams tried to overthrow the independent-minded governments in Latvia and Lithuania. This drew fierce international criticism, and Gorbachev disowned it. Apparently he had given up the idea of using force to hold the USSR together, for he now began pursuing a new union treaty with the heads of the republics that made up the USSR. In response, a Soyuz conference in April 1991 called for power to be transferred from Gorbachev to Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov or Anatoly Lukyanov, chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Clearly the Soyuz group was laying the political and organizational groundwork for the coup attempt of August 1991, but the failure of the putsch sealed the fate of the USSR and of Soyuz, its most loyal defender. Alksnis was later one of the defenders of the anti-Yeltsin parliament in the violent confrontation of October 1993. Interviewed in 2002, he insisted that the USSR could have been saved if Gorbachev had acted more resolutely and not been “afraid of his own shadow.” See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; DEMOCRATIZATION; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH
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