It is now time for us to turn once again to those who actually ran (we have not as yet said ‘owned’) the economic branches and services. It is impossible to tackle any aspect of Soviet society, economy and politics without constantly running into the administrative class, whether state bureaucrats, party apparatchiks, or both in their intricate inter-relations. We are therefore going to revert to this phenomenon, starting out from the findings of the Commission for the Elimination of Waste,* whose remit extended to the bureaucracy.
The history of state and party institutions is full of constant structuring and restructuring: structures were set up, split, abolished, re-established. By contrast, the last fifteen years of the regime witnessed great stability in this respect. Khrushchev’s disbanding of more than one hundred industrial ministries at the stroke of a pen was the most spectacular anti-bureaucratic initiative – the only one on such a scale. And it is worth repeating that they were all reconstituted in 1965. The institutional problem we are referring to here – a systemic feature in itself- consisted in a kind of incessant tinkering, a form of ‘bureaucratic neurosis’ that the system was cured of only by catching another illness. The administration possessed a lot of weight, became highly influential, and sought to curb the Politburo’s despotic power. The bureaucratic neurosis was a way of evading real reform, on the basis of the idea – dear to Stalin – that all that was needed was to ‘correct’ the administrators.
All this requires some explanation. Tracking the vagaries of the administrative system is no easy task.1 Despite having been a prime mover in Soviet history, the bureaucracy (and its administrative networks) has been insufficiently examined. Its study takes us to the very heart of the system, revealing that the bureaucracy which ran the state virtually came to own it. Changes in its structure, self-image and status must be examined not only in the framework of administrative history, but also in a political optic, contrary to the widespread view that the chief political features of the system were embodied in the party. Under Stalin, the bureaucracy was already an indispensable co-ruler, but unstable and fragile on account of the relative youth of its structures and the novelty of its tasks. Moreover, its members were ‘suspect’ because Stalin understood and feared its potential for consolidating itself and its thirst for power. The situation changed profoundly in the post-Stalin period: initially still deeply marked by the country’s plebeian and rural traditions, during the 1950s and ’60s the bureaucracy became a fully urban phenomenon in a society that was itself now urbanized. In its upper echelons, it was now a solidly established and firmly entrenched power. This emancipation of the bureaucracy was one of the key features of the whole post-Stalinist period. The state and party bureaucracy put an end to the arbitrary practices that had made its situation so precarious under Stalin. Stalinism was thereby replaced by a fully bureaucratic model that rapidly acquired a quasi-monopoly over all strategic positions of power.
Here we must recall the speed of social change in the 1950s and ’60s and the consequent drastic alteration of the socio-historical landscape. The construction of a still fragile bureaucracy under Stalin, and its consolidation as a monopolistic power structure in the years immediately after his death, occurred in a primarily agrarian society. Its monopolistic position in the state and entrenchment in power preceded the definitive transition to an urban civilization. An old characteristic of Russian history, pointed out by Miliukov and reformulated by Trotsky, was once again replicated here: the establishment of a strong state preceded the development of society and enabled the former to dominate the latter. But the Soviet era also witnessed the converse: successive waves of social development on a grand scale generated new systemic characteristics and a whole series of complex phenomena, which we are seeking to untangle in this book.
The bureaucratic phenomenon would unquestionably become more palpable if we had some idea of its size, internal structure and power. We already know that ascertaining the precise number of people employed by the state and other administrative agencies is not straightforward, since much depended on the criteria used by those who counted them – in particular, the Central Statistical Office. The best data are probably those produced by the census of administrative agencies conducted in 1970. Just reading this material and enumerating its results discloses the complex, tentacular character of the phenomenon. Here we shall simply offer a brief synthesis.
The census focused on the administrative personnel of all state institutions and supplied a breakdown between the various important administrative units, enterprises and organizations. Each republican administration was presented separately, as was local government. This abundance of statistics is mentioned only to remind readers that it does exist.
The Central Statistical Office’s computing centre explained that on this occasion it had included everyone not directly engaged in productive activity. Where there was ambiguity, they had split the difference: for example, an engineer working on the shop floor was not regarded as a member of the administrative personnel; but an engineer who worked in the factory’s administrative office was – unless his job was planning and design work. Auxiliary and service staff were included, albeit in a separate category. Guards were a separate category again, probably because they were better paid than auxiliary staff in the strict sense.
On 15 September 1970 – the date of the census – the total administrative apparatus consisted of some 13,874,200 employees, or 15 per cent of the working population (workers and employees). Top managers (rukovoditeli) and their deputies numbered 4,143,400 (this encompassed all institutions at central, republican and regional levels). The next most important category was that of ‘chief specialists’ and their deputies, containing all the engineers, technicians, agronomists and so on, working in administration: some 2,080,400. Then came engineer-economists, economists and planners: 543,400. The rest were distributed between accountants, statisticians, computer scientists, office employees and auxiliary staff.
One particular type of institution was singled out for separate treatment – namely, central ministries and their equivalents in the republics, as well as the other major agencies of comparable status and importance (state committees). The organizations under them employed the bulk of the country’s working population – 49,708,377 workers and employees. Administering all these workers were 7,996,116 officials, of whom 2,539,797 belonged to the top managerial category. In other words, one in three of them was a ‘boss’.2
Above this layer we find the very senior officials – some hundreds of people in charge of gigantic institutions. From another source we learn that around 1977 there were 32 USSR-level ministries (25 of them industrial) and 30 Union ministries that had equivalents at republican level (10 of them industrial).3 To these must be added some 500 institutions that were referred to as ‘ministries’, but which were government agencies in the ‘autonomous’ republics – something important for the study of local elites, but not the topmost stratum.
Before the 1970 census, the figure of 8 million was generally given for the number of employees in state administration, 2.5 million of whom were described as nachal’niki (‘heads’). With the census, the picture changed to a more realistic total of 13 million, with some 4 million nachal’niki. The statisticians had rightly separated out another category: the members of the central ministerial core, who constituted the real ruling stratum. It involved six Union-level state committees (Science and Technology, International Trade, Meteorology, etc.), twelve committees with dual competence (Union and republics), and agencies like the KGB, Gosplan, the Central Statistical Office, the Finance Ministry, and so on. The officials who headed these institutions were all members of the central government.
To this hard core, composed of the heads of some eighty major government institutions, we must add the members of the Politburo, the heads of the party apparatus (at central and republican levels), and party secretaries in the regions and the capitals – a select group of some 1,000 people (of whom slightly fewer than half were Central Committee members). All of these were top players, mindful of the interests of the 2.5 million people who underpinned them. If the ‘ruling elite’ is what we are interested in, then the first figure (1,000) is the relevant one; but if the ‘ruling class’ is the subject of our study, then the second (2,500,000) is appropriate. A number of intellectuals, scientists and artists belonged here – some in the narrower circle, most in the wider one. But this is beyond the scope of our immediate concerns.
When wading through the mass of files and documents relating to the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat, one is struck by the intensity of the contacts between state bureaucrats and party bureaucrats within each apparatus. A factory manager, who might also be a bureaucrat in the formal as well as the pejorative sense, was in daily contact with people from other social groups – workers and technicians. By contrast, top leaders encountered workers only during official visits; typically, they made a speech and the workers applauded. The poverty of such contacts is normal for rulers, as is the fact that their milieu mainly consists of bureaucrats and that the whole politico-administrative process unfolds within it. Inside the party apparatus itself, from the Politburo to party cells, personnel issues took up a lot of time, together with minor economic and administrative details. General issues were reserved for a very small number of figures. Such was the environment and activity in which Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev were immersed; and this was what shaped them. An in-depth knowledge of the nuts and bolts was a sign of their mastery, and they exhibited it to impress their audience or interlocutors.
On the other hand, the capacity to deal with major problems – normally a leader’s main task – was utterly lacking in most of them. They devoted most of their time to resolving budgetary and salary issues, and signing the tens of thousands of decrees drafted by various agencies. Such activities pertain not to the remit of political leadership in the proper sense, but to that of a pernickety inspector who deludes himself that he is the master of the situation (when real mastery consists in a profound grasp of broader realities). Their subsidiary skills (shrewdness, cunning, the ability to construct a clientele) mainly served their personal power games. Behind them and this ‘passion for control’, which consumed their best efforts and skills, we can discern the waning of their political power and their highly coveted ability to control all the levers. We may note in passing that in 1966 a very powerful state control agency, whose running costs outstripped those of the Health and Culture ministries combined, was disbanded by Brezhnev simply to counter the influence of its highly ambitious head, Shelepin.
The leaders’ formation by their milieu was closely bound up with the Soviet principle that the national economy was state property. This was the source of the bureaucracy’s monopolistic power and of the only type of leadership such a state was capable of producing.
The administrative strata themselves underwent changes as a result of the country’s ongoing urbanization. Their educational level, professionalism, living standards and cultural habits were so many factors that necessarily impacted on intra- and inter-bureaucratic functioning. Even if the impression persisted that the general-secretary was absolute master (full stop!), the system was no longer a genuine autocracy. The general-secretary could dominate the party apparatus (though he was also heavily dependent on it), but the actual exercise of power and policy implementation took the form, as has been said, of extended bargaining between different government agencies. The latter were adept at manipulating the formal and informal lines of authority. Their rights, official and unofficial, went on expanding, to the point where their objections, counter-proposals and demands had become a component of political and administrative procedure, acquiring a quasi-constitutional status that we know too little about. For example, we have already seen that the centre was incapable of compelling the ministries to comply with planning procedures. In numerous respects, they acted exclusively in accordance with their own interests.
Given that nothing could be done without the ministries and other such agencies, events, or, more precisely, the powerful contradictory trends that were at work, forced the system’s rulers to adapt not only to changing social realities, but also to the ‘sociology’ of the bureaucracy itself. Various trends characteristic of the bureaucratic universe can be identified as ‘system-making’. After all, the state and its leading administrative personnel had become almost indistinguishable.
The formation of the complex structures of this stratum is a crucial phenomenon. As we have seen, its numbers exceeded 2 million in 1970, to restrict ourselves to the most sensitive posts. Their power allowed them to dictate acceptance of their insatiable drive for higher living standards, more perks, ever more power, and also toleration of a degree of corruption. They were the mainstay of the system. Hence another trend can be discerned, leading to the de facto amalgamation of these upper echelons of the state and party to form a single power complex. The most important ministers were members of the Central Committee, and some (KGB, Foreign Affairs, Defence) had a seat in the Politburo. Paradoxically, what facilitated this amalgamation was the procedures of the nomenklatura. Restored after the war to put the administrative monster in its place, it rapidly revealed its other side, which pointed in the opposite direction. If the whole elite was composed of ‘nomenklaturists’ – all of them high-ranking officials, but often also high-ranking party functionaries – the question of who actually controlled whom is not without point. Nomenklatura appointees and the apparatuses under them were running the state: this became the overarching reality of the Soviet polity.
In these circumstances, what exactly was the role of the party or, more precisely, of its leadership? Evidently, it was a powerful apparatus that relied on the governmental administrative machinery to rule the country. But the impression that the former controlled the latter, because the bureaucracy was its nomenklatura, is misleading. The Politburo and its apparatus were also an administration and, by this token, formed part of a much larger bureaucracy. The state administration had employees and workers; the party had employees and members. To insist that these members controlled nothing would be superfluous. Since this ‘party’ possessed some curious features, it is appropriate to put quotation marks around the term.
However paradoxical at first sight, we are going to explore the hypothesis that the ‘ruling party’ did not in fact hold power. This seems surreal, but Soviet history is replete with myths and shams, misnomers and deliria. Thus, such resounding slogans as ‘collectivization’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘communism’, ‘democratic centralism’, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and ‘vanguard’ had little to do with reality, at least most of the time.
As the years passed, the regime’s initial orientation towards the working and peasant classes and masses gave way to a different orientation – towards the state administration, its ‘organs’, and the various categories of ‘officials’. This all-encompassing process of ‘statization’, whereby the state’s centrality became absolute, culminated in a cult of the state, which represented the mindset of the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. In private discussions, but also in public, we find top party officials declaring that government ministries deal only with sectoral matters, whereas the party alone concerns itself with the higher interests of the state. Obviously they were responding to ministerial circles, which asserted precisely the opposite. This enables us better to appreciate what ‘statism’ meant. Party officials were not claiming that they alone were capable of representing society’s interests: they were competing with other bureaucrats to be the better spokesmen for the state and seeking to assert their primacy in the state.
In the 1930s, the organization calling itself the ‘party’ had already lost its political character; it had been transformed into an administrative network, wherein a hierarchy ruled a rank and file. During the next step, even this administrative creature was deprived of any power: under Stalin, it made no sense to speak of a party in power, given that its institutions did not function, no one asked its members for their views, and the rare occasional congress was just one long clapping session.
It is true that Khrushchev restored power over the party and state to the party’s summit (the Central Committee) and its apparatus. However, this made no difference to various key characteristics: rank-and-file members still had no political rights and the party remained a ruling hierarchy, devoid of any real political life. Under Stalin, the party had lost power to the supreme leader; after Khrushchev, it kept losing power to the state machine, which ended up absorbing its ruling network, making it into its own spokesman and representative – and this time for good. The process of ‘statization’ which was so important in the Soviet phenomenon, and probably its main characteristic when it came to the political system, reached its final stage. When the system entered into a prolonged phase of ‘stagnation’, the party, unable to do anything, powerless to impose far-reaching measures on ministries and other agencies, foundered along with everything else.
We can already formulate some initial conclusions: the ‘party’ was not actually always in power; and at a certain moment, it stopped being a political party and became one agency among others – the linchpin of an administration. This is why it is appropriate to put the term ‘party’ in quotation marks. We can even go so far as to venture that the ‘one-party’ system, on which so much ink has been spilt, eventually became a ‘no-party’ system. It may well be that if the USSR had possessed a genuine party, engaged in political life and capable of political leadership, it might have escaped its sorry fate and the country been spared a monumental crisis. However, after so many years and waves of historical change, this political structure, based on a powerful apparatus and members deprived of rights, was moth-eaten. No wonder it collapsed so easily, without any need for a strong jolt or storm.
What were the factors and circumstances that led the party system to a quasi-phantom existence, despite the awe inspired, then and now, by the Staraia Ploshchad? It was the transformation of the party into an apparatus – an old phenomenon – that entailed its de facto absorption by and into the bureaucratic realities of the state. The process started when the party became directly immersed in economic and other minutiae that were supposed to be handled by government ministries. Ministerial staff justly sensed that the party was duplicating their work, rather than concentrating on its own. The little-known conflict between Brezhnev and Kosygin over who should represent the country abroad is a good illustration of the problem.
The party’s ‘identity crisis’ – a formula used in Part One to describe the reformist endeavours of 1946–8 – can now be further deciphered. The apparatus had been restructured in 1946 with a view to its rediscovering its political identity by withdrawing from direct supervision of economic life. The argument was that the ministries ‘were buying the apparatchiks’, the ‘party had lost power’, and it must revert to its proper functions if it wanted to recover its power. Two years later, however, it was once again restructured for the converse reasons: so that it could interfere in economic affairs and ‘control’ them. The contradiction was the following: when the party concerned itself with politics, it lost control of the economy and bureaucracy; when it was fully engaged in controlling the economy, and meddled directly with what the ministries were doing and the way they were doing it, it lost its specific functions – even any sense of what they were. The second logic prevailed, and it allowed the party’s de facto absorption by the bureaucratic colossus.
It is worth remembering that Lenin and Trotsky (the latter in a letter to the Politburo just before the Eleventh Congress) had raised this problem, and warned Bolshevik leaders that direct meddling in the affairs of economic agencies (as opposed to ruling through them) would encourage the bureaucratization of the party, as well as increasing irresponsibility on the part of the administration. Trotsky argued that just as they had declared that the trade unions should not engage in managing the economy, but should remain trade unions, so the party should remain a party. But things did not turn out that way, prompting Bukharin 1928 to lament a virtual fait accompli: ‘The party and state apparatuses have merged and it’s a calamity.’ Following Stalin’s death, this was to lead to a further deepening of this trend.
Growing labour shortages elicited an almost ‘classical’ market response. Labour is a commodity and as the state – the principal employer – became more and more dependent on it (and with forced labour no longer an option), it had to confront these shortages in various ways. As a result of the interaction of the factors involved, a different climate and new patterns emerged in labour relations. But this was insufficient to cure the illness ravaging the state economy. The regime brought in more and more measures in response to the pressures and aspirations of different social strata. However, despite the urgent recommendations impressed on it by the Anti-Waste Commission, the State Control Commission, and many other agencies, the regime failed to secure an increase in labour productivity, to prevent enterprises accumulating reserve stocks of labour and raw materials, and to stimulate the sluggish rate of technological innovation. The country’s rulers faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they were desperately in need of labour and had to court the labour force. On the other, they also had to court the administrative bodies that managed the labour force. This was not an easy game to play. A ‘consensual’ modus operandi was now unavoidable; and bargaining with the ministries became the rule. As is always the case with bureaucracies, however, this finally amounted to sharing power with them. There was no such power-sharing with labour, although here too we could point – as we did – to many concessions, improvements and extentions of rights (the same was true for other interests and social groups). This new way of conducting affairs of state, consisting in taking account of all sorts of social pressures and responding to them, is never registered by theorists of ‘totalitarianism’, for whom dependency remained total and unilateral. (In this instance, one can sympathize with their predicament: by definition, a semi-totalitarian regime is as impossible as a half-pregnant woman.)
Yet this was the major novelty of the post-Stalinist period and certainly contributed to the regime’s vitality in the 1960s. But the fact that the bureaucracy which managed the state obtained (or, more precisely, extracted) more than others, and reached an entente cordiale with the political leadership, was difficult to reconcile with satisfying the interests of workers and other social strata. Any hopes of maintaining social peace and developing the country were frustrated by a sluggish, wasteful economy. Bureaucratic planning did succeed in modernizing the economy and the ‘deal’ made with the bureaucracy enhanced its power, but did not improve its performance. Informal agreements with the bureaucrats did not constitute a policy; they amounted to a drift in a direction that aggravated the system’s ailments.
Readers are now well aware of the system’s malfunctioning and presumably keen to know what the Anti-Waste Commission proposed by way of remedies for government ministries and other agencies. For some conservatives, the indicated road was clear: the solution consisted in greater discipline – ‘law and order’, as they say in other political contexts. But this was a delusion.
From the outset, the history of state administration had been dominated by the Politburo’s endless battles to contain (and even reduce) its expansion and improve its efficiency. The Anti-Waste Commission, which had redefined its function from ‘eliminating waste’ to the rather less offensive formula of ‘saving state resources’, met with representatives of the central and republican ministries to prepare a draft proposal, taking account of the mass of data and information it had gathered on each and every branch. Its attempt to find ways of making savings in expenditure on state administration was seemingly rather courageous. Reducing the proliferating cohorts of the bureaucracy had hitherto seemed utterly impossible, given that each administrative machine was run by one of the most powerful figures in the regime. Persuading them to make cuts would be no easy matter. Moreover, some members of the Anti-Waste Commission (its membership is listed in footnote 4 below) themselves ran sizeable administrative departments.
N. Rogovsky, a noted expert and head of Gosplan’s labour department, reported on the discussions that took place during the Commission’s sessions, and they certainly involved quite a battle.4 The Commission initially proposed to reduce administrative costs by 1,015 million roubles, but after some long and hard bargaining agreed to the lower figure of 905.3 million. For their part, the central and republican ministries would accept no more than 644 million. Detailed discussions on expenditure and staffing were conducted with each ministry separately and the same pattern invariably emerged: in each instance, the Anti-Waste Commission made concessions on the requisite cuts, while the other side gave little or nothing. Rogovsky informed the government that the majority of central ministries and republics opposed any change, preferring to leave things as they were.
As regards the number of state employees – another sticking point – the Anti-Waste Commission wanted to abolish 512,700 posts – a sizeable chunk of the total administrative workforce projected in the 1967 plan – which would have saved 590 million roubles on wages. Needless to say, the ministries affected would not hear of it.
In the defence of budgetary cuts that he addressed to the government, Rogovsky stressed one of the biggest obstacles faced by the Soviet economy: the problem of finding a balance between the population’s income and the supply of consumer goods. Reducing administrative costs would help. It is difficult not to register a certain perplexity here: eliminating half a million jobs would certainly reduce the sum total of monetary incomes, but those who lost their jobs would swell the ranks of the poor.
What actually happened? Some job cutting did occur here and there, but most of the officials affected found administrative work elsewhere or even in the same ministry. The hope entertained by some – that officials made redundant would turn to manual jobs (where there were real shortages, especially in remote regions) – was a pipe dream.
Another valuable source on the bureaucratic universe derives from the State Control Committee, which surveyed it in 1966 and made its contribution to Baibakov’s Anti-Waste Commission. It also offered a series of suggestions as to how to reduce state administrative costs. We may start with a proposal that was hidden among various other items: abolition of the benefits offered to certain categories of top officials, which would of course have produced significant savings. The State Control Committee drew up a list of the various perks that officials awarded themselves, calculated in roubles (millions of roubles, naturally) for each category of ‘service’. The list is revealing. Officials and departmental heads received a so-called ‘healthy diet’ allowance, as well as an allowance (equivalent to a month’s salary) for ‘social needs’, with vouchers for stays in sanatoriums and rest homes at reduced prices. They had at their disposal dachas, whose maintenance and repair were carried out at government expense. The State Control Committee proposed abolishing all these benefits and some even more outrageous ones enjoyed by senior military officers and their families. It was alarmed by the fact that administrative personnel had increased by 24 per cent in the last five years, bringing their total to more than 7 million (let us recall that this number referred to the hard core of the ministerial network) and the overall wage bill to 13 billion roubles. This rate of growth surpassed that of employment in general and curbing it would easily save a billion roubles.
An especially profligate branch when it came to staffing was the network of various supply agencies maintained by most ministries. The State Control Committee offered some examples, which should not be neglected if we wish to grasp Soviet realities.
Without counting those employed in stores and canteens, these departments and directorates for ‘supplying workers’ employed 36,700 people, receiving 40 million roubles a year. They could often have been closed down, and the stores and canteens directly supplied by the state’s own commercial network.
The Central Committee and Council of Ministers decreed that the problem of ‘workers’ supply’ should be addressed by a single unified system, which was already in the process of being constructed, in the hope that it would be less expensive and more efficient. But a number of ministries refused to rely on other organizations and preferred to retain their own supply channels for food, raw materials and machines, continuing to create and maintain depots and offices for supplies and marketing. Some of them bought materials and products of general industrial use from enterprises and marketed them through their own networks in other regions or republics. To take one example: the Ministry of Chemical Industry was shipping all manner of equipment and semi-finished products from its Sverdlovsk marketing office to Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Donetsk, even though such articles were available there in the local warehouses of the bodies responsible for supplies. This system, which employed many thousands of superfluous workers and issued in such irrationality, was an endless source of good jokes (we do not need the archives to know them).
We shall return to these issues of supply and marketing (snaby-sbyty),* in connection with one of their unforeseen consequences. First, however, let us turn to further examples of the ‘excesses’ indulged in by the ranks of the bureaucracy, and condemned as such by the State Control Committee. Among them were the ‘official trips’ (komandirovki) to Moscow – a million a year – for seminars or conferences, or even (in 50 per cent of cases) in the absence of any reason or invitation, which cost the state some 600 million roubles a year. The State Control Committee proposed to reduce the number of such trips by 30 per cent (which once again would not be easy, given that going to Moscow and enjoying its pleasures was one of the most sought-after perks). Another practice that had assumed unacceptable proportions was sending all sorts of intermediaries (khodatye i tolkachi) to finalize deals and find materials. In general, the State Control Committee deplored the fact that the measures and efforts undertaken to reduce bureaucratic ‘mobility’ had yielded no results.5
As we have seen, administrative officials liked to offer themselves as many services and perks at the state’s expense as they could extract. They also liked to party. Even in the postwar days of penury, high-ranking officials had had a good time. But in the 1960s the libations were more lavish and the parties rowdier! No one even tried to claim that they had anything to do with serving the common weal. The pile of empty bottles consumed by civil servants at state expense spoke for itself The government regularly received indignant letters condemning this lifestyle and became seriously alarmed about it. A countrywide campaign was launched against illegal expenditure of state resources on banquets and receptions, and large-scale investigations undertaken, which revealed the extent of the problem. All kinds of occasions were excuses for banquets – anniversaries, jubilees, conferences, visits by dignitaries – during which vodka, cognac and wine were served in generous quantities. Finance and control agencies had plenty of material on these goings-on; they knew perfectly well that managers and their accountants were burying such expenses as ‘production outlays’ and that the ministries and senior officials were turning a blind eye to it. The Council of Ministers drafted a decree stipulating that in future ministries could only give banquets in exceptional circumstances, following permission from the Council (or the local authorities in the republics), and that alcohol was not to be served during them. Infringements were to be severely punished and the culprits required to reimburse the cost out of their own pockets.
The draft decree was jointly proposed by the Finance Minister (Garbuzov) and the Chairman of the State Control Committee (Kovanov), after they had presented their government colleagues with a ‘panorama’ of such excesses. In 1968, 6,500 government enterprises and agencies had been investigated (at central, republican and district levels), revealing that more than a thousand of them had staged lavish banquets where enormous quantities of alcohol were consumed and presents offered to honoured guests. In Izhevsk, twelve enterprises belonging to different ministries had each spent thousands of roubles on receptions and parties. Between October 1967 and July 1968, one of them had drained 350 bottles of cognac, 25 bottles of vodka and 80 bottles of champagne during the merry-making, at a total cost of 3,100 roubles. Sometimes the banquets were staged in restaurants, which were cited in the document together with the bills stating the price of the drinks.6
As we can see, there was no shortage of information on the lifestyle of officials financed by the state, and the leadership sought to remedy the situation. But it is doubtful whether the measures they took or proposed had any effect. The decree itself offered a loophole, authorizing banquets in some circumstances (it was impossible to ban them altogether), and we can be sure that the requisite permission was given. For such was the style of the system, in which everything functioned via personal contacts, exchanges of services, deals, promotions, and so on.
This detour was necessary in order to return to the crowds of ‘suppliers’ (snabzhentsy), for whom meals in restaurants, receptions and binges were part of the routine. Working without these, not to mention bribes, was inconceivable; and this was common knowledge. The KGB and prosecuting authorities could recount some especially juicy stories. In any case, libations were only the preliminary to a whole ‘culture’ of wheeling and dealing, profiteering and corruption. The supply agencies were the quintessential milieu that generated this culture and diffused it throughout the administration, especially to economic agencies. As we proceed, we shall discover the existence of powerful systemic springs at work, transforming the whole Soviet bureaucratic scene into a setting from a different play altogether.
By name at least, such Soviet institutions as the KGB or Gosplan were known throughout the world. But outside the ranks of specialists, no one abroad referred to Gossnab. For Soviet economists and the whole administrative class, Gossnab – the State Committee for Material and Technical Supplies – was the engine of the economic system. Like the KGB and Gosplan, Gossnab was a supra-ministerial body, run by a prestigious economist and administrator, V. Dymshits, who had won his spurs in Gosplan.
Gossnab was supposed to provide the economy with everything it needed in order to function. Its warehouses, stations and offices were a sort of Mecca for the innumerable tolkachi (‘pushers’) and other agents from the various ministries, agencies and production units. These emissaries arrived to assure themselves that Gossnab would indeed deliver what they had been promised in order to fulfil the plan. Not receiving what had been envisaged, or receiving nothing at all, or getting it too late was a major anxiety; and given that Gossnab was frequently short of all sorts of items, the tolkachi were charged with making contacts with its officials, arranging deals and obtaining results.
A centralized supplier on this scale was regarded as a contradiction in terms by leading Soviet economists. Even when competently run, Gossnab, like every other Soviet agency, experienced shortages and deficiencies. It was cursed by just about everyone, with the exception of those who enjoyed the seal of government priority in procurement (the arms sector or other pet projects of the leadership).
Despite its elevated position in the Soviet institutional hierarchy, Gossnab had to submit to the same administrative routines as other bodies when it came to its budgets, personnel and structural units. Acquaintance with these procedures will help us to understand the character of this apparatus. Budgetary negotiations with the Finance Ministry were not particularly exacting, because the latter was aware of the complexity of Gossnab’s duties and its high status. On 8 August 1970, Dymshits approved the list of Gossnab’s staff and sent it to the Finance Ministry for registration, as procedure dictated, in order to secure the requisite personnel and corresponding budget. The document specified the number of top officials and their salaries, the number of specialists, and each specialist department together with its field of activity, for everything had to be approved by the financial auditors. Thus we learn that Gossnab comprised 34 units with 1,302 employees. Among them we find 286 holding higher managerial posts, 10 of which were leadership positions. The monthly wage bill for these 286 posts was 284,786 roubles. A separate table indicated the salary of the 10 highest officials (between 550 and 700 roubles, plus unspecified perks), or a monthly total of 5,300 roubles (though this excludes the salary of Gossnab’s head). At the other end of the wage scale, we find employees earning 70 roubles a month and enjoying no perks.
As has been said, the bargaining went smoothly. At this stage, Dymshits was still in a strong position. The Finance Ministry’s inspectors went through the motions of approving a central staffing level of 1,302, while trying to nibble away at numbers and wages wherever possible. When Dymshits requested an average monthly salary of 219 roubles per administrator (it had been 215 the previous year), the Finance Ministry suggested 214. Representatives of the Finance Ministry had fixed rules as regards categories of employees (nachal’niki, ‘specialists’, ‘senior specialists’), and they quibbled over everything. But they readily agreed to the requested number (ten) of top officials. Next came the examination of Gossnab’s activities and departments (in addition to its supply agencies, Gossnab had factories, construction teams and research laboratories). The supply activities were distributed between the specialist departments: heavy industry, energy, metals, construction, materials, and so on, as well as an import-export department and the usual internal administrative agencies.7
A lengthy page would be required just to list the departments and sections of this imposing body. It employed some 130,000 people, which was not excessive given its task – namely, to organize a smooth flow to the country’s productive apparatus of all the supplies required for it to function: machinery and equipment, raw materials, fuel, construction materials and tools, and so on. Everything sounds perfectly reasonable – until we realize that in the USSR a single bureaucratic agency was responsible for doing what market mechanisms did elsewhere. If Gossnab had performed satisfactorily, the USSR would indeed have represented the alternative to capitalism it sometimes claimed to be. Gossnab and Gosplan would have been the two cathedrals of a new world. Here we might remind the reader that a good socialist like Trotsky had explained to the Comintern executive committee in 1921 that socialism was a long-term project and that those who wished to realize it one day had to start off by following in the footsteps of the market economy.
The reality is that in the Soviet world no other centralized agency produced such a host of ‘decentralized’ side-effects. Gossnab, super-supplier, was in fact one of the system’s bottlenecks, for it was the cause and manager of constant shortages. Consequently, it is scarcely surprising that the whole economic apparatus responded to these shortages, and to Gosplan’s patent inability to furnish vital supplies consistently, with all sorts of devices and practices and an independent supply-cum-marketing system, emulating the ministries and important enterprises. This murky world of snaby and sbyty acquired a life of its own, becoming a key fixture of economic and social life. No study of Soviet reality can ignore it, and it is important not to confuse it with Gossnab.
‘Murky’ is the appropriate adjective to describe this plethora of operators on the margins of the official system. Even so, had the regime really wanted to know how things stood (and even if it did not really wish to know), it could have referred to the inspection agencies, which regularly conducted inquiries into the sector, or (even better) to the Central Statistical Office, which on 1 October 1970 carried out a census of these ‘commercial’ organizations. Although it could not claim to be exhaustive – naturally, it did not encompass military procurement agencies – the figures are impressive. The 11,184 organizations recorded in the third quarter of 1970 employed 722,289 people, with a total payroll of 259,503,700 roubles. The Central Statistical Office also provided information on warehouses, inventories and transportation costs.8
The census was incomplete because it did not include the unofficial personnel of these snaby-sbyty bodies. The notorious tolkachi featured on the payrolls as employees of other administrative agencies or in more or less fictitious jobs in enterprises. They actually spent most of their time dealing with all manner of suppliers and disposed of the requisite resources to ‘speed things up’, or simply to secure indispensable supplies in means of production and consumer goods. For crucial supplies were rarely obtained without a nudge in the right direction; and that was precisely the task of the tolkachi. Their activities were severely condemned by the party, but flourished nevertheless, for without them the economy would have stalled completely.
There was a further dimension that the census could not take account of Possessing plentiful resources, these operators frequently meshed with dealers on the black market, who hovered around factory warehouses whose stocks were not strictly inventoried. The huge army of people engaged in snaby-sbyty activities formed a natural environment for all sorts of deals, and thus for the development of a shadowy proto-market economy, which was often vital and useful. At all events, it constituted a surreal aspect of Soviet reality.