Yudin K. A. Anatomy of «fatal reforms»: features of party-state control and management in the USSR (mid-1950’s — early 1960’s)

The article examines one of the most important links in the chain of continuous institutional, political and ideological transformations — the reform of party and state control and management, carried out by the first Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N. S. Khrushchev in the autumn-winter of 1962. The focus of the study is mainly on the internal, “anatomical” component of the reform course, its causal structure. On the basis of archival data and documentary publications, it is concluded that Khrushchev’s plan to restore the “Leninist model” of state administration, associated with a return to the principles of internal party democracy, centralism, and the publicity of the control system, was initially utopian. The parallelism, the duplication of polities, the coexistence of departments belonging to different epochs in name and essence, the creation of another hybrid, unified structure of party and state control-all this was the culmination and “fatal” apogee, which at this historical stage led to the removal of the country's leader, but also had far-reaching consequences for the self-destruction of the system.

Reference to article:

Yudin K. A. Anatomy of «fatal reforms»: features of party-state control and management in the USSR (mid-1950’s — early 1960’s) // Ivanovo State University Bulletin. Series «The Humanities». 2021. No.4. P. 118–126.