So imagine you're appointed as the CEO of a superpower's
entire economy. Which is just a massive job to
even comprehend. Right. I mean, you control the
military supply lines, the heavy industry, the
agricultural output. You're essentially managing
11 time zones of continuous production. Exactly.
But there is a massive catch to all this. A shadow
board of directors can override your every single
move based purely on like political ideology.
And the public doesn't even know the names of
the people sitting on your own executive committee.
Yeah, it is wild. So today we are opening the
absolute black box of the Soviet Council of Ministers.
Quite the maze. It really is. We are going to
extract the hidden, deeply intricate mechanics
of how the USSR actually governed itself from
the ashes of World War II all the way to its
collapse in 1991. And, you know, if you visualize
the backdrop for this deep dive, picture a moody
mid -century Moscow cityscape. Oh, I like that.
Or maybe a massive dimly lit room filled floor
to ceiling with gray heavily redacted bureaucratic
files. Very Cold War spy thriller. Exactly. Because
while the title, Council of Ministers, sounds
like a very standard, very visible European government
cabinet, the reality was entirely different.
Right. This was the highest executive and administrative
organ of state authority in the Soviet Union.
Yeah. I mean, this was the engine that ran absolutely
everything. And for anyone listening who loves
untangling how massive complex systems actually
operate behind closed doors, this is the ultimate
structural puzzle. Oh, without a doubt. We are
not just looking at a list of politicians here.
We are looking at a story of raw administrative
power. Yeah. And vast economic experiments that
affected millions of lives. Plus some incredibly
high stakes bureaucratic backstabbing, which
is always fascinating. It really is. But to understand
how this engine actually operated, and why it
ultimately proved so volatile, we have to look
at the foundation they built right after the
Second World War. Right, the big shift in 1946.
Yeah, in 1946, the Soviet government underwent
this massive reorganization. Up until that point,
the state was run by an entity called the Council
of People's Commissars. Catchy name. Right, very
revolutionary. But they rebranded the entire
apparatus to the Council of Ministers, and those
individual commissariats simply became ministries.
Okay, let's unpack this for a second. Because
on the surface, changing your title from commissar
to minister just sounds like, uh... Like a PR
move. Just dressing it up for the West. Yeah,
exactly. Just to sound a little more conventional
on the global stage. But when you look at the
scope of what this newly minted council was legally
obligated to do, it's staggering. It really was
all -encompassing. They were actively responsible
for the day -to -day management of the entire
national economy. The whole thing. Right. They
were the ones actually formulating the massive
five -year plans for social and economic development.
They drafted the state budget. economics either.
No, not at all. They handled public order, state
security, and the general policies for the armed
forces. Including exactly how many citizens would
be drafted into the military. Which is a huge
amount of power. What's fascinating here is the
sheer administrative reach they possessed on
paper. If the Council of Ministers issued a decree
or a declaration. It had obligatory jurisdictional
power across all the constituent republics of
the Soviet Union. So everywhere. Everywhere.
From Moscow to Vladivostok, if the council issued
a rule, every local organization, every factory,
every regional government had to obey it. And
I think this is the crucial distinction that...
They were not actually the supreme power in the
land. No, they definitely weren't. The Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, specifically its Central
Committee and the Politburo, was de facto more
powerful. Right. The most important nation -altering
decisions were not made by the Council of Ministers
alone. They were issued via joint declarations
with the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
And if we connect this to the bigger picture,
that dynamic creates an incredible inherent tension
right at the heart of the superpower. Oh, absolutely.
friction this causes. The Council of Ministers
had the immense technical responsibility for
the nation's survival. So if things go wrong,
it's on them. Exactly. If the wheat harvest failed,
or if the train supplying a new city stopped
running, it was the council's fault. Yeah. But
they ultimately lacked absolute ideological supremacy.
I see it exactly like a massive corporate structure.
OK, yeah. Where the ministers... are the C -suite
executives, the CEO, the CFO, the chief operating
officer. They are the ones actually keeping the
lights on and managing the supply chains. Right,
doing the actual work. But the Communist Party
Central Committee is the board of directors.
holding the actual leash. I like that analogy.
Yeah, because the C -suite can mandate new factory
quarters or reorganize a domestic industry. But
if the board of directors suddenly decides on
a radical new ideological direction, the C -suite
just has to swallow it. They fall in line and
figure out how to execute it. Exactly. It is
a classic, highly volatile case of having immense
practical responsibility without having ultimate
unquestionable authority. Which sounds incredibly
stressful. Oh, it was. You have to constantly
navigate the political will of a party apparatus
that might not even understand the logistical
realities of the very economy you were trying
to run. And because those ministers, specifically
the chairman of the council who was effectively
the premier of the USSR held the practical keys
to the kingdom, that top job became the ultimate
prize. course. If you control the factories and
the budgets, you have an enormous amount of leverage,
which meant the moment Joseph Stalin died in
1953, the position of premier became the center
of a brutal power struggle. This is where the
Soviet Game of Thrones truly kicks into high
gear. Grab the popcorn. Seriously. The tension
we just talked about, the government executives
versus the party ideologues, explodes right into
the open. You have two main factions vying for
total control. OK, who are the players? The government
apparatus is championed by Georgi Malenkov, who
manages to take over as the premier. On the other
side, the party apparatus is led by Nikita Khrushchev,
who takes over as the first secretary of the
Communist Party. So it's the ultimate showdown
between the CEO of the government and the chairman
of the ideological board. That's exactly it.
And the board wins, right? They do. By 1955,
Malenkov loses this power struggle and is unceremoniously
demoted from his office as chairman of the Council
of Ministers. Ouch. Yeah. He is replaced by a
man named Nikolai Bulganin. But Bulganin doesn't
even last. Wait, really? No, Contrecha eventually
dismisses them entirely. And the reason why is
wild. Bulganin apparently offered assistance
to a faction called the Anti -Party Group. The
Anti -Party Group? That sounds ominous. Very.
and their entire goal was to oust Khrushchev
from power in 1957. So, wait, I have to jump
in here because this sounds like an absolute
bureaucratic Wild West. Oh, what? You have the
guy running the economy trying to fire the guy
running the ideology who then turns around and
fires the economy guy? It is a ruthless piece
of political maneuvering. There is zero job security
at the absolute pinnacle of this superpower.
None. Khrushchev essentially purges the premier
of the country because the premier tried to help
overthrow him first. And with Bolganin gone,
Khrushchev consolidates an enormous amount of
power, essentially fusing the influence of the
party and the government back together under
his own umbrella. But history shows us that Khrushchev's
victory lap wasn't permanent either. Not at all.
He himself gets ousted in 1964. And the new leaders
who step into the vacuum, Leonid Brezhnev and
Alexei Kosygin, decide they have to put a stop
to this constant turf war. Right. They attempt
to hardwire a structural fix. A central committee
plenum establishes a strict new rule. Which was?
No single person is ever allowed to hold both
the first secretary role and the premier role
concurrently. Oh, interesting. Yeah, they legally,
formally separated the top party job from the
top government job to prevent another Khrushchev
-style consolidation of power. But did that new
rule actually balance the power, or did it just
give the party leader a cleaner way to sideline
the premier? That is the pivotal question, honestly.
and the mechanics of what happened next proved
that it heavily sidelined the premier over time.
At first, it looked like a genuine collective
leadership. Alexei Kosygin takes over as the
premier of the Council of Ministers, and he has
handed the reins of economic administration.
And Brezhnev. Meanwhile, Leonid Brezhnev, as
the general secretary of the party, takes control
of overall domestic matters and state policy.
So they slice the pie right down the middle.
On paper, yes. But whoever controls the party
apparatus in a one -party state inevitably controls
the trajectory of the entire nation. That makes
sense. As the Brezhnev era wore on, the job of
premier slowly but surely lost its rank. It actually
lost its status as the second most powerful position
in the USSR. To what? It fell behind the chairman
of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which
was the chief of state role. So the executive
actually managing the day -to -day survival of
the economy gets functionally demoted in the
unofficial hierarchy. Precisely. And this wasn't
accidental. By 1977, when a key figure named
Nikolai Podgorny was dismissed as chief of state,
Brezhnev absorbed those duties. Just to come
on himself. Yeah, and strengthened his own control
over the government apparatus even further. He
didn't need to take Kosygin's title of premier
to box him in. He just elevated the powers around
him. Exactly. which actively reduced Kosigin's
role in the day -to -day management of government
activities. The rule forbidding one man from
holding both jobs didn't create a perfect balance
at all. It just ensured that the party leader
could slowly build an invisible cage around the
government leader. Unifully put, yes. Well, with
the premier essentially locked into this specific
box of managing the economy, we really need to
look at the actual tools they had to do that
job. It's a massive job. Right, because we are
talking about managing a country spanning 11
time zones, encompassing incredibly diverse geographies
and industries. It's almost unimaginable. So
their main levers of power were divided into
two high distinct categories, the ministries
and the state committees. And this is where the
structural engineering of the Soviet state gets
highly intricate. The ministries were formed
to manage specific vertical topics. A ministry
was responsible for the ordinary decision making
for a single industry. You would have a ministry
for agriculture, a ministry for coal, a ministry
for foreign affairs. And these weren't just mid
-level managers. When you look at the 25th Party
Congress, 73 % of the ministers were elected
as full members of the Central Committee. Yeah,
that's huge. And the ministers of the really
major portfolios, like foreign affairs or defense,
were full members of the Politburo. They had
serious clout. They did. But alongside those
vertical ministries, you had the state committees.
And these were fundamentally different. How so?
A state committee was not responsible for just
one specific topic or a single industry. They
were responsible for cross -cutting functions
that applied to multiple, sometimes all parts
of the government. What kind of functions are
we talking about here? Functions like research
and development, building construction, publishing,
archiving. Crucially, standardization across
all industries. Oh, I see. most famously state
security. The KGB was a state committee. Really?
I didn't know that. Yeah. While the distinction
between a ministry and a state committee could
sometimes seem obscure to an outsider, the general
rule was that state committees had jurisdiction
over common activities performed by all the different
vertical ministries. Here's where it gets really
interesting, I think. Let's upgrade how we visualize
this. Think of the ministries as the vertical
pipes in a massive continental plumbing system.
Oh, I like this. Water, or in this case, commands
and resources, flows straight down from Moscow
to a local steel mill, or straight down to a
collective farm. completely siloed. Right. But
the state committees are the horizontal shutoff
valves cutting right across all of those vertical
pipes. A standardization committee could step
in and dictate the exact metric system the steel
guys and the agriculture guys both have to use.
That's right. Or the KGB could step in and turn
the valve on your pipe, stopping everything,
investigating your factory, no matter what your
specific minister of coal or agriculture said.
That is a brilliant way to conceptualize it.
Vertical silos intersected by horizontal enforcement
and coordination valves. It makes it so much
easier to picture. And those state committees
were absolutely vital for keeping this vast,
incredibly complex Soviet economic system integrated
and coherent. But leadership just couldn't leave
well enough alone. No, they could not. In the
late 1950s, Khrushchev looks at this intricate
plumbing system and decides to try a massive,
frankly terrifying economic experiment. He attempts
to decentralize the entire chain of command.
He was a bold move. To put it mildly, he eliminates
a huge number of those vertical ministries entirely,
completely ripping the pipes out of the walls,
and replaces them with a network of regional
and local councils called soft narcos? Yes. He
placed these regional councils under the supervision
of the Supreme Soviet of the national economy.
Why, though? What was the point? His underlying
theory was to push decision making down to the
local level, hoping it would spur efficiency.
But if you are a factory manager in Ukraine during
this time, wasn't Khrushchev essentially taking
a deeply integrated continental monopoly and
violently smashing it into pieces without a blueprint?
Pretty much. Because the result was disastrous.
It completely severed regional economic relations.
It was a spectacular failure. This raises an
important question. Why did it fail so quickly?
It was a catastrophic miscalculation of how a
command economy actually functions. How so? Well,
in a free market. If a steel plant in Ukraine
needs coal, market prices and localized trade
naturally connect the buyers and the sellers.
They figure it out organically. But the Soviet
economy had no natural market prices. The only
thing telling the coal mine in Siberia to send
shipments to the steel plant in Ukraine was that
vertical ministry in Moscow. When Khrushchev
smashed the ministries, he essentially deleted
the country's economic software. The coal mine
literally didn't know where to send the coal,
because the central nervous system was gone.
That is wild. He didn't just reorganize them,
he blinded them. Absolutely blinded them. And
you can see how devastating that was by how quickly
they reversed it. As soon as Khrushchev is ousted
in 1964, The very next year, the new premier,
Alexei Kosygin, hits the massive undo button.
He had to. He immediately reestablishes the vertical
ministries. He brings back 28 industrial ministries
right out of the gate in 1965. Kosygin recognized
that you cannot run a command economy without
a commander. That makes sense. He initiated his
own economic reforms, but rather than destroying
the central structure, he tried to work within
it. His goal was to keep those vertical ministries
intact, but give individual enterprises slightly
more economic freedom and introduce profit incentives
so they would naturally want to be more efficient.
So coordinating all of these resurrected vertical
ministries, managing the horizontal state committees,
and overseeing massive structural reforms across
11 time zones required a highly sophisticated
central command. It did. And that brings us to
what has to be the most mysterious, fascinating
part of the entire Soviet government apparatus,
the Presidium of the Council of Ministers. This
is where the bureaucratic black box becomes entirely
opaque. Completely opaque. The Presidium was
formally established in March 1953, growing out
of a special bureau from 1944 that was originally
designed to supervise government institutions.
But throughout its existence, the Presidium operated
in the shadows. First -world observers in the
West knew almost nothing about it. We didn't
know its exact functions, we didn't know its
internal hierarchy, we didn't even know how often
it met. And this wasn't just a matter of keeping
secrets from Western spies. Right. You know,
it was hidden from their own people. Which is
just wild to me. In Soviet textbooks, and when
officials vaguely alluded to it, it was just
described as an internal organ. So vague. British
historian Leonard Shapiro theorized it worked
somewhat as an inner cabinet for policy making.
But even historians who dedicated their lives
to studying the Soviet Union couldn't determine
its exact power compared to other government
organs. They were just guessing. During the 50s
and 60s, Western analysts weren't even totally
sure if the Presidium was actively holding meetings.
It's incredible. It's like having a shadow board
of directors running the day -to -day operations
of your country and no one is quite sure if they
even exist. It really is. There's this amazing
anecdote where a political scientist, Robert
C. Tucker, is visiting the USSR. He's trying
to map out this labyrinth. And he finally just
straight up asks Mansur Mirza Akhmetov, who was
the premier of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic
at the time, does the Presidium still function
as an inner policymaking body? Which is an incredibly
bold question to ask a high ranking Soviet official
during the height of the Cold War. Right. He
just goes right for it. But the official actually
says Yes, he gives Tucker this ultra rare peek
behind the curtain. What did he tell him? He
explains that the Presidium consisted of the
premier, two first deputy chairman, four regular
deputy chairman, the minister of finance, and
the minister of agriculture. OK, so a tight group.
Exactly. So it wasn't a sprawling parliament.
It was a highly concentrated, incredibly exclusive
brain trust of the most vital economic and administrative
leaders in the empire. And yet. Authorities kept
it entirely under wraps for decades. It wasn't
until the 1977 Soviet Constitution that they
officially legally defined the Presidium as a
permanent organ of the Council of Ministers.
Finally on the books. Right. Established specifically
to secure economic leadership. But even after
it was codified in the 1977 Constitution and
later in the 1978 USSR law, the actual names
of its members other than the premier, were never
officially disclosed to the public. So what does
this all mean? I really have to push back on
the logic of this system. Kill for it. How do
you successfully run the economy of a global
superpower when your top executive board operates
like a secret society? If the citizens, the factory
workers, the soldiers don't even know the names
of the men sitting on the presidium, how is there
any accountability for the decisions they make?
Because you are applying a democratic expectation
to a fundamentally different operating architecture.
Fair point. In a system that prioritizes absolute
state security and top -down control over transparency,
secrecy wasn't a flaw. Secrecy was the primary
feature. By hiding the membership in the meetings
of the Presidium, the Soviet leadership completely
insulated their economic planning away from public
scrutiny, and crucially, away from broad governmental
scrutiny. So they didn't want lower -level bureaucrats
questioning the math on the five -year plans.
Exactly. It functioned as an untouchable shadow
committee right below the Paula Perot. It allowed
a tiny, deeply insulated group of men to make
massive, sweeping decisions about resource allocation,
industrial development, and state funding. without
ever having to justify those decisions to the
public. Or even to the wider Supreme Soviet.
In this architecture, accountability only ever
flowed upward to the party leadership. It never
flowed downward to the citizens. Which is just
a staggering, almost alien way to run an empire
for nearly half a century. It really is. And
it brings us right back to why a deep dive into
an extinct Soviet bureaucratic organ matters
to you listening to this today. This isn't just
dry history. It is an absolute master class in
how massive organizations actually function behind
closed doors. Absolutely. It shows us how job
titles can be completely deceiving, where the
person with the grand title of premier might
actually be slowly boxed in and losing power
to the guy running the party apparatus. It also
highlights the extreme danger of structural whiplash.
When you look at Khrushchev's attempt to decentralize
by destroying the ministries, it caused absolute
economic chaos because he didn't understand the
load bearing walls of his own system. Exactly.
You can't just delete the central command software
of a command economy and expect the hardware
to keep running. No, you can't. And of course,
it shows how real tangible power often sits entirely
in the shadows like the Presidium, making decisions
that alter millions of lives without ever stepping
up to a podium or revealing their names. It is
a profound study in the anatomy of institutional
power. It really is. And I want to leave you
with one final lingering thought to mull over
drawn from the very end of this history. OK.
In 1991, as the Soviet system was rapidly unraveling,
the authorities finally dissolved the entire
Council of Ministers. They replaced it with a
newly established cabinet of ministers, seemingly
to modernize the government. Right. The final
rebrand. But that new cabinet disappeared just
months later because the entire Soviet Union
collapsed. It really makes you wonder, did the
larger collapse of the empire simply wipe out
this new cabinet? Or did the sudden final dismantling
of that 45 -year -old executive engine, the boring
shadowy bureaucrats who were quietly forcing
the supply chains to work, actually trigger the
final fatal shatter of the superpower? That is
quite the question. Without the Council of Ministers
physically forcing the pipes and valves to stay
connected, did the whole thing just instantly
fall apart? Just something to think about the
next time your company announces a major structural
reorganization. And you have to wonder if they
actually know which walls are load -bearing.
Definitely a sobering thought. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive. We will catch
you next time.