The New Course

This chapter looks at why Leonid Brezhnev extended the principles of indigenization to the Slavic republics. It assesses the changing balance of co-optation, repression, and political exclusion after Khrushchev. It also discusses how political exclusion took on a more muted form as levels of repression fell. The chapter highlights how Nikita Khrushchev's heirs reunified the regional party committees, dismantled the system of party-state control, dissolved the sovnarkhozy, and reinstated the central industrial ministries. It describes how Brezhnev oversaw a massive infusion of resources into the agricultural sector and adopted a more inclusive, conciliatory approach to the countryside. The chapter also discusses the acknowledgment of the diminished motivational power of Marxism–Leninism, in which functionaries at the Central Committee apparatus turned to Russian nationalism as an agent of mobilization.

Administrative Revolution

This chapter recounts the most radical, most puzzling, and least understood organizational reform launched by Nikita Khrushchev. It examines Khrushchev's proposal to cleave the regional party-state in two, which entailed not only dividing the obkoms, the obkom buros, and the obkom bureaucracies but also having two obkom first secretaries in each region. It points out how Khrushchev's reform struck at the nerve center of the regional power network and the regional party apparatus. The chapter traces the effects of the reforms on regional leaders and their networks in order to see what they can reveal about the nature of their power. It also emphasizes how the institutional reforms of 1962 became a genuine test of the cohesiveness and resilience of the regional networks that had formed in the 1940s.