Sovnarkom
소브나르콤
Short for the 'Council of People's Commissars', the cabinet of the soviet government formed right after the October Revolution. Lenin was its first chairman, and it remained the formal government of the USSR until it was renamed the Council of Ministers in 1946.
In depth
Establishment
The Council of People's Commissars was constituted by decision of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917. Avoiding the title of minister in favour of people's commissar marked a break with the forms of the bourgeois state, and using council rather than government belonged to the same choice. Lenin served as its first chairman.
Its initial composition was Bolshevik alone, but from December 1917 the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries joined and it became a coalition. That coalition broke up in March 1918 over opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Sovnarkom continued afterwards as a single-party government.
Powers and practice
In law Sovnarkom was an executive body answerable to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, but in practice it legislated as well. The practice of enacting law by decree in emergency conditions settled in during the civil war, and it reduced the legislative authority of the congresses of soviets to a formality.
The more important change occurred in its relation to the party. After the Politburo was made a standing body in 1919, major policy decisions were taken in the party apparatus and Sovnarkom shifted into the position of executing them. Under Lenin the double structure did not appear as conflict because he stood at the centre of both bodies, but the subordination of the government machinery hardened institutionally afterwards.
Reorganization
With the formation of the USSR in 1923 a union-level Sovnarkom was constituted with republic-level councils beneath it. The chairmanship passed to Rykov after Lenin's death, to Molotov in 1930, and from 1941 Stalin held it himself.
In March 1946 Sovnarkom was renamed the Council of Ministers and the commissariats became ministries. The renaming is read as the adoption of conventional state forms in line with wartime alliance relations and international usage, and its symbolic meaning as the abandonment of revolutionary nomenclature is noted alongside. There was no change in the actual structure of authority, and the centre of policy decision remained in the party apparatus.