Communist Government In The USSR, 1917-85 Flashcards
(64 cards)
1
Q
How did Lenin create a ‘soviet-state’?
A
- In October 1917, Lenin seized power on behalf of the soviets – small democratic councils that had emerged spontaneously in every town and village across Russia after the February Revolution.
- Additionally, the local soviets sent representatives to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met in June 1917 to discuss Russia’s future.
2
Q
What was the Sovnarkom?
A
- The All-Russian Congress was too big to meet regularly they elected the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) to govern Russia on day-to-day basis.
- Sovnarkom was essentially the new Russian cabinet. The first Sovnarkom was made up of 13 People’s Commissars.
- Lenin was elected Chairman of Sovnarkom, and other Commissars included Leon Trotsky, who was head of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and Joseph Stalin, who was head of the People’s Commissariat of Nationality Affairs.
3
Q
What were the popular decrees passed by Lenin’s government following the October Revolution?
A
- The Decree on Land (October 1917), which gave peasants the right to seize land from the nobility and the Church.
- The Decree of Peace (October 1917), which committed the new government to withdrawing from the First World War and seeking peace.
- Workers’ Decrees (November 1917), which established an eight-hour maximum working day and a minimum wage.
- The Decree of Workers’ Control (April 1918), which allowed workers to elect committees to run factories.
4
Q
How democratic was Russia truly in 1918?
A
- Lenin argued that the new state was based on committees of working people who participated in government on a day-to-day basis.
- There is clear evidence that the new government was genuinely democratic. For example, the first decrees were genuinely popular and reflected what the majority of the workers, peasants and soldiers wanted.
- Additionally, Russia was not a one-party state yet. According to the Constitution of 1918, Sovnarkom was responsible to the Congess of Soviets – which contained representatives from many political parties including the Bolshevik’s main rivals, the Mensheviks.
5
Q
What was the rumoured coalition government in 1918?
A
The moderates within the Bolshevik Party, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Lenin should form a coalition government and work with other political parties.
- However, when Bolshevik moderates were unable to persuade Lenin to compromise they resigned in protest.
- As a result, by November, Lenin’s new government was dominated by people who wanted the Bolshevik Party to govern alone.
6
Q
What caused the Bolshevik’s to lose soviet elections across Russia?
A
- In March 1918, Lenin approved the Treaty of Litovsk, which gave away a significant proportion of Russian territory to the Central Powers in order to end Russia’s involvement in the First World War.
- The treaty was extremely unpopular and therefore the Bolsheviks lost the soviet elections across Russia in April and May 1918.
7
Q
How did Lenin retain his power after the Bolsheviks lost in the 1918 elections?
A
- In order to retain power, Lenin refused to recognise the results, arguing that the elections had not been fair.
- Moreover, Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the soviets. Lenin demanded new elections, but quickly postponed them due to the outbreak of the Civil War.
- As a result of the abolition of the Constituent Assembly and Lenin’s refusal to recognise the results of new soviet elections, Lenin was able to consolidate Bolshevik power. However, it became more difficult to argue that the new government was democratic.
8
Q
Who fought against eachother in the Civil War?
A
‘Communist Reds’ and ‘Reactionary Whites’ – The Bolsheviks against all their rivals.
9
Q
How did Lenin centralise power in the Party due the Civil War?
A
- He centralised control of the economy with the policy of War Communism.
- He also relied on political centralisation, working through the loyal Party nomenklatura rather than the more democratic soviets, and using terror to suppress opposition.
- Trotsky, leader of the Red Army, made the Red Army more authoritarian. He introduced conscription, harsh punishments and relied on former Tsarist generals to lead the army.
10
Q
What was the Politburo?
A
- Lenin preferred working with the Politburo to Sovnarkom as it was smaller - between five and seven members - and therefore could reach decisions more quickly.
- Additionally, he preferred working with the Politburo because it contained his most loyal supporters people such as Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
11
Q
What happened to the Sovnarkom during the Civil War?
A
- Simply ceased to function as the main centre of government.
- From 1920, the Politburo effectively became the
government of Russia. - Sovnarkom played a much smaller role, merely approving the decisions that had already
been made by the Politburo.
12
Q
What was the Red Terror?
A
- In December 1917 Lenin created the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka), a political police force tasked with defending the revolution.
- During the Civil War Chekists were responsible for raiding anarchist organisations, closing down opposition newspapers and expelling Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries from the soviets.
- The Cheka was willing to imprison. torture or kill anyone who the communists viewed as a threat.
- For example, in Kremenchuk in the Ukraine. Church leaders were impaled on spikes, while in the city of Oryol victims were frozen and put on display as ice statues.
13
Q
What was the popular unrest against grain requisitioning in 1921?
A
- Peasants in Tambov, led by Aleksandr Antonov, began a rebellion against communist grain requisitioning and Cheka brutality.
- By January 1921 Antonov had a force of 50,000 anti-communist fighters. Antonov’s revolt was not the only challenge to the Bolsheviks in the countryside.
- In March 1921 there were peasant attacks on government grain stores all along the Volga River.
14
Q
What was the Kronstadt sailors rebellion in 1921?
A
- Sailors at the Kronstadt naval base, horrified by the communists’ suppression of the Petrograd strikes, rebelled.
The Kronstadt sailors demanded a series of reforms, including: - The immediate free and fair election of new soviets
- Release of all anarchist, Menshevik and SR political prisoners
- A restoration of freedom of speech and the press
- The abolition of the Cheka
- An end to War Communism.
In essence, the Kronstadt sailors wanted a return to soviet
democracy.
15
Q
How did the Red Army stop the Kronstadt sailors rebellion?
A
- In May they suppressed the rebellion by deporting 100,000 people to labour camps and attacking peasant villages with poisoned gas.
16
Q
How did Lenin create a One-Party State in 1921?
A
- From February 1921 Lenin authorised the Cheka to destroy opposition political parties.
- At the end of February 1921, all Mensheviks in Petrograd and Moscow, including one of the Mensheviks’ leaders, Fyodor Dan, were arrested and sent to the Butyrka Prison.
- Similar steps were taken against the SRs. Twenty-two leading SRs were put on trial in early 1922 and sentenced to prison or exile.
- Consequently, between 1921 and 1922, the communists’ dominance of Russia was consolidated by crushing opposition political parties.
17
Q
What Reforms did Lenin introduce in the 1921 Party Congress?
A
- The New Economic Policy: liberalised the economy
- On Party Unity: Party members found guilty of forming factions could be expelled from the Party as punishment. This helped strengthen Lenin’s position within the party by making his policies more difficult to organise.
18
Q
Who was Gregory Zinoviev in the contending for power?
A
- Zinoviev emerged as the front-runner to lead the Soviet Union in 1923.
- He could claim to be a true Leninist as he was Lenin’s closest friend.
19
Q
Who was Nikolai Bukharin in the contending for power?
A
- “golden boy”
- From 1925 to early 1928 Bukharin was the most prominent figure in the Soviet Government. In 1925 he formed an alliance with Stalin, known as the Duumvirate.
- The alliance gave Bukharin and Stalin a majority in the Politburo due to the support of more junior members who were allies of Bukharin.
20
Q
Who was Trotsky in the contending for power?
A
- Trotsky was the most famous member of the government other than Lenin. He was well known as a revolutionary hero due to the role he played in the October Revolution and the Civil War.
- Moreover, from 1917 he had been Lenin’s right- hand man and closest political collaborator.
21
Q
Why was Ideological Orthodoxy important during the leadership struggle?
A
- First, in order to win the leadership struggle, Stalin had to establish that he, rather than the other contenders, was a true Leninist. This changed the nature of the Party by establishing a new ideological orthodoxy.
22
Q
By 1928, what two ideas was the Communist Party committed to due to Stalin?
A
-
Socialism in one country: From 1924 Stalin and Bukharin had advocated the idea that the Soviet Union could construct socialism.
- From 1924 Bukharin and Stalin argued that the Soviet Union could build socialism without waiting for a global revolution. They argued that socialism in one country was the correct Leninist idea, and that Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were Trotskyites, rather than Leninists. -
Collectivisation and industrialisation: In 1928, Stalin argued that the time was right to abandon the NEP and transform the Soviet economy.
- From 1928 Stalin argued that peasants should be forced to work on state-owned farms, and that the profit they produced should be used to industrialise the Soviet Union at a rapid pace.
- He argued that Bukharin’s desire to continue the NEP indicated that Bukharin was no longer a true Leninist.
23
Q
How did Stalin undermine the authority at the top of the Party?
A
- Establishing a new ideological orthodoxy and branding his opponents enemies of Leninism.
- Demanding that Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev apologise to the Party for the errors when they lost votes at the Party Congress.
- Accusing Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev of plotting against the Party and forming a faction; these were serious crimes, as Lenin had banned factions in 1921.
24
Q
How did Party membership help Stalin win the leadership struggle?
A
- In 1924, Stalin initiated the Lenin Enrolment. From May 1924, the Lenin Enrolment allowed 128,000 people to join the Communist Party.
- Stalin justified this by arguing that the Party needed new working-class members.
- However, in practice the new members were poorly educated people who wanted well-paid jobs within the Party.
- Due to their lack of education, the new members were suspicious of Trotsky and Bukharin, the Party’s leading intellectuals.
- Moreover, because they were interested in getting well-paid Party jobs they tended to support Stalin, who was able to promote them within the Party.
25
What was Stalin's patronage system?
- As General Secretary, he could give well-paid and powerful jobs to lower-ranking Party members. Equally as head of the **Central Control Commission** and the **Rabkrin** he had the power to investigate and, if necessary, sack Party members and government officials.
- Stalin’s power to promote and sack Party members meant that he could **count on the loyalty of Party members** who wanted to retain their positions or get a promotion.
26
What was Staling concerned about before the purges of the 1930s?
- His own supporters were prepared to challenge his authority
- His old rivals could conspire against him and overthrow him.
- Stalin responded to these perceived threats by launching the Great Terror, or Great Purge, a campaign of arrests, torture, mass imprisonments and executions that finally removed his opponents.
27
What was the Great Terror?
The Great Terror was at its height from **1935 to 1938**. It was responsible for the deaths of around **10 million Soviet citizens**, approximately ten per cent of the population.
28
How was opposition from the Politburo a cause of the purges?
- By 1932 there was a group of moderates in the Politburo associated with **Sergei Kirov**, head of the Communist Party in Leningrad. Kirov and the moderates were able to force some changes in policy in the early 1930s.
- Kirov’s growing authority within the Party was clearly a challenge to Stalin.
29
How were economic problems a cause of the purges?
- Economic problems were also a cause of the Great Terror. First, senior figures within government were aware of the problems with Stalin’s industrial and agricultural policies, which undermined Stalin’s authority in government 53–54.
- Secondly, by accusing workers and managers of being ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’ Stalin could blame them for the problems.
- Stalin sent ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’ to **Gulags**, huge labour camps. In this sense, the terror **created an army of slave labour**, which he could use to build factories or mine resources.
30
How was the Congress of Victors a cause of the purges?
- Stalin came **second** to Kirov in the vote at the end of the Congress which elected the new Central Committee; **Kirov received 1225 votes compared to Stalin’s 927**.
- Senior members of the Party approached Kirov, urging him to stand against Stalin as General Secretary. Kirov refused, and the vote was kept secret. Nonetheless, the Congress demonstrated that **Stalin had a rival in the Communist Party**.
31
32
How was Kirov’s murder a useful pretext for launching the terror?
- Kirov was murdered in December 1934. Some
historians have speculated that Stalin ordered the attack, but conclusive proof has never been found.
- **Certainly, the murder removed Stalin’s main rival.**
- Additionally, the murder allowed Stalin to claim that there was **a dangerous conspiracy** that aimed to overthrow the Communist Government. In that sense, it gave Stalin **a reason to arrest his rivals and launch a mass campaign** to hunt down his enemies.
33
What were the three show trials that took place in 1936, 1937 and 1938?
- **The Trial of the 16**, 1936, led to the execution of **Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14** of their supporters.
- **The Trial of the 17**, 1937, led to the execution and imprisonment of **17 of Trotsky’s former supporters**.
- **The Trial of the 21**, 1938, led to the execution of **Bukharin** and many of his closest supporters.
34
How did the Great Terror affect the government?
- The terror affected all aspects of the Party and the government. Indeed, **95 per cent of those affected** by the terror were men between the ages of 30 and 45 who held **senior positions in the Party or played an important role in the economy**.
35
What were the secret trials?
- In 1937 eight senior generals were tried for plotting to overthrow the government. The eight leaders had worked with Trotsky when he was head of the Red Army, and therefore Stalin did not trust them. All were executed.
- Following the trial more than **37,000 officers** were purged from the army.
36
What were the consequences of the Great Terror?
- It finally eliminated Stalin’s rivals from the 1920s.
- It also led to the **death or imprisonment of a whole generation of communists who had known and worked with Lenin**. In this sense, it removed all Party members who could claim authority that was independent from Stalin.
- It led to the emergence of a new generation of Communist Party leaders who **owed their positions** to Stalin, and who were therefore **loyal**.
- It **established the principle** that Stalin had the right to use terror against anyone who was disloyal.
- Stalin’s political police, the **NKVD, became a powerful organisation** within the regime. Consequently, Lavrentiy **Beria**, Stalin’s NKVD chief from 1938, also became a powerful figure within the government.
37
How did WW2 affect the party and state's relationship?
- Stalin took the **leading position in the state, as well as the Party**, in order to ensure better co-ordination of government.
- **He ended mass terror**. During the Great Terror thousands of effective administrators had been purged. During the war, Stalin allowed state and Party officials to continue working in order to ensure that government could run more smoothly.
- He **allowed state power to grow**. During the war there was a shift in power within the government from the Party to the state. **State Ministers, rather than Party bosses, made important decisions**.
- He **changed the composition of the Politburo**. As the power of the state grew, Ministers joined the Politburo, and members of the Politburo were given important ministerial jobs.
- He created the **State Defence Committee (GKO)**. The GKO was responsible for economic co-ordination and military production and defence during the war.
38
How did Stalin encourage competition between the party and state?
- First, he did this by **appointing rival personnel to key positions in the Party and state**. Encouraging competition between Party and state officials meant that senior officials in the Soviet Government competed with each other and not with Stalin.
- Secondly, Stalin **shifted power from the Party to the state and back again**. By shifting the centre of power within the government, Stalin was able to ensure that none of these senior committees grew to rival him.
39
What was the Leningrad Affair 1949?
- During 1949 Stalin launched a purge against the Leningrad Party. Stalin was concerned that Leningrad, Russia’s second city, was developing **a degree of independence** from his powerbase in Moscow.
- Around **100 officials were shot and around 2000 arrested and dismissed**.
- The Leningrad Affair followed Zhdanov’s death in 1949, and one explanation was that **Beria encouraged Stalin** to purge Leningrad because it contained **a group of senior officials** who had been his rivals.
40
How did Stalin test the loyalty of his closest allies?
- One way in which he did this was to **imprison or sack the wives and daughters** of senior figures in government.
- In 1948 Stalin demanded that the Politburo vote
to expel Molotov’s wife from the Party. Molotov abstained from the vote and later apologised to Stalin for this disloyalty. In 1949, **Stalin had Molotov’s wife arrested and imprisoned**. Having learned from his previous mistake, Molotov made no effort to stop the arrest or end the imprisonment.
41
What did Khrushchev believe in?
- He believed in the **revolutionary goals of Lenin** and wanted to create a society of plenty, in which there was **no poverty and no inequality***.
- Moreover, he believed that **mass commitment to the revolution** was central to the future of Communism. Therefore he wanted to **encourage greater public participation in politics and greater dynamism** within the Party.
- He also wanted to create a **humane form of socialism** in which people were **free from the threat of arbitrary terror**. In this sense he rejected Stalin’s belief that terror was central to revolutionary transformation.
42
What were Beria's reforms regarding the MVD?
- Beria informed the Presidium that the **Gulag system had become inefficient and difficult to manage**. Indeed, from the late 1940s there were an increasing number of uprisings in the Gulag.
- In March 1953 he introduced an **amnesty for non-political prisoners** who were serving short sentences.
- The amnesty was extended in April to some **‘counter revolutionaries’**
- A Party commission was set up in May to investigate past executions. The Commission **rehabilitated 4620 communists** who had been executed on the basis of forced confession.
- The MVD had used Gulag labour to construct factories and power stations, as well as to mine precious metals including gold. **These projects were terminated.**
- As a result of the reforms introduced by Beria the
Gulag population dropped from **2.4 million in 1953 to 1.6 million in 1956**.
43
What were Beria's reforms regarding the republics?
In June 1953 Beria introduced two measures that were designed to make republican governments more representative:
- He introduced a measure that required all senior Party officials to speak the language of the republic that they worked in.
- He ordered that all official publications should be available in the languages of the republics as well as in Russian.
44
45
Why did Beria fall?
- At a meeting of the Presidium in June 1953, Khrushchev accused Beria of handing Soviet secrets to the **British government and of crimes against the Soviet people**.
- Beria’s arrest removed one of the main contenders for power. From mid-1953 to the end of 1954 Khrushchev and Malenkov effectively **ruled as a duumvirate**.
46
How did Khruschev establish personnel changes?
- Khrushchev used his position as Secretary of the Central Committee to replace senior officials throughout the Party.
- Between 1953 and 1956 Khrushchev replaced around half of the regional Party secretaries and **44 per cent of the Central Committee**.
- He filled the top levels of the Party with people who were loyal to him and people who were prepared to back reform.
47
What was Khrushchev's anti-bureaucracy campaign?
- Khrushchev proposed cutting bureaucracy by **devolving power from the Soviet Government to republican governments**. This was a direct attack on Malenkov’s powerbase.
- In mid-1954 Khrushchev restructured government, cutting the number of central Soviet ministries from **55 to 25**.
- The reforms meant that the proportion of Soviet industry controlled by central government dropped from **68 per cent to just 44 per cent**.
48
How did Khrushchev accomplish de-Stalinisation?
- He wanted to **end Stalin’s use of terror** and enhance the lives of Soviet citizens by improving their standard of living, ending widespread terror and enriching Soviet culture with new novels, plays and other art forms.
- Therefore they rejected the **‘cult of personality’** that had grown up around Stalin.
- The first steps towards ending the cult of Stalin were small. Plans to turn Stalin’s **dacha into a museum celebrating his life were scrapped**. Additionally, the annual Stalin prizes were cancelled and, for the first time since the 1930s, there were **no official celebrations of Stalin’s birthday**.
- Newspapers, which had traditionally been full of quotes from Stalin’s works, started quoting from **Marx and Lenin**.
49
50
What was the Secret Speech?
- On the night of 25 February, a day after the Congress officially finished, delegates were summoned to an unscheduled late night meeting. **Khrushchev spoke for four hours, setting out a profound critique of Stalin’s rule**.
- Khrushchev focused on the cult of personality. He argued that Stalin had **abandoned collective leadership and set himself up as dictator**.
- Moreover, he claimed that Stalin committed enormous crimes, particularly **during the terror** when he ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
- Khrushchev revealed the scale of the terror, which Stalin had concealed from the Party, and quoted the criticism of **Stalin in Lenin’s Testament**, which had also been kept secret.
- Significantly, Khrushchev did not criticise Stalin’s policy of **industrialisation or collectivisation**, or any aspect of communist ideology.
51
How did Khruschev end the terror?
- In May 1954 Khrushchev and Malenkov set up a special commission to review the cases of political prisoners who had been sent to the Gulags. In the first year, progress was slow and only **4620 of the 113,739 political prisoners were released**.
- In June 1956, **51,439 prisoners**, including 26,155 political prisoners, were released.
52
What were the problems of de-Stalinisation?
- Communist Parties in Hungary and Poland began their own process of de-Stalinisation. In Hungary students and artists seized the opportunity, initiated a revolution and elected a new prime minister. After the new government ended its military alliance with the Soviet Union, Khrushchev ordered Soviet troops to **crush the revolution**.
- There was also unrest in the Soviet Union. there were
**student demonstrations in favour of multi-party democracy at Moscow State University in 1957**. Again, they were supressed by the communist authorities.
53
How did Khrushchev backtrack on his reforms?
- Stalinists in the Party argued that de-Stalinisation had destabilised the government. Some moderates also accused Khrushchev of **reforming too fast**.
- Khrushchev responded by backtracking, agreeing with his critics that the Soviet people were ‘not ready’ to know the truth about Stalin.
- Khrushchev’s New Year’s Eve speech acknowledged that **all communists were ‘Stalinists’**.
54
55
How did Khrushchev attempt democratisation and decentralisation?
- He allowed an expansion of Party membership. Membership grew from **6.9 million in 1954 to 11 million in 1964**. This made it more democratic as a greater proportion of its members, **60 per cent by 1964**, were workers of peasants.
- He introduced **fixed terms for senior Communists** to ensure that they were replaced regularly. As a result, **two-thirds of regional Secretaries and the Presidium were replaced between 1957 and 1961**.
56
What was the Anti-Party group and why were they significant?
In June 1957 a majority of the Presidium, led by Malenkov, **voted to replace Khrushchev**. The attempted coup of 1957 was significant for the evolution of Soviet government for two main reasons:
- It demonstrated that senior Communists would **no
longer use political terror** against each other.
- It recognised that the power of the Party leader
depended on the **support of the Central Committee**.
57
What were Khrushchev's final reforms?
- Khrushchev also introduced a radical Party reform. He built on his earlier democratisation measures by introducing **fixed terms for all jobs** within the Party, including a fixed 16-year term for Central Committee members.
- Khrushchev’s 1962 Party reforms **effectively split the Party in two**. According to the new structure, one half of the Party was put in charge of **agriculture and the other of industry**.
- This new division went right to the top of the Party: the Central Committee was divided into industrial and agricultural bureaus.
58
How did Brezhnev attempt to restore the system?
- They ensured that the two top jobs in government were not occupied by the same person – in order to **stop the emergence of an all-powerful leader**. Brezhnev led the Party as General Secretary; Kosygin was Premier and therefore had the most important job in the Soviet state.
- They divided key posts in government **roughly equally** between supporters of Brezhnev and Kosygin.
- They ensured that Party and state officials kept their jobs for **long periods to limit the opportunities for patronage**.
59
What was the 'Stability of cadres'?
- Brezhnev’s government was based on the policy of **‘stability of cadres’, or ‘trust in cadres’**. In essence the policy discouraged promotions or demotions within government.
- It replaced Khrushchev’s 1961 policy of limited terms, which had been very unpopular with the Party. In this sense the policy ensured support for the new leaders from government officials because it gave them **job security**.
60
How did Brezhnev restore the Party?
- **Centralisation* : Khrushchev had repeatedly tried to break up central ministries and decentralise government by giving more power to the republics. Brezhnev reversed this, re-establishing the all-union ministries that Khrushchev had abolished.
- Brezhnev **ended the split between industrial and agricultural wings of the Party**.
- Article 6 of the new 1977 Soviet Constitution, known as the ‘Brezhnev Constitution’, **officially recognised the Party’s leading role in Soviet society**. In this sense, it established the superiority of the Party over the state.
61
How did the gerontocracy arise during Brezhnev's government?
- Between 1964 and 1971, only two people were promoted to the Politburo.
- Between 1966 and 1971, between 80 and 90 per cent of Central Committee members retained their jobs following Party Congresses.
62
What problems arose from Brezhnev's gerontocracy?
- Brezhnev’s critics argued that his style of government created a **generation gap between the government and society**. In this sense, Brezhnev’s government no longer understood the society they governed.
- Senior officials became **increasingly ill** and therefore unable to perform their jobs.
- ‘Stability of cadres’ meant that there were extremely **limited opportunities for promotion**. As a result, middle-ranking officials were effectively stuck in dead-end jobs with no prospect of promotion.
- The system provided **no incentives to work hard**
because there were so few opportunities for promotion.
63
What corruption rose during Brezhnev's government?
- Soviet officials, who could not grow rich through hard work and promotion, used their positions to grow rich, knowing they were unlikely to be disciplined.
- One form of corruption was to sell goods on the black
market. For example, Yury Sokolov, the director of a major Moscow food store, took bribes from rich customers for passing on luxury food.
64
What were Andropov's reforms?
- He abandoned the **‘stability of cadres’** policy, replacing a quarter of senior officials.
- He introduced **small-scale economic reforms** focusing on labour discipline.
- His most important initiative was an anti-corruption
campaign. The campaign: attacked senior figures, for example he prosecuted **Red Army General and Minister of the Interior** Nikolai Shchelokov and investigated Galina Brezhneva’s lover ‘Boris the Gypsy’
- Included media exposés of corrupt officials.
