“Party outcome” as the antithesis of the personnel policy of the CPSU

The article analyzes two processes that were simultaneously going on in the CPSU in the summer of 1991. First, we are talking about the transition of the leading party nomenklatura to economic, mainly Soviet, work. The leaders of the regional and local levels did not see any prospects in party work. Second, the dramatic abandonment of the party by rank-and-file communists is considered, which followed two lines – through a declaration of withdrawal and through the loss of connection with the organization. Both processes are collectively determined by the author as a “party outcome”. The personnel policy of the CPSU throughout the years of the existence of the USSR was the basis of stability and a guarantee of the existence of the party-state. It was, in fact, existential in meaning. By controlling the nomenclature through personnel policy, the CPSU retained itself in the status of a state. In a short period of history, the destruction of personnel policy took place. From a mechanism for containing destructive and uncontrollable dangers of the party, it has become its antipode – a mechanism that destroys the Soviet state, its antithesis - its own opposite. The personnel policy of the CPSU has traditionally been based on the constant reproduction of the party state (institutions of power), the nomenklatura system (recruiting mechanisms) and the administrative-political elite (the nomenklatura itself). The regulation of the number, the balance of the party hierarchy and the ladder career movement – these are the basic, fundamental principles of the personnel policy of the CPSU in 1985-1991. have undergone a significant correction. In the realities of 1991, they rapidly degraded and collapsed, which led in the summer of 1991 to a “party exodus”. The main components of the “party outcome” were the withdrawal from the party of ordinary communists, including those with more than 20 years of experience, the transition of the party nomenclature to leading economic and Soviet work, the coming to replace the cadre party nomenclature of representatives of the lower echelons of the party apparatus.