The short answer: it varied considerably but generally the party head was the most prominent. Let me go into a bit of detail though on why this is such a tricky proposition to answer.

One of the enduring problems with Soviet (and post-Soviet) history is there’s often a conflict between the formal ‘power verticals’ (ie government hierarchy) and the ‘informal networks’ that develop around them. This was particularly true during the Soviet period when the Party provided an alternative institutional power base. An individual’s power/influence could often vary massively regardless of their formal position. It wasn’t just a lack of information that made Kremlinology such a mini-industry: formal titles often counted for a lot less than personal access. Power ebbed and flowed through the networks of the Soviet Union – who held power depended on the individuals, circumstances and periods involved.

But let’s illustrate some of these shifts over the first few decades of the Soviet Union. The idea is to demonstrate the degree to which these bodies, and the power held within, changed over time.

(For the sake of brevity, I’m not even going to touch on the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and its successor the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The chairman of these, while nominally head of state, was invariably a figurehead.)

Lenin

To begin with, the office of the General Secretary was a relatively late innovation in the early Bolshevik state. The original Secretaries (to the Central Committee) were generally solid organisers but essentially non-entities politically, Sverdlov being an exception. Similarly, the work of the Secretariat was originally entirely administrative in nature, albeit with a broadening scope over time. It wasn’t until 1922 that Stalin came to occupy the position and gradually used its powers (particularly the assignment of offices) to build a powerbase within the Party.

At the same time, Lenin was predominately working through the official state machinery that the Revolution had established. His primary formal position was Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). Policy discussions therefore shifted somewhat to government bodies, with leading Bolsheviks playing the roles of Commissars/Ministers. But the Communist Party still existed. Moreover, the demands of the Civil War, and the inadequacies of state machinery in meeting these, meant that it had emerged as a powerful coordinating body in its own right. Its Central Committee and Politburo continued to debate policy and pass resolutions. What emerged therefore was a conjoined institutional mess of a Party-State.

Want to make things even more complicated? Lenin was never ‘head of party’ in any formal sense. Of course, his personal status was such that this was unnecessary but the Central Committee was formally a collection of equals. So good luck trying to pin authority/power to a formal org chart.

Stalin

Things began to change following Lenin’s illness and death as more power migrated back to the Party during the 1920s. I’m going to skip over the interregnum except to note that most of the drama here was happening in the Politburo. Stalin held no official state position at this time and his rise to power was entirely via party channels. So the triumph of the Party, right? Not quite.

One of the interesting facets of Stalin’s rule is the degree to which he progressively sidelined both party and state institutions. He much preferred to govern informally and the real decision-making elite during the 1930s was to be found in a close-knit group of technocrats (‘Team Stalin’) that had personal access to Stalin. These did not always occupy senior positions and many leading Party members actually had little influence on decision-making. The Politburo effectively stopped meeting regularly in the mid-1930s (from 80 sessions a year in 1922 to 2 in 1940) and became a rubber-stamping body. For example, Rudzutak spent more time with Stalin when he left the Politburo than he did while a full member.

This reached the point where Moshe Lewin has accused the late Stalinist system of effectively being a ‘no-party state’, in which the Party was reduced to a control tool and real power lay with the various Ministries/Commissariats. So you have a period in which the head of government (Molotov at the time) is a figurehead and the head of party rules through a combination of state and party structures. In 1941 Stalin did formalise this by taking Lenin’s old title of Chairman of Sovnarkom, thus combining the two offices for the first time.

Khrushchev

I won’t spend much time here as it’s outside my comfort zone. But when Stalin died the Khrushchev-Malenkov duumvirate essentially split the party-state arrangement at the highest level. Khrushchev became General Secretary and Malenkov Chairman of Sovnarkom (now Sovmin). This lasted until Khrushchev won the resulting struggle and Bulganin replaced Malenkov (only to be replaced in turn by Khrushchev following party intrigue). So there was a period in which the powers concentrated by Stalin in his own hands were distributed between the roles, until Khrushchev manage to recombine them.

Post-Khrushchev (arguably post- Kosygin) and the position of Chairman fades in importance with the General Secretary clearly being in charge. All the later figures that you’d recognise (Brezhnev, etc) were General Secretaries. At this point (ie post-1960s) we can say that the rule of Party head predominating holds true.

Summary

So what’s the relevance of all the above? Largely that Soviet power structures went through several shifts over time and were never strictly institutional. Informal networks and personal ways of working played a key role in shaping Soviet decision-making.

Select Sources

Below are a few good places to start. Happy to provide some more works if required.

• Graeme Gill’s The Origins of the Stalinist Political System is a solid introduction to the evolution of Stalinism as a political system.

• I’ve deliberately not touched on the lower levels of the Soviet state (where a lot of the same problems occur) but Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War has some good essays on early Soviet state-building.

• Stephan Wheatcroft has done some fascinating research (From Team Stalin to Degenerate Tyranny) on the importance of proximity to Stalin, rather than formal office, in determining the real Soviet elite at this time. The whole work it’s in, Edward Rees’ The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship, is also obviously relevant.

• Moshe Lewin’s comment came from his The Soviet Century. Also contains observations on the later periods.

• It’s concerned with the creation of Putin’s sistema but Alena Ledeneva’s Can Russia Modernise? provides a nice conceptual model, and historical context, for Soviet informal networks.

[Edit: Tweaks to the end of the Stalin period, to clarify the meaning.]

The head of the party was always the more powerful position - the party set policy, the 'state' (which I'm going to treat in this case as being the Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet - this body was sort of the 'democratic' representation for the Soviet party-state) and 'government' (who chairs the Council of People's Commissars, later Council of Ministers) were there as a mouth piece and to implement policy as directed respectively. Lenin was sort of the head of the party by default, he didn't exactly hold an office that said he was the boss. The General Secretary became defacto head of the party under Stalin. The head of state was really more a symbolic thing, they just didn't have the power or authority that the head of the party/government would have.

Complicating things a little bit further is Soviet leaders often held multiple offices. So both Stalin and Khrushchev were both head of the party and government (so General Secretary and chairing the Council of Ministers) while from Brezhnev onwards the head of the party was also head of state, with government being left to another senior party member (so under Brezhnev it started off with Kosygin from memory... or perhaps he got it a few years in?). Lenin while not formally head of the party, did hold key government positions. This is before we get into special bodies formed during the Civil War/WWII for Lenin and Stalin which were also effective executive decision making bodies.