Russia and Its Neighbors - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 219

Two scientific disasters—the Chelyabinsk nuclear accident and a rocket
explosion—caused some dissent among the scientists.
Government: From soon after the 1917 Revolution until 1991 the
Communist Party dominated the Soviet Union. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
soon centralized power with authority vested solely in the party. Other
parties and free newspapers were banned. The secret police, the Cheka
(later called the KGB), spied on citizens. Courts no longer exercised
independent authority. Lenin seized ownership of major industries. The
government bureaucracy, supervised in detail by the Communist Party,
managed every aspect of the economy and society. This extended to mar-
riage and the family. Control grew tighter after Josef Stalin came to power
after Lenin's premature death in 1924. Western critics labeled this totalitar-
ianism, meaning the party and the state sought total control. They equated
it to Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy. Although the Soviet Union
formally had representative bodies like the Congress of People's Deputies,
elections were a sham, and only candidates selected by the party were
elected. Parallel to the government were Communist Party organs like
the Party Congress. Party control was organized from the smallest local
level to the USSR level. Any semblance of democracy was phony. In theory
the Congress of the People's Deputies elected the Supreme Soviet to gov-
ern when it was not in session, and in turn this body elected the Council
of Ministers and adopted economic plans and budgets. The parallel, and
actually more important, party organ was the Politburo (Political Bureau
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party). This was where the
real power lay. The party secretary was the ruler.
The USSR was geographically nearly as extensive as the old Empire of
the czar, thus including many people were where not ethnically Russian.
The largest minority was the Ukrainians, and other major groups were the
Turkic in central Asia. Lenin gave all these groups their own geographi-
cal regions, establishing republics, or autonomous regions. The largest,
Russia, also had republics within itself, known as the Russian Federation.
Thus, the name of the overall federation was the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. Regarding Russia, it was a double federation. The republics
were not in fact autonomous, but subject to the rule of the Communist
Party, and central control from Moscow.
Besides organizing the USSR along ethnic lines, Lenin had to reconcile
Marxist theory to the realities of the revolution. Marx had predicted that
the revolution would come in cities as the proletariat rose up against the
capitalists. But Russia was more than 80% rural, and the peasants were