"Viktor Suvorov. Inside soviet military intelligence (англ) " - читать интересную книгу автора

Each system of governing the State is duplicated and reduplicated.
Soviet power itself is duplicated. If one visits any regional committee of
the Party and then the Regional Executive Committee one is struck by the
fact that two separate organizations having almost identical structures and
deciding identical prob1ems nevertheless take completely contradictory
decisions. Neither one of these organisations has the authority to decide
anything independently.
This same system exists at all stages and at all levels of the
Government. If we look at the really important decisions of the Soviet
leadership, those which are published in the papers, we will find that any
one of them is taken only at joint sessions of the Central Committee of the
Party and the Council of Ministers. I have in front of me as I write the
last joint resolution on raising the quality and widening the range of
production of children's toys. Neither the Council of Ministers of the
gigantic State structure nor the Central Committee of the ruling Party is
able, since neither has the power and authority, to take an independent
decision on such an important matter. But we are not talking here just about
Ministers and First Secretaries. At all lower levels the same procedure is
to be observed. For example, only a joint decision of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of a republic and the Council of Ministers of the
same republic, or the Provincial Committee and the Provincial Executive
Committee, is valid. At these levels of course, such crucial problems as the
quality of children's toys are not decided; but the principle remains that
no separate and independent decisions can be taken. In shape and form,
Soviet power is everywhere duplicated, from the planning of rocket
launchings into space to the organisation for the burial of Soviet citizens,
from the management of diplomatic missions abroad to lunatic asylums, from
the construction of sewers to atomic ice-breakers.
In addition to the governing organs which give orders and see that they
are carried out, there also exist Central Control Organs which are
independent of the local authority. The basic one of these is of course the
KGB, but independently of the KGB other powerful organs are also active: the
innocent-sounding People's Control for example, a secret police organisation
subordinated to a Politburo member who exercises almost as much influence as
the Chief of the KGB. In addition to the People's Control, the Ministry of
the Interior is also active and this is subordinated neither to the KGB nor
to Control. There is also the Central Organ of the press, a visit of which
to a factory or workshop causes hardly less anger than a visit of the OBHSS,
the socialist fraud squad. On the initiative of Lenin, it was seen as
essential that each powerful organ or organisation which is capable of
taking independent decisions be counter-balanced by the existence of another
no less powerful bureaucratic organisation. The thinking goes: we have a
newspaper Pravda, let's have another on a similar scale - Izvestia. Tass
created, as a counter-balance to it, APN. Not for competition but simply for
duplication. In this way the comrades in the Politburo are able to live a
quieter life. To control everybody and everything is absolutely impossible,
and this is why duplication exists. Everybody jealously pursues his rival
and in good time informs whoever he should inform of any flashes of
inspiration, of any deviation from the established norm, any effort to look
at what is going on from the standpoint of a healthy critical mind.