The Communist Party was not the only outside body charged with supervising Soviet industry to ensure that it operated in a legal and efficient manner. There was a host of administrative and voluntary social (obshchestvennye) organizations which performed monitoring functions in the Soviet economy.

During the Brezhnev era there was an attempt to increase the role of these supplementary bodies to ease the burden of supervisory work formerly shouldered by party organs. This would leave party officials free to concentrate on their core political and ideological functions. Despite the extensive nature of these auxiliary control activities, in fact they had a minimal impact on bureaucratic and managerial behaviour. The non-party organs fell prey to all of the problems which dogged the supervisory work of party organs – lack of time and expertise; a tendency to collude with economic managers; and a lack of authority vis-à-vis the ministerial hierarchies.

Thus the attempt to shift responsibility for bureaucratic supervision from party to non-party organs seems to have been a dismal failure. M. Gorbachev delivered a scathing indictment of the work of Soviet control organs in his report to the January 1987 CC CPSU meeting, arguing that the morass of commissions and inspections had produced ‘miserable’ results. This chapter will try to explain why this policy failed – and why, despite this failure, the system persisted in relying on external control agencies.