COMMUNIST PARTY’S REGIONAL CONFERENCE AND REGIONAL COMMITTEE AS INSTITUTIONS OF REGIONAL POWER OF THE LATE SOVIET ERA (based on the material of the Upper Volga regions)

The article analyses the social characteristics of key regional structures of the Communist Party power and the features of their composition. The study focuses on the Party institutions of regional power in the late USSR: the regional Party conference, the regional committee of the Party, the bureau of the regional committee of the Party. Considerable attention is paid in the article to the historiography of the issue of regional power in the USSR. The methodological framework of the study consisted of an institutional approach, a combination of source analysis and the oral history paradigm, the principles of historicism and systematicity. The theoretical basis of the article is based on the network approach to institutions of power (ideas of Aleksandr Konovalov, Viktor Mokhov, Oleg Khlevniuk, Yoram Gorlizki). The central concept of the study is the concept of “regional leadership network”. The “ administrative market theory” is of an auxiliary nature. Acording to Simon Kordonskiy. The basis of the corpus of sources for the article was unpublished material from archives of Russia’s regions (Vladimir, Ivanovo, Kostroma, Yaroslavl). A significant part of the sources consisted of oral history evidence – semi-structured interviews conducted personally by the author. The article concludes that contradictory trends had been growing in regional Party institutions of power. It is noted that there was an active inclusion of broad sections of the population in regional authorities, based on the values of Soviet democracy. However, actual decision-making was in the hands of the Party nomenclature clique, headed by the first secretary of the regional Party committee. It is emphasised that the real institutional centre for making management decisions at the regional level of government in the USSR was the Bureau of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party. A general increase in the educational level of the Party conference delegates and members of the regional committee of the Party is noted.