ABSTRACT
On 26 December 1957, eight months after the decision had been taken to create sovnarkhozy (decentralized economic councils), Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CC CPU) in which he gave a positive evaluation of the start of their work. As First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), he declared that their work was enabling people’s initiatives to unfold. Khrushchev formulated his vision of the problem of governing society as follows:
Comrades, you know we can’t think that under communism we shall have some kind of single administrative centre from where we will govern and say which machines will go where. Above all, we have to be communists. Therefore we must govern in such a way that nobody governs for society, but society itself does the governing. Therefore we need decentralization; this means attracting a wider circle into governing the economy; so that we as an organization actually move in the right direction, towards a deepening of socialist construction in our state. This is good, but we need to go further, and we shall, and we shall broaden the attraction of the general public for governing and for the self-servicing of society.1
