The abortive reform: proposals for the revision of the administrative-territorial division of the USSR (1948)

The article deals with a plot not previously touched upon in historical science: the initiatives put forward in 1948 to revise the administrative-territorial division (ATD) of several USSR republics: RSFSR, Belorussian and Kazakh SSR. Until now, it was believed that the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s was a period of “calm” after a series of reforms and counter-reforms in this area. However, documents discovered in the archives show that there were ideas to continue the transformations. They were motivated by the need to increase the efficiency of the work of the party and Soviet authorities through the reduction of the administrative apparatus and the elimination of its redundant links – regions – by their consolidation. These proposals were ignored, but the problem of improving the efficiency of management in its territorial aspect persisted. This series of initiatives, despite its seeming insignificance, had far-reaching consequences for the political and economic system of the USSR, marking the beginning of an active, albeit rather haphazard search for improvement in spatial organization, the stages of which were attempts to create a bureaus of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) for several macro-regions of the USSR in 1949 and the introduction of regional division in the republics that didn’t have it in 1951–1952.