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Article: Presidential Council
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Russian History
- Author:
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PRESIDENTIAL COUNCIL
In March 1990, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost its political monopoly and Mikhail Gorbachev was elected president of the USSR, he created a new Presidential Council to replace the Politburo as the major policy-making body in the Soviet Union. The council's task, according to the newly revised Soviet constitution, was to determine the USSR's foreign and domestic policy. This was a major institutional innovation. The Presidential Council was to be independent of the Communist Party, which at this stage was viewed as incapable of reform, and was intended to challenge the power of the Defense Council (subsequently abolished) and to increase and ...