Nearly fifty men and one woman served for longer or shorter periods as members of Lenin's Sovnarkom. What sort of people were they? How were they chosen, and by whom? Were they selected for their party seniority and revolutionary services, or rather for the possesssion of appropriate qualifications and experience? What was their social and ethnic background, and what kind of education had they received? The answers to such questions should tell us much about the capabilities and position of Sovnarkom as an instrument of rule.

In this chapter and the next we shall be looking respectively at the recruitment and the background of the Sovnarkom membership and at how they changed over the Lenin period. There would be merit in widening our enquiry to include all the members of commissariat boards and others entitled to attend Sovnarkom meetings, some of whom, as we have seen, were more active in Sovnarkom affairs than were some of the people's commissars. Unfortunately, however, it is virtually impossible to establish a definitive list of such persons, and very little information is available about many of them. Moreover, questions of space oblige us to concentrate on the central core-group of government figures, and no objective criterion of such ‘centrality’ is available other than the admittedly imperfect one of formal people's commissar status.

The initial membership of Sovnarkom was thrashed out within some 36 hours in the heat and confusion attending the armed seizure of power and the Second Congress of Soviets.