When Lenin moved his government from Petrograd to Moscow, he was evidently satisfied in broad terms with how it had been evolving, for he immediately set about re-establishing the Smolny patterns in the Kremlin. These patterns assigned supreme importance, in the whole hierarchy of government decision-making, to the formal meetings of Sovnarkom, and it is to the organisation and character of these meetings that the present chapter is devoted.

As we saw in Chapter 3, initially Sovnarkom was convened every evening, but there was some falling off in frequency of meetings even before the transfer to Moscow. As effective procedures for the organisation of business and the devolution of matters to subordinate bodies – especially the Little Sovnarkom and later the Defence Council – were evolved, the trend to less frequent meetings continued. Lidia Fotiyeva, who was then working in the Sovnarkom Secretariat, recalls that in the initial period of its operation in Moscow the Sovnarkom was meeting daily except for Sundays and sometimes Thursdays. In the middle months of 1918 it settled down to a routine of meeting on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Then on 12 August a decision was taken to stop meeting on Saturdays. Six weeks later, however, the evenings of meeting were changed to Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.