This article discusses some of the charges against the main persons involved in the so-called “Leningrad affair” – one of the most important political affairs of the "late Stalin period". These “Leningraders” were planning to establish a leading party organ for the RSFSR. Regardless of whether the “Leningraders” were aware of this or not, this would entail significant shifts in the supreme leadership of the USSR, the redistribution of powers in the highest organs of power, and the appearance there of one of the most influential figures. At the Leningrad Party Conference in 1948, the results of the secret ballot were falsified. This was not only a consequence of the propensity to violate the rule of law and the self-aggrandizement of the Leningrad bosses, but also a threat to the Stalinist system of power. It consisted in the fact that the “Leningraders” demonstrated the way to nullify the secret ballot in the party organizations, which was introduced by Stalin in 1937 as one of the main elements of “inner-party democracy”.

The paper examines administrative practices of the Sverdlovsk region party-state nomenclature in 1937–1938 during the leadership of A.Ya.Stolyar. Regional leadership headed by Stolyar demonstrated commitment to Stalin’s political reforms and directives of the supreme power but in reality offered tacitly stubborn resistance to their implementation on the grounds that these changes limited absolute power of the regional party nomenclature, threatened its material well-being and stability.