Laventry Beria was keen of often citing Louis XVI's famous quote when discussing the future of a post-Beria Soviet Union - "après moi, le déluge." After his brains were unceremoniously scooped out of his skull by a band of radical students who sought to attach it to a computer, he was very rapidly proven correct. The muted opposition from the Soviet political establishment, fearing that they were next, empowered one man in particular to gamble it all.
Although many Western observers argued that the Moscow Commune was a rebirth of Council Communism, insofar that it believed that the revolution ought to be led and determined by locally selected governments and democratically selected party committees, this was largely a self-interested ploy. In their own writings, the Moscow Commune stated its support for vanguard Communism and democratic centralism - they just argued that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was no longer functioning to express the democratic will of party cadres, even as they still believed it should still function as a vanguard party.
Snezhnevsky called for Soviet workers and students to march onto the Kremlin and quite simply replace the national Soviet government with a new government entirely, one based on "authentically democratic principles." Andropov, with his close relations with the NKVD, rapidly worked to broker a compromise between the NKVD and the Moscow Commune. Aliyev, who was thrust into the position, took a deal to simply resign and be shuffled to a position managing ethnic affairs (where his power base was stronger). The students demanded that Politburo created a new Standing Committee, which would include all of the additional members, but which would also include "democratically selected" academics. soldiers (mostly NKVD), and union leaders (drawing from Beria's worker self-managed enterprises) selected from across the entire nation. The compromise taken was that all such members had to be Communist Party members, but in the face of what increasingly became known as the Terror Spring, enough Soviet bureaucrats acquiesced. They saw what happened to Beria, and they had no desire to become the next Beria.
This did not work. The new Standing Committee members were known as "elected" and "meritorious" appointments, and each simply delivered their vote to fill the now empty role of General Secretary with Snezhnevsky himself, who in his inaugural speech called for Soviet citizens to "take revolutionary democracy" in their own hands and purge "antidemocratic bureaucratic dogmatism" and all elements of reactionary, "primitive" thought from Soviet society. The post-World War II baby boom had created a huge cluster of children who were around 21 years old with no real memory of "Stalinism" (at least in the much more radical pre-1941 version). Committees of students loyal to Snezhnevsky formed committees to "standardize and progress Soviet culture." For example, the August Days in Moscow saw almost all of the Soviet Union's economic bureaucrats and planners, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were simply dragged out of their homes and publicly lobotomized by radical students, who quickly shoved brains into a giant jar as a monument to Soviet progress (the jar was called the "brain trust" and the concept was eventually ship it to Wall Street in the United States in order to intimidate it into submission). The only ones spared were those who acquiesced to the new concept of the "11-year plan."
Soviet youth, who spent much of their time burning and looting Orthodox churches with more gusto than any of Lenin or Stalin's men, built an alternative cosmology. Prominent Soviet scientist Alexander Chizhevsky, known for being a crucial scientist in studying solar cycles, was once again given academic freedom to study solar cycles and in particular, his belief that solar cycles would influence human behavior and material history due to ionization in the atmosphere impacting the internal magnetism of humans and driving them towards revolutionary action. Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, Chizhevsky also died, so he was unable to tell off students who took his ideas infinitely further than he had intended. Adopting solar cycles into materialistic class struggle, activists demanded that the five-year plans be changed to eleven-year plans in order to conform to the internal magnetism of Soviet citizens and their "revolutionary drive." As a result, surviving bureaucrats would draft "eleven-year solar plans" instead of the traditional five-year plans, with Soviet workers regularly given phony (but harmless) magnetism tests as a common everyday task (this data was stored and then never used again).
