The article examines the dynamics of subregional party leadership turnover – first secretaries of district party committees in the North Ossetian ASSR from 1953 to 1961. The relevance of this research topic is determined by the fact that the specifics of the rotation of first secretaries of district CPSU committees and the functioning mechanisms of district-level party bodies during the «thaw» period remain poorly studied in Russian historiography. Furthermore, an analysis of approaches to the rotation of subregional party leaders is essential for developing an effective personnel policy at the present stage, both at the local and regional levels. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the fact that, based on a large body of documents from the North Ossetian Regional Committee of the CPSU, introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time, the stages of large-scale rotation of first secretaries of district party committees are identified and the main reasons for the renewal of the party leadership corps are revealed. The source material for this work includes recently declassified regional party committee minutes and other party records, as well as materials from the newspaper «Socialist Ossetia» from the 1950s and 1960s. The study is based on historicism and the problem-chronological method. The principles of a systems approach employed in the work allowed us to examine the party nomenklatura as an important element of Soviet society. The study was conducted taking into account changes in the administrative-territorial division of the North Ossetian ASSR in 1955-1957, following the abolition of certain districts (Gizeldonsky, Darg-Kokhsky, and others), which led to the liquidation of several district party committees. An analysis of archival documents and periodicals allowed the authors to establish that personnel changes in the corps of district committee secretaries were caused by various reasons: the desire of regional leadership to get rid of secretaries who violated the norms of intra-party democracy, changes in the administrative-territorial structure of the republic, and unsatisfactory results of the socio-economic development of the districts.