General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Ð"енеральный Ñекретарь ЦК КПСС) was the title given to the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. With some exceptions, the office was synonymous with leader of the Soviet Union. Throughout its history the office had four other names: Technical Secretary (1917â€"1918), Chairman of the Secretariat (1918â€"1919), Responsible Secretary (1919â€"1922) and First Secretary (1953â€"1966). Joseph Stalin elevated the office to overall command of the Communist Party and by extension the whole Soviet Union.
History of the office
In its first two incarnations the office performed mostly secretarial work. The post of Responsible Secretary was then established in 1919 to perform administrative work. In 1922, the office of General Secretary followed as a purely administrative and disciplinary position, whose role was to do no more than determine party membership composition. Stalin, its first incumbent, used the principles of democratic centralism to transform his office into that of party leader, and later leader of the Soviet Union.
In 1934, the 17th Party Congress refrained from formally re-electing Stalin as General Secretary. However, Stalin was re-elected into all other positions and remained leader of the party without diminishment.
In the 1950s, Stalin increasingly withdrew from Secretariat business, leaving the supervision of the body to Georgy Malenkov, possibly to test him as a potential successor. In October 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, Stalin restructured the party's leadership. His request, voiced through Malenkov, to be relieved of his duties in the party secretariat due to his age, was rejected by the party congress, as delegates were unsure about Stalin's intentions. In the end, the congress formally abolished Stalin's office of General Secretary, though Stalin remained one of the party secretaries and maintained ultimate control of the Party. When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, Malenkov was the most important member of the Secretariat, which also included Nikita Khrushchev among others. Malenkov became Chairman of the Council of Ministers but was forced to resign from the Secretariat nine days later on 14 March, leaving Khrushchev in effective control of the body. Khrushchev was elected to the new office of First Secretary at the Central Committee plenum on 14 September of the same year. Originally conceived as a collective leadership, Khrushchev removed his rivals from power in both 1955 and 1957 and reinforced the supremacy of the First Secretary.
In 1964 opposition within the Politburo and the Central Committee led to Khrushchev's removal as First Secretary. Leonid Brezhnev succeeded Khrushchev to the post and the office was renamed General Secretary in 1966. During the Brezhnev Era the collective leadership was able to limit the powers of the General Secretary. Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were obliged by protocol to rule the country in the same way as Brezhnev had. Mikhail Gorbachev ruled the Soviet Union through the office of General Secretary until 1990, when the Communist Party lost its monopoly of power over the political system. The office of President of the Soviet Union was established so that Gorbachev still retained his role as leader of the Soviet Union. Following the failed August coup of 1991, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary. He was succeeded by his deputy, Vladimir Ivashko, who only served for five days as Acting General Secretary before Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, suspended all Communist Party activity. Following the party's ban, the Union of Communist Parties â€" Communist Party of the Soviet Union (UCPâ€"CPSU) was established by Oleg Shenin in 1993. The UCPâ€"CPSU works as a framework for reviving and restoring the CPSU. The organisation has members in all the former Soviet republics. Its current leader is Gennady Zyuganov, who is concurrently First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
List of General Secretaries
See also
- Communist Party of the Soviet Union