Abstract
During the sixty-two years of its existence, the Soviet Union has had only four undisputed leaders. We may reasonably leave out of account Georgiy Malenkov who was senior secretary within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for little more than a week and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for less than two years.’ Iosif Stalin died on 5 March 1953 and by 14 March Malenkov’s supreme power was over. In the two years which followed, there was some ambiguity as to who was the top man in the Soviet Union, but gradually it emerged that the senior party secretary (known for most of Soviet history as the General Secretary, but from September 1953 until April 1966 as the First Secretary) commanded greater political resources than anyone else in the land.
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Notes
Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union 2nd edn (London, 1970) pp. 559 and 561. It could be argued that Malenkov was top man within the Soviet hierarchy for longer than his occupancy of the party secretaryship and a shorter time than his tenure of the Chairmanship of the Council of Ministers. Until mid-1954, when alphabetical order was adopted, his name consistently appeared first in lists of members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the party.
T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–1922 (Cambridge, U.K. 1979) p. x. Rigby notes further that the chairmanships of Sovnarkom and of the Labour and Defence Council (Sonet Truda i Oborony) were the only formal positions which Lenin ever held within the Soviet regime. ‘It is true’, he adds, ‘that as the most authoritative member of the Party Central Committee he usually chaired its meetings and those of the Politburo and was its main spokesman at Party congresses. Yet, unlike other Politburo members such as Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, he never came to hold any formal position in the party giving him direct authority over any of its executive machinery’ (ibid., p. to8).
David Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford, 1963; first published 1741) p. 112.
It is at least arguable that Stalin, in his last few years, and Brezhnev, in the most recent period, were both — as a result of failing health — less dominating figures in the policy process than they had been a year or two earlier. A case could be made for regarding the mid-197os as the zenith of Brezhnev’s power. But even if a reduction in his physical strength has led to some subsequent reduction of his political activity, it must also be noted that in the late seventies the number of Brezhnev protégés in leadership positions was continuing to increase. Khrushchev’s last years present a still more ambiguous picture. On the one hand, there is ample evidence of Khrushchev pushing policies through against the wishes of his colleagues even when he was within two years of his enforced retirement. On the other hand, these very actions provoked opposition, and the over-confidence which led to the actions provided opportunities for that opposition. The limitations upon Khrushchev’s power in the early 1g6os have been skilfully depicted (though somewhat overemphasised at the expense of the very considerable powers he still wielded) by Carl Linden in his Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership 1957–1964 (Baltimore, Md., 1966) and
Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev’s Decline to Collective Leadership (London, 1969).
One of the best accounts of this process is still Leonard Schapiro’s The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The most detailed study of Stalin is Robert C. Tucker’s trilogy, of which the first volume, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1899–1929 (London, 1974) has already appeared. See also
Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977);
Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (London, 1971); and
Roy A. Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism (Oxford, 1979).
Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power: The Role of Stalin’s Secret Chancellery in the Soviet System of Government (Copenhagen, 1978).
See, for example, Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Tears in Power (Oxford, 1977) pp. 129–42.
There is plenty of evidence of real discussion taking place at Politburo level in the Khrushchev era, though it is also clear that Khrushchev often succeeded in getting his way against the better judgement of his colleagues, since those same colleagues proceeded to criticise and reverse a number of the policies, to which, in principle, they were parties, within a very short time of Khrushchev’s removal. These changes have been summarised in my chapter to of Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (eds), The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khrushchev (London, 1975; 2nd edn, 1978) pp. 218–75, esp. 218–38. For a statement by Khrushchev that the Politburo (or Presidium of the Central Committee as it was known then) met weekly when he was First Secretary, see
Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (eds), Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (London, 1974) p. 25.
See T. H. Rigby, ‘The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilizing Oligarchy?’, Soviet Studies, xxii, no. 2 (October 1970) pp. 167–91, esp. pp. 1756;
P. A. Rodionov, Kollektivnost’ — vysshii printsip partiinogo rukovodstva (Moscow, 1967) p. 219 (cited by Rigby, p. 175).
New York Times 15 June 1973, p. 3; cited in Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) pp. 471 and 650.
See, for example, Harold Wilson, The Governance of Britain (London, 1976) p. 45.
In sharp contrast with his predecessor. See, e.g. Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965);
and Zhores Medvedev, io Years After Ivan Denisovich (London, 1973) esp. pp. 119–20.
L. I. Brezhnev, Voprosy razvitiya politicheskoi sistemy sovetskogo obshchestva (Moscow 1977) pp. 434–8, esp. 434–5.
The general point has been made by Peter Vanneman in The Supreme Soviet: Politics and the Legislative Process in the Soviet Political System (Durham, N.C., 1977). Writing prior to Brezhnev’s assumption of the presidency, Vanneman pointed to the close links between departments of the Central Committee and the commissions of the Supreme Soviet, observing (p. 214) that ‘the commissions are virtually the legal arm of the Secretariat and practically duplicate it in some respects’. The point that he makes about the commissions could be extended to embrace the role of the Presidium and its Chairman: ‘The commissions constitute a second line of supervision for the Party apparatus — legal “kontrol” over the organs of state administration.’
Willy Brandt, People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975 (London, 1978) p. 336.
Mohamed Heikal,.Nasser: The Cairo Documents (London, 1972), pp. 147–8; see also
Heikal’s Sphinx and Commissar: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in the Arab World (London, 1978) p. 135.
Joseph LaPalombara, ‘Monoliths or Plural Systems: Through Conceptual Lenses Darkly’, Studies in Comparative Communism, viii, no. 3 (Autumn 1975) p. 317.
Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (London, 1962).
See on educational reform Mervyn Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia (London, 1972) esp. chs to and II;
Nigel Grant, Soviet Education (4th edn, Harmondsworth, 1979) esp. pp. 109–17;
Joel J. Schwartz and William R. Keech, ‘Group Influence and the Policy Process in the Soviet Union’ in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr (ed.), Communist Studies and the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1969) pp. 298–317; and
Philip D. Stewart, ‘Soviet Interest Groups and the Policy Process: The Repeal of Production Education’, World Politics, xxii, no. 1 (October 1969) pp. 29–50.
See Sidney Ploss, Conflict and Decision-.baking in Soviet Russia: A Case Study of Agricultural Policy, 1953–1963 (Princeton, N.J., 1965);
Werner G. Hahn, The Politics of Soviet Agriculture, 1960–1970 (Baltimore, Md., and London, 1972);
Karl-Eugen Wädekin, The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Calif., and London, 1973); and
Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: The Virgin Land Programme 1953–1964 (London, 1976).
K. U. Chernenko, Nekotorye voprosy tvorcheskogo ra.vitiya stilya partiynnoi i gosudarstvennoi raboty 2nd edn (Moscow, 1978) p. 6.
The Earl of Swinton, Sixty Years of Power: Some Memories of the Men who Wielded It (London, 1966) p. 67.
Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev, Tselina (Moscow, 1978) p. 50.
Cf. Jerry F. Hough, ‘The Brezhnev Era: The Man and the System’, Problems of Communism, xxv, no. 2 (March–April 1976) pp. 1–17.
Zdenék Mlynâr, Mrdz pichdzi z Kremlu (Cologne, 1978) pp. 217–8. The constraints upon Brezhnev’s freedom of political action, and his consciousness of them at that time, are emphasised by a Polish first-hand observer. See
Erwin Weit, Eyewitness: The Autobiography of Gomulka’s Interpreter (London, 1973) p. 177.
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Brown, A. (1980). The Power of the General Secretary of the CPSU. In: Rigby, T.H., Brown, A., Reddaway, P. (eds) Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04326-2_8
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