Abstract
Leonard Schapiro has identified six main features in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as it appeared to him in 1952 on the eve of Stalin’s death. In the first place he put the fact that while retaining its selectivity the CPSU had become a ‘mass party’. This was at a time when there were slightly over 6,700,000 party members. Shortly after the political demise of Khrushchev (1 January 1965) the party had a membership of 11,758,000. By 1974 party membership stood at well over 15,000,000. Of course, the population of the USSR has increased considerably since 1953 (from 184.8 millions to 248.6 millions in 1973). As Table 5.1 shows, party membership more than doubled in the same period, although expressed as a percentage of the population the increase in party size was far less dramatic. Moreover, comparison would be more realistic had we full information on percentages of party size in relation to that part of the Soviet population aged eighteen and over. Brezhnev at the XXIV Congress mentioned that the figure (March 1971) stood at 9 per cent, or one out of every eleven adults.
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Notes
Anthony Sampson,Macmillan. A Study in Ambiguity(London,1967) p. 22
John D. Nagle, ‘The Soviet Political Elite, 1917–1971: Application of a Generational Model of Social Change’, a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, mimeo (1973) p. 3. Nagle cites the views of three scholars on the question of political consciousness (see his footnotes 5, 6, 7).
Erich Fromm, ‘The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx’s Theory’, in Erich Fromm, Socialist Humanism: An international symposium (London, 1967) pp. 207–22, 210–11. Fromm defines the ‘social character’ as: ‘that particular structure of psychic energy which is moulded by any given society so as to be useful for the functioning of that particular society’. We are not suggesting that this is directly equatable with ‘political conscious ness’.
Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom. The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (London, 1949 ed.) p. 107.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography (Harmondsworth, 1965) p. 109.
Michael P. Gehlen, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A Functional Analysis ( Bloomington, Indiana, 1969 ) p. 39.
These quotations are from Leonid Brezhnev, Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 24th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1971) pp. 116–17.
See T. H. Rigby, ‘The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilising Oligarchy?’, Soviet Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (1970) pp. 167–91. On ‘immobilism’ and the generational problem, see especially pp. 190–1.
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© 1978 Peter Frank
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Frank, P. (1978). The Changing Composition of the Communist Party. In: Brown, A., Kaser, M. (eds) The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khrushchev. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15847-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15847-8_5
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