Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

• 1. Origins And Early Structure

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  In 1898, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party convened its founding congress and established a Central Committee with three initial members. Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Friedrich Lengnik, and Vladimir Noskov took their seats to supervise the party newspaper Iskra. This small group held the right to decide all party issues except local ones. The Bolshevik faction supported this central organ while Julius Martov led the minority that became known as Mensheviks. Lenin persuaded the committee to initiate the October Revolution of 1917 despite skepticism from most members. A vote passed with ten in favour and two against the motion to carry out a revolution. During these early years, Karl Radek criticized Lenin's position on peace with Germany by stating if there were five hundred courageous men in Petrograd they would put him in prison. The system allowed criticism during meetings but opposition to Lenin's centralization policies grew louder at the 9th Party Congress in March 1920.

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• 2. Stalinist Consolidation And Purges

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  The Great Purge between 1936 and 1940 eliminated nearly eighty percent of the Central Committee members elected at the 17th Party Congress in 1934. Of the 139 people elected to the committee, ninety-eight were killed or imprisoned during this period. Grigory Kaminsky spoke against the purge at a meeting before being arrested and executed himself. Stalin used his control over personnel appointments to ensure ideological conformity throughout the organization. By the 18th Congress in 1939 only thirty-one members remained and just two had been reelected from the previous body. Molotov later described how seventy expelled fifteen persons then sixty expelled another fifteen until a minority of the majority remained within the committee. The Politburo did not convene once between 1950 when Nikolai Voznesensky was killed and 1953. Under Khrushchev an investigation concluded that all decisions taken unanimously from 1929 onwards showed the committee lost its ruling function under Stalin.

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• 3. Post-Stalin Power Struggles

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  Georgy Malenkov succeeded Stalin as chairman on the 5th of March 1953 but resigned from the Secretariat by March 14 to grant the request of the Council of Ministers chairman. Lavrentiy Beria contested power alongside Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev forming a short-lived Troika until they betrayed him. Beria renounced the Doctor's Plot through an official pronouncement by the Ministry of Internal Affairs rather than the Central Committee. Khrushchev and Malenkov gathered enough support for Beria's ouster after rumors of a potential coup led by Beria began circulating among party leadership. Beria forced to resign from all his party posts on June 26 and executed on December 23. Malenkov initiated policies strengthening central ministries while establishing savings of twenty point two billion rubles for Soviet taxpayers. By August 1954 Nikolai Bulganin began signing Council of Ministers decrees marking the end of Malenkov's role as de facto head of government. The Anti-Party Group including Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich attempted to dismiss Khrushchev in June 1957 before being expelled from the committee.

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• 4. Brezhnev Era Bureaucratization

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  Leonid Brezhnev succeeded Khrushchev on the 14th of October 1964 after a majority in the Central Committee voted to remove him from office. The number of meetings decreased steadily during Brezhnev's rule with Politburo officials rarely participating in sessions between 1966 and 1976. Alexei Kosygin Podgorny and Mikhail Suslov attended only one meeting in 1973 to ratify the treaty with West Germany. No Politburo or Secretariat members served as speakers during Central Committee meetings throughout this era. The survival ratio of full members reached eighty-nine percent at the 26th Congress in March 1981. Membership expanded to three hundred nineteen by 1981 with new membership consisting of twenty-eight percent of the total body. Brezhnev filled the majority of the committee with his own appointees by 1977 while maintaining mutual vulnerability and dependence with the general secretary. The collective leadership emphasized stability of cadres resulting in gradual increases in member retention rates across successive congresses.

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• 5. Gorbachev Reforms And Dissolution

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  Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary unanimously on the 11th of March 1985 following Chernenko's death four days earlier. The Politburo recommended Gorbachev to the Central Committee which approved him without opposition from Dinmukhamed Konayev Volodymyr Shcherbytsky or Vitaly Vorotnikov. By 1988 delegates demanded term limits and multi-candidate elections within the party at the first conference since 1941. Six Commissions established on the 30th of September 1988 included bodies led by Alexander Yakovlev Yegor Ligachev Georgy Razumovsky Vadim Medvedev Nikolay Slyunkov and Viktor Chebrikov. The commissions did not convene until early 1989 but some heads received responsibilities immediately including Medvedev tasked with creating a new definition of socialism. In 1990 the Congress of People Deputies voted to remove Article 6 from the 1977 Soviet Constitution ending the Communist Party's position as leading force. The committee officially disbanded upon banning the CPSU in late 1991 after years of accelerating disintegration of party control.

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