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Renewal and Dead Souls: The Changing Soviet Central Committee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Evan Mawdsley  and
Stephen White
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Extract

For a Soviet General Secretary presumably committed to the collectivist principles of Marxism-Leninism, Mikhail Gorbachev has been peculiarly insistent upon the decisive importance of individual leadership. In speech after speech it was not only the socioeconomic order that Gorbachev held to be the source of the Soviet Union's problems: the quality and style of its political leadership were also crucial factors.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 1990 , pp. 537 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Materialy XXVIIs'ezda KPSS (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), p. 4.Google Scholar

2 Materialy plenuma Tsentral'nogo komiteta KPSS 27–28 ianvaria 1987 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1987), pp. 11–15, 24–5.Google Scholar

3 Pravda, 27 07 1989, p. 2.Google Scholar

4 Kommunist, no. 13 (1988), p. 11.Google Scholar

5 Pravda, 8 05 1989, p. 3; 11 06 1989, p. 4.Google Scholar

6 Pravda, 26 05 1989, p. 4.Google Scholar

7 Pravda, 31 03 1989, p. 2.Google Scholar

8 A new development here is the election of 139 CC members to be People's Deputies of the USSR (narodnye deputaty SSSR) (Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 10, pp. 104–5).Google Scholar

9 The terms ‘full members’ and ‘candidate members’ are used for the Russian terms chleny and kandidaty v chleny respectively; the term ‘members’ refers to both.

10 Teague, Elizabeth, ‘“Dead Souls” in the Central Committee’, RL 17/87, Radio Liberty Research Bulletin, no. 2 (3415), 14 01 1987.Google Scholar The idea of ‘dead souls’ is, of course, originally based on Gogol's 1842 novel of the same name; the hero tries to make his fortune by mortgaging dead ‘souls’, male serfs who had died since the previous census but who were formally liable to tax until the next one.

11 Gorbachev, M. S., Izbrannye rechi istat'i, vol. 5 (Moscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1988), p. 156.Google Scholar

At the little-studied 18th Party Conference (February 1941) six full members and fifteen candidate members were dismissed from the CC (and a number of members were warned of possible expulsion). Six new full members and seventeen candidate members were elected; two of the new full members (M. A. Suslov and O. V. Kuusinen) and all of the new candidates had not been elected to the CC at the 18th Congress two years before. The CC elected in February 1939 comprised only seventy-one members and sixty-eight candidates so these changes were, in percentage terms, substantial. See Rezoliutsii XVIII vsesoiuznoi konferentsii VKP(b) (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1941), pp. 21–2.Google Scholar

12 Four other members had been dismissed between March 1986 and April 1989.

13 Prauda, 26 04 1989, p. 1.Google Scholar The obrashchenie was signed by 110 people: ninety-eight CC members, plus twelve members of the Central Revision Commission. However, those who resigned from the CC and the CRC did not include all people who were already retired from their other party or state posts; some retired officials evidently decided to stay on in the CC or the CRC.

14 Seven candidates were promoted to full member status between the 27th Congress and the April 1989 plenum.

The situation changed little at CC level after April; full membership as of October 1989 was 249; this reflected a further promotion from candidate to full member at the September 1989 plenum and several deaths (Izvesliia Tsk KPSS, 1989, no. 10, pp. 104–5).Google Scholar

15 As of this date six republic-level first secretaries and eighty-eight regional first secretaries were not members of the CC (Pravda, 27 04 1989, p. 3).Google Scholar

In September 1989, Izvestiia TsK KPSS (1989, no. 9, pp. 51–85)Google Scholar gave biographical details of regional leaders who were not CC members. These included six first secretaries at republic level (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania and Uzbekistan) out of a total of fourteen. Also not on the CC were eighty-seven first secretaries at krai and oblast level – out of a total of 144 – and all ten first secretaries at okrug level.

For a recent critical survey of the pace of change in the CC see Sazonov, V., ‘TsK KPSS i perestroika’, Argumenty i fakty, no. 5 (1990), p. 6.Google Scholar

16 XIX vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia KPSS: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), vol. 2, p. 143.Google Scholar For further discussion of the party rules and the importance of changes in them see Gill, Graeme, The Rules of the CPSU (London: Macmillan, 1988)Google Scholar and White, Stephen, Soviet Communism: Programme and Rules (London: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar

17 Pravda, 20 09 1989, p. 1, and 17 03 1990, p. 1.Google Scholar

18 Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 10, p. 107.Google Scholar