The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Центральный комитет Коммунистической партии Советского Союза – ЦК КПСС, Tsentralniy Komitet Kommunistitcheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza – TsK KPSS), abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", was de jure the highest body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) between Party Congresses. According to Party rules, the Central Committee directed all Party and government activities between each Party Congress. Members of the committee were elected at the Party Congresses.
During Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the Communist Party, the Central Committee functioned as the highest party authority between congresses. However at the 8th Party Congress held in 1919, the Political Bureau (Politburo) was established to respond to questions needing immediate responses. Some delegates objected to the establishment of the Politburo, and in response, the Politburo became responsible to the Central Committee, and Central Committee members could participate in Politburo sessions with a consultative voice, but could not vote unless they were members. Following Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin took power in the Communist Party through the office of General Secretary of the Central Committee, the leading Secretary of the Secretariat. With Stalin's takeover, the role of the Central Committee was eclipsed by the Politburo, which consisted of a small clique of loyal Stalinists.
By Stalin's death in 1953, the Central Committee had become largely a symbolic organ, which was responsible to the Politburo, and not the other way around. The death of Stalin revitalised the Central Committee, and it became an important institution during the power struggle to succeed Stalin. Following Khrushchev's ascension to power, the Central Committee still played a leading role; it overturned the Politburo's decision to remove Khrushchev from office in 1957. In 1964, the Central Committee ousted Khrushchev from power, and elected Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary. The Central Committee was an important organ in the beginning of Brezhnev's rule, but lost effective power to the Politburo. From then on, until the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Central Committee played a minor role in the running of the party and state – the Politburo was the highest political organ in the Soviet Union.
Read more about Central Committee Of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union: Duties and Responsibilities, Physical Location
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, central, committee, communist, party, soviet and/or union:
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other’s affairs, who “come out” together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“In a higher phase of communist society ... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“It is well-known what a middleman is: he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“One difference between Nazi and Soviet camps was that in the latter dying was a slower process.”
—Terrence Des Pres (1939–1987)
“Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves,—the union between themselves and the State,—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the same relation to the State that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)