History of The Office
In its first two incarnations the office performed mostly secretarial work. The post of Responsible Secretary was then established in 1919 to perform administrative work.. In 1922 the office of General Secretary followed as a purely administrative and disciplinary position, whose role was to do no more than determine party membership composition. Stalin, its first incumbent, used the principles of democratic centralism to transform his office into that of party leader, and later leader of the Soviet Union. In 1934, the 17th Party Congress did not elect a General Secretary and Stalin was an ordinary secretary until his death in 1953, although he remained the de facto leader without diminishing his own authority.
In order to test Georgy Malenkov as a potential successor, in the 1950s, Stalin increasingly withdrew from Secretariat business, leaving the supervision of the body to him. In October 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, Stalin restructured the party's leadership and formally abolished the office of General Secretary. When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, Malenkov was the most important member of the Secretariat, which also included Nikita Khrushchev among others. Malenkov became Chairman of the Council of Ministers but was forced to resign from the Secretariat on 14 March 1953, leaving Khrushchev in effective control of the body. Khrushchev was elected First Secretary at the Central Committee plenum on 14 September 1953. Originally conceived as a collective leadership, Khrushchev removed his rivals from power in both 1955 and 1957 and reinforced the supremacy of the First Secretary.
In 1964 opposition within the Politburo and the Central Committee led to Khrushchev's removal as First Secretary. Leonid Brezhnev succeeded Khrushchev to the post and the office was renamed General Secretary in 1966. During the Brezhnev Era the collective leadership was able to limit the powers of the General Secretary. Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were obliged by protocol to rule the country in the same way as Brezhnev had. Mikhail Gorbachev ruled the Soviet Union through the office of General Secretary until 1990, when the Communist Party lost its monopoly of power over the political system. The office of President of the Soviet Union was established so that Gorbachev still retained his role as leader of the Soviet Union. Following the failed August coup of 1991, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary. He was succeeded by his deputy, Vladimir Ivashko, who only served for five days as Acting General Secretary before Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, suspended all Communist Party activity. Following the party's ban, the Union of Communist Parties – Communist Party of the Soviet Union (UCP–CPSU) was established by Oleg Shenin in 1993. The UCP–CPSU works as a framework for reviving and restoring the CPSU. The organisation has members in all the former Soviet republics. Its current leader is Gennady Zyuganov, who is concurrently First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Read more about this topic: General Secretary Of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or office:
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“The human face is the organic seat of beauty.... It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.”
—Eliza Farnham (1815–1864)