Abstract
This chapter deals with the membership of the Politburo/Presidium and is based on earlier research on a larger elite, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.1 Great power was accorded the Central Committee in the various party Rules, and the operational role of the Central Committee’s administration (apparat) was great. Despite this, the Central Committee was arguably significant, not so much because it was an actual centre of policy making (as opposed to policy-approval), but because its members were a cross-section of the senior Soviet leadership, notably in the central and regional party administration, in the central people’s commissariats (after 1946, ministries), and in the army high command.
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Notes and references
Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Stalin: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917–1991 (Oxford, 2000). My co-researcher, Stephen White, and I are grateful to the United Kingdom Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) who provided a generous award, R231491, for the creation of the large Soviet Elite Project (SEP) Database on the Central Committee of 1917–90.
The vital differences between the Politburo and the Central Committee (CC) were the relative size of the two organisations and the frequent meetings of the Politburo (for most of the Stalin period) compared to the infrequent plenums of the CC. The function of the Politburo in the early period is discussed in O. V. Khlevnyuk, A. V. Kvashonkin, L. P. Kosheleva and L. A. Rogovaya (eds), Stalinskoe Politbyuro v 30-e gody: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1995),
and O. V. Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1996).
On the post-1945 period, see: Yu. N. Zhukov, ‘Bor’ba za vlast’ v rukovodstve SSSR v 1945–1952 godakh’, Voprosy istorii, no. 1, 1995, pp. 23–39;
Yu. S. Aksenov, ‘Apogei stalinizma: Poslevoennaya piramida vlasti’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 11, 1990, pp. 90–104;
and R. G. Pikhoya, ‘O vnutripoliticheskoi bor’be v Sovetskom rukovodstve. 1945–1958 gg.’, Novaya i noveishaya istoryia, 1995, no. 6, pp. 3–14. For the fullest recent survey in English, see John Löwenhardt, J. R. Ozinga and E. Van Ree, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Politburo (London, 1992).
Especially valuable as a source of biographical information was ‘Sostav rukovodiashchikh organov Tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS partii — Politbyuro (Prezidiuma), Orgbyuro, Sekretariata TsK (1919–1990 gg.)’, Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1990, pp. 69–136; a corrected version was published as Politbyuro, Orgbyuro, Sekretariat TsK RKP(b) — VKP(b) — KPSS: Spravochnik (Moscow, 1990). See also A. Chernev, 229 kremlevskikh vozhdei. Politbyuro, Orgbyuro, Sekretariat TsK Kommunisticheskoi partii v litsakh i tsifrakh (Moscow, 1996). Important for state officials is Vladimir Ivkin. ‘Rukovoditeli Sovetskogo pravitel’stva (1923–1991): Istoriko-biograficheskaya spravka’, Istochnik, 1996, no. 4, pp. 152–92; no. 5, pp. 135–60; and the appendix to
T. P. Korzhikhina, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i ego uchrezhdeniia: Noiabr’ 1917 g. — dekabr’ 1991 g. (Moscow, 1994). Strictly speaking, a person was either a ‘member’ (chlen) or a ‘candidate’ (kandidat v chleny) of the Politburo; the terms ‘full member’ and ‘candidate member’ have been used in this chapter where the distinction is relevant, but otherwise the term ‘member’ is used to cover both categories.
This is discussed at some length in Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite (Oxford, 2000), pp. 4–5, 38–41.
Correspondence ballots were also used to purge the Central Committee in 1937–1938, see Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite (Oxford, 2000), pp. 67, 70–4.
The dynamic of the Central Committee purge are discussed more fully in Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite (Oxford, 2000), pp. 66–90.
For one interpretation of the purge phenomenon in general, see Evan Mawdsley, The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929–1953, 2nd edn (Manchester, 2003), pp. 96–108.
T. H. Rigby ‘Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?’, Soviet Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, July 1986, pp. 314ff;
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York, 1991), p. 118. Conquest made a distinction at Politburo level between those promoted up to 1926 (for example, Molotov) and those promoted in 1926–37 (for example, Eikhe), and argued — not altogether convincingly -that the latter were expendable because they had no prestige (p. 439). It is possible that a limited exercise in ‘keeping the boys in line’ got out of control; see
Robert Thurston for one possible mechanism — Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), p. 130.
Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (London, 1985), pp. 278, 281ff, 309;
Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1994), pp. 73, 91, 182, 187. For the most recent version, see
Lewin’s ‘Bureaucracy and the Stalinist State’ in Ian Kershaw and M. Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 53–74.
For an example of this, see F. I. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym; Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow, 1991), pp. 462ff.
On this point, see Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite (Oxford, 2000), pp. 93–8.
This case was made by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics of Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).
I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. XVI (Stanford, 1967), pp. 4–5.
On the party revival, see Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin’, Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 1 (1995), pp. 1–22. It is also significant that the expansion of the Central Committee did not end after Stalin’s death. The 1956 CC was to be larger even than the 1952 CC (6 per cent more full members and 10 per cent more candidates).
This falls outside the subject of the Politburo in the Stalin period. For details, see Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite (Oxford, 2000), pp. 157–66.
Robert V. Daniels, ‘Office Holding and Elite Status: The Central Committee of the CPSU’ in Paul Cocks, R. V. Daniels and Nancy Whittier Heer (eds), The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 78.
For details see Mawdsley and White, The Soviet Elite (Oxford, 2000), pp. 41–50.
XVIII s”ezd, p. 149; Pravda, 9 October 1952, p. 6. Incidentally, in May 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev would say exactly the same thing about the combination of the old and new: ‘The main thing is skilfully to combine — experienced and young cadres. That is the most reliable guarantee against, inertness and stagnation, and also against adventurism and voluntarism’; see M. S. Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1987), p. 222.
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Mawdsley, E. (2004). An Elite within an Elite: Politburo/Presidium Membership under Stalin, 1927–1953. In: Rees, E.A. (eds) The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524286_3
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