Central Committee of the CPSU. First Secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee

This almost not used abbreviation was once known to every child and was pronounced almost with reverence. The Central Committee of the CPSU! What do these letters mean?

About the title

The abbreviation of interest to us means the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or simply the Central Committee. Given the importance of the Communist Party in society, its governing body could well be called a kitchen where the fateful decisions for the country were "brewed." Members of the CPSU Central Committee, the main elite of the country, are "cooked" in this kitchen, and the "chef" is the Secretary-General.

From the history of the CPSU

The history of this public education began long before the revolution and the proclamation of the USSR. Until 1952, its names changed many times: the RSDLP, the RSDLP (b), the RCP (b), the CPSU (b). These abbreviations reflected both the ideology refined every time (from the Social-Democrats of the workers to the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks) and the scale (from the Russian to the All-Union). But not in the names of the essence. From the 1920s to the 1990s, one-party system functioned in the country, and the Communist Party had a sovereign monopoly. The Constitution of 1936, it was recognized as the guiding core, and in the main law of the country from 1977 and was proclaimed at all as the guiding and guiding force of society. Any directives released by the Central Committee of the CPSU immediately gained the force of law.

All this, of course, did not contribute to the democratic development of the country. In the USSR there was an active imbalance in the party character. Even members of the CPSU could claim only small leadership positions, from which they could be asked for mistakes on the basis of party lines. One of the most terrible punishments was the deprivation of a Party membership card. The CPSU positioned itself as a party of workers and collective farmers, so there were rather strict quotas for its replenishment by new members. It was hard to be in the party ranks to a representative of a creative profession or an employee of intellectual labor; The CPSU followed its national composition no less strictly. Thanks to this selection, not always the best ones got to the party.

From the Party Rules

In accordance with the Charter, all activities of the Communist Party were collegial. In primary organizations, decisions were made at general meetings, but in general the governing body was a congress held once in several years. Approximately once in six months the party plenum was held. The Central Committee of the CPSU, in between the plenary sessions and congresses, was the leading unit responsible for all Party activities. In turn, the highest body, which was headed by the Central Committee itself, was the Politburo, headed by the General (First) Secretary.

Among the functional duties of the Central Committee were personnel policy and control on the ground, expenditure of the party budget and management of the activities of public structures. But not only. Together with the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, he determined all the ideological activities in the country, and dealt with the most important political and economic issues.

On Soviet specificity

People who did not live in the Soviet Union, understand this difficult. In a democratic country, where a number of parties operate, their activities are of little concern to the common man in the street - he remembers them only before the elections. But in the USSR, the leading role of the Communist Party was even emphasized constitutionally! In factories and collective farms, in military units and in creative collectives, the Party organizer was the second (and often the first) leader of this structure. Formally, the Communist Party could not manage economic or political processes: for this, the Council of Ministers existed. But in fact the Communist Party decided everything. No one was surprised by the fact that both the most important political problems and the five-year plans for economic development were discussed and determined by party congresses. The Central Committee of the CPSU directed all these processes.

About the main person in the party

Theoretically, the Communist Party was a democratic entity: from the time of Lenin until the last moment, there was no one-man management, and there were no formal leaders. It was assumed that the secretary of the Central Committee was only a technical position, and the members of the governing body were equal. The first secretaries of the Central Committee of the CPSU, more precisely the RCP (b), were indeed not very prominent figures. E. Stasova, Y. Sverdlov, N. Krestinsky, V. Molotov - their surnames though they were on hearing, but these people did not have a relationship to practical leadership. But with the arrival of Stalin, the process went differently: the "father of the peoples" managed to subvert all power to himself. There was also a corresponding post - the Secretary General. It must be said that the names of party leaders periodically changed: General First replaced the Secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee, then vice versa. With the light hand of Stalin, regardless of the title of his post, the party leader became also the main person of the state.

After the death of the leader in 1953, N. Khrushchev and L. Brezhnev were in this post, and for a short time the post was occupied by Yu. Andropov and K. Chernenko. The last party leader was M. Gorbachev - concurrently the only President of the USSR. The epoch of each of them was significant in its own way. If Stalin is considered a tyrant by many, Khrushchev is usually called a voluntarist, and Brezhnev is the father of stagnation. Gorbachev went down in history as a man who at first destroyed and then buried a huge state - the Soviet Union.

Conclusion

The history of the CPSU was an academic discipline, compulsory for all higher educational institutions of the country, and every schoolchild knew the main milestones in the development and activity of the party in the Soviet Union. Revolution, then the civil war, industrialization and collectivization, victory over fascism and the post-war reconstruction of the country. And then virgin land and flights to space, large-scale all-Union construction projects - the history of the party closely intertwined with the history of the state. In each case, the role of the CPSU was considered to be predominant, and the word "communist" was synonymous with a true patriot and simply a worthy person.

But if you read the story of the party in a different way, between the lines, you'll get a terrible thriller. Millions of repressed people, exiled people, camps and political murders, reprisals against the objectionable, persecution of dissidents ... One can say that the author of every black page of Soviet history is the Central Committee of the CPSU.

In the USSR they liked to quote Lenin's words: "The Party is the mind, honor and conscience of our era." Alas! In fact, the Communist Party was neither one, nor the other, nor the third. After the putsch of 1991 , the activities of the CPSU in Russia were banned. Is the Russian Communist Party the heiress of the All-Union? It is even difficult to explain this to specialists.