Committee. Stalin got his revenge in the purges of 1936 through 1938, when the party apparatus was decimated and more than half of the people who had been congress delegates in 1934 were arrested and executed.
The Eighteenth Party Congress came only after a lapse of over five years, in March 1939. An almost entirely new Central Committee was installed, Nikita Khrushchev achieved membership in the Politburo, and the Third Five- Year Plan was belatedly approved. Stalin further revised Marxist ideology by emphasizing the historical role of the state and the new intelligentsia. A follow-up party conference, the Eighteenth, was held in February 1941; it endorsed measures of industrial discipline, but was mainly significant for the emergence of Georgy Malenkov into the top leadership. The institution of the party conference then fell into abeyance, until Mikhail Gorbachev revived it in 1988.
FROM WORLD WAR II TO THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNIST PARTY RULE
After the Eighteenth Party Congress, none was held for thirteen years, during the time of war and postwar recovery. When the Nineteenth Party Congress finally convened in October 1952, the question of succession to the aging Stalin was already impending. Stalin implicitly anointed Malenkov as his replacement by designating him to deliver the political report of the Central Committee. At the same time, the party’s leading organs were overhauled: the Politburo was renamed the Party Presidium, with an expanded membership of twenty-five (including Leonid Brezhnev), and the Orgburo was dissolved. The congress also officially changed the party’s name from All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) to Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
By the time of the Twentieth Party Congress, convened in February 1956, Stalin was dead, Khrushchev had prevailed in the contest to succeed him, and the Thaw, the abatement of Stalinist terror, was underway. Nevertheless, Khrushchev proceeded to astound the party and ultimately the world with his Secret Speech to the congress, denouncing Stalin’s purges and the cult of personality. To this, he added a call, in his open report to the congress, for peaceful coexistence with the noncommunist world. The congress also established a special bureau of the Central Committee to superintend the business of the party in the Russian Republic, which, unlike the other union republics, had no distinct Communist Party organization of its own.
In January-February 1959 Khrushchev convened the Extraordinary Twenty-First Party Congress, mainly for the purpose of endorsing his new seven-year economic plan in lieu of the suspended Sixth Five-Year Plan. As an extraordinary assembly, the congress did not conduct any elections to renew the leadership.
At the Twenty-Second Party Congress of October 1961, with its numbers vastly increased to 4,408 voting and 405 nonvoting delegates, Khrushchev introduced more sensations. Along with renewed denunciation of the Anti- Party Group that had tried to depose Khrushchev in 1957, and condemnation of the ideological errors of communist China, the congress approved the removal of Stalin’s body from the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square. The congress also issued a new party program, the first to be formally adopted since 1919, with emphasis on Khrushchev’s notions of egali-tarianism and of overtaking capitalism economically.
Four party congresses were held under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership, all routine affairs with little change in the aging party leadership. The Twenty-Third Party Congress in March-April 1966 emphasized political stabilization. It reversed Khrushchev’s innovations by changing the name of the party presidium back to Politburo and by abolishing the party bureau for the Russian Republic, but took no new initiatives regarding either Stalinism or the economy. The Twenty-Fourth Party Congress convened in March-April 1971, a year later than originally planned; further economic growth was stressed, but the issue of decentralist reforms was straddled. The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in February-March 1976 was distinguished only by more blatant glorification of General Secretary Brezhnev, as the 4,998 delegates (no nonvoting delegates from this time on) heard him stress tighter administrative and ideological controls in the service of further economic growth. Continuity still marked the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February-March 1981: Brezhnev was in his dotage
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and his entourage was dying off, and economic inefficiency and inertia, especially in agriculture, remained at the center of attention. The years spanned by the Twenty-Third through the Twenty-Sixth Congresses were aptly known afterwards as the era of stagnation.
With the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, attended by approximately five thousand delegates in February- March 1986, the dissolution of the Communist Party dictatorship in the Soviet Union had begun. Gorbachev had taken over as General Secretary after Brezhnev’s death and the brief administrations of Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, and had undertaken a sweeping renovation of the aging leadership. At the congress itself, more than three-fourths of the delegates were participating for the first time, and the new Central Committee elected by the congress had more new members than any since 1961. Gorbachev’s main themes of socialist self- government and acceleration in the economy were dutifully echoed by the congress, without intimating the extent of changes soon to come.
An even more significant meeting was Gorbachev’s convocation in June 1988 of the Nineteenth Party Conference, the first one since 1941, and a far larger gathering than under the old practice, with 4,976 delegates. Faced with growing opposition by conservatives in the party organization, Gorbachev could not rely on the circular flow of power, but had to campaign for the election of pro-reform delegates-without much success. He had hoped to give the conference the authority of a party congress to shake up the Central Committee, but had to defer this step. Nevertheless, as Gorbachev himself noted, debate at the conference was more frank than anything heard since the 1920s. The outcome was endorsement of sweeping constitutional changes that shifted real power from the party organization to the government, with a strong president (Gorbachev himself) and the elected Congress of People’s Deputies.
In July 1990, as Gorbachev’s reform program was peaking, the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress convened with 4,863 delegates. It proved to be the last party congress before the collapse of Communist rule and the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the freer political space allowed by Gorbachev’s steps toward democratization, including surrender of the party’s political monopoly, the party had broken into factions: the conservatives led by Party Second Secretary Yegor Ligachev, the radical reformers led by the deposed Moscow Party Secretary Boris Yeltsin, and the center around Gorbachev. At the congress, the conservatives submitted to Gorbachev in the spirit of party discipline, but Yeltsin demonstratively walked out and quit the party. Nonetheless, calling for a new civil society in place of Stalinism, Gorbachev presided over the most open, no-holds-barred debate since the communists took power in 1917. He radically shook up the Communist Party leadership, restaffed the Politburo as a group of union republic leaders, and terminated party control of governmental and managerial appointments maintained under the old “nomenklatura” system. For the first time, congress resolutions were confined to the internal organizational business of the party, and steered clear of national political issues. Barely more than a year later, in August 1991, the conservatives’ attempted coup d’?tat against Gorbachev discredited what was left of Communist Party authority and set the stage for the demise of the Soviet Union. See also: BOLSHEVISM; BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHEVIKS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON; ZINOVIEV, GRIG-ORY YEVSEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, John A. (1961). The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present. New York: Random House. Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Current Soviet Policies: The Documentary Record of the Communist Party, eds. Leo Gruliow et al. 11 vols. Columbus, OH: Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Dan, Fyodor. (1964). The Origins of Bolshevism. New York: Harper and Row. Daniels, Robert V. (1960, 1988). The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and Boulder, CO: Westview. Daniels, Robert V. (1966). “Stalin’s Rise to Dictatorship.” In Politics in the Soviet Union: Seven Cases, eds. Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Daniels, Robert V. (1993). The End of the Communist Revolution. London: Routledge. Keep, John H. L. (1963). The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Mawdsley, Evan, and White, Stephan. (2000). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central
