Bolshevik Politburo (October 1917)

Creation

The first Politburo was born at the Central Committee meeting that decided on the armed uprising. Lenin, in hiding after the July Days, returned to Petrograd to force the question before the Second Congress of Soviets, and on 10 October (O.S.) 1917 the Central Committee debated through the night and carried Lenin's resolution 10 to 2. Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against and warned of disaster; Lenin argued that delay would forfeit the moment. The resolution placed the armed uprising 'on the order of the day' and instructed every party organisation to decide practical questions from that standpoint. In the same decision the Central Committee elected a Political Bureau to provide 'political leadership for the immediate future', with seven members: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov.

What the 1917 Politburo actually did

The body played no role in the rising. Trotsky wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution (1931) that the 1917 Politburo never held a single meeting. Operative planning was carried out by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which Trotsky chaired. The Politburo's leadership ended with the Petrograd rising of 24 October (O.S.) 1917, after about two weeks. After the rising the Central Committee took over the leadership. The dictionary's Sokolnikov entry records only that he was elected in October 1917 and says nothing about the body's duration or dissolution, so the two accounts do not conflict.

Institutional lineage

The body was one of three inner bodies in succession within the Central Committee elected by the 6th Party Congress (in session 3 August 1917 – 8 March 1918). The 'Narrow Composition' came first in August 1917 and was abolished in October 1917; the Politburo followed and was abolished in November 1917; a Bureau was set up in November 1917. On 29 November (12 December) 1917, when rapid decisions had become necessary, the Central Committee elected a Bureau of the Central Committee without the qualifier 'political' and in reduced composition: Lenin, Sverdlov, Stalin and Trotsky. The permanent Politburo was created when the 8th Party Congress, held in Moscow on 18–23 March 1919, generalised the practice of day-to-day leadership; the Central Committee plenum of 25 March 1919 elected full members (Lenin, Kamenev, Krestinsky, Stalin, Trotsky) and candidate members (Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kalinin), and the body first met on 16 April 1919.

Distinctions and significance

The 1917 body is the first and shortest of the Politburo's periods and had no basis in the party charter. The 1919 congress made the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat permanent bodies by charter amendment, subordinated the Politburo to the Central Committee and provided for its members to be elected by Central Committee plenums; the 1917 body had no such provisions. Nor is 'narrow composition' a general synonym for Politburo: in the whole Soviet period a narrow inner body of the leading organ was formed only once, in 1952, as the Bureau of the Presidium inside the Presidium. The 1917 body's significance is that it was the origin of a body that was later made permanent, but under Stalin the Politburo's weight was downgraded and its members were repressed, among them two men who had sat in the 1917 Politburo, Zinoviev and Kamenev.