Collective Leadership

Definition and origin

Collective leadership is the principle that a party-state's leading bodies share power, and that a single officeholder such as the General Secretary or party chair acts only as primus inter pares within them. In the USSR the principle began to operate after Stalin's death in March 1953, as power was dispersed among the Politburo, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers and the powers of the General Secretary and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers were deliberately limited. Immediately after Beria's arrest on 26 June 1953 it was proclaimed the 'supreme principle of our Party'.

The Party Rules and the institution

Article 27 of the CPSU Rules stated that 'the supreme principle of Party leadership is collectivity of leadership, an indispensable condition for the normal activity of Party organisations, the correct education of cadres, and the development of the activity and initiative of communists', adding that the cult of personality and related violations of inner-party democracy could not be tolerated. The article entered the Rules in the version approved by the 22nd Congress (1961) and was carried through partial amendments by the 23rd (1966) and 24th (1971) congresses, remaining in the Rules as successively amended at the 27th (1986) and 28th (1990) congresses. It followed Article 19, which made democratic centralism the guiding principle of the Party's organisational structure: elective leading bodies from bottom to top, accountability, strict discipline and subordination of the minority to the majority.

De-Stalinisation and the end of the purge

The doctrinal origin of the principle was de-Stalinisation and the 20th Congress. Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech condemned the 'cult of the individual' and the 'great harm caused by violation of the principle of collective Party direction', tying collective leadership to the 'Leninist principles of Party leadership'. Institutionalised collective leadership ended the Stalin-era practice in which political defeat meant death.

A documented test of the principle was the Anti-Party Group affair of June 1957. The Presidium majority that moved to depose Khrushchev failed after the minority insisted that only a Central Committee plenum could decide a leadership question; the group was deposed from party and government positions by the plenum decree of 29 June 1957, and in 1961 Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Shepilov were expelled from the Party. It is recorded as a case in which the collective body, not an individual, decided a leadership question.

The paradox of 1964

Collective leadership then became the ground for Khrushchev's own removal. At the plenum that ousted him in October 1964, one of the stated reasons, as Suslov put it to him, was his violation of collective leadership, and the Central Committee forbade any single individual from holding the offices of General Secretary and Premier simultaneously. Collective leadership was afterward praised in the Soviet press as a return to 'Leninist norms of Party life'. Khrushchev was succeeded by Brezhnev as First Secretary and Kosygin as Premier, who with Suslov, Kirilenko and Mikoyan (replaced in 1965 by Podgorny) formed a reinvigorated collective leadership that at first had no clear single leader and was called the 'Brezhnev-Kosygin' leadership.

The Brezhnev era: from collectivity to oligarchy

Over the 1970s Brezhnev accumulated predominance within the collective, creating a 'Secretariat of the General Secretary', and in 1977 he ousted Podgorny. Collective leadership nevertheless continued in form under Andropov (1982-1984) and Chernenko (1984-1985), and Gorbachev's reforms after 1986 produced open disagreement and factionalism inside the leadership rather than a return to one-man rule.

Distinctions and uses beyond the USSR

Collective leadership is distinct from one-man rule and from the personality cult, and in Leninist doctrine it is presented as realised through inner-Party democratic collective leadership. The term is not Soviet-exclusive. In post-Mao China it is described as collective leadership from Deng Xiaoping's late-1970s reforms under the norm of consensus, with Jiang Zemin formally styling himself 'first among equals'. In Vietnam under Lê Duẩn, collective leadership distributed powers from the office of the General Secretary to the Politburo Standing Committee 'while still retaining one ruler'.

Left-wing green and socialist parties in liberal democracies also practise collective leadership on socialist ideals, either through male and female co-leaders or several co-spokespersons, often justified by consensus decision-making and gender equality: Alliance 90/The Greens divides its Federal Executive between two co-equal spokespersons, and the Scottish Green Party began the practice in 2004 with a male and a female co-convenor.

Assessments and disputes

The General Secretary could be compared to a prime minister in the Westminster system, acting as the leading broker in Politburo sessions and remaining in office only while retaining Politburo consensus; collective leadership did not necessarily mean that the Central Committee, Politburo and Council of Ministers were equals without a leading figure. Richard Löwenthal described the USSR as 'post-totalitarian authoritarianism' or an 'authoritarian bureaucratic oligarchy', a state still omnipotent in theory and highly authoritarian in practice, but one that considerably reduced the scale of repression and allowed more pluralism in public life. A majority of First World observers agreed with him that collective leadership in an authoritarian state was 'inherently unworkable' and would sooner or later give way to one-man rule; other analysts instead saw an alternation between 'oligarchy' and 'limited-personal rule'.