General Secretary of the CPSU
소련 공산당 서기장
The highest post in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, head of the Central Committee Secretariat. Created in 1922 as an administrative office, it became Stalin’s base of power and from 1924 to 1991 was in effect the office of the leader of the Soviet Union. From 1953 to 1966 it was called First Secretary.
In depth
After the Bolsheviks took power, the office of Responsible Secretary was set up in 1919 to handle administrative work. Nikolai Krestinsky, the only Politburo member among the three secretaries in 1919–1921, was sometimes informally called “general secretary”. The post of General Secretary was created as an office of the Secretariat apparatus by the Central Committee plenum of 3 April 1922, after the Eleventh Congress, and Joseph Stalin was the first to hold it. It was not written into the party rules, and as it served administrative and disciplinary purposes — determining the composition of the membership and assigning party posts — Lenin, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, was still seen as leader of the party and government. Some historians regard the early death of Yakov Sverdlov, the original head of the Secretariat and a natural candidate for the post, in 1919 as a key factor in Stalin’s rise.
In his final months Lenin called for Stalin’s removal from the post on the grounds that he was becoming authoritarian and abusing his power, but with the help of Zinoviev and Kamenev Stalin kept his position. After Lenin’s death Stalin used the office to consolidate his power, and by 1928 he was unquestionably the leader of the Soviet Union. From the Seventeenth Congress in 1934 the Central Committee no longer mentioned the post when electing the Secretariat, and Stalin was formally one of the secretaries, but his leadership was undiminished. The Nineteenth Congress formally abolished the office in October 1952. When Stalin died in March 1953, Georgy Malenkov, the most senior member of the Secretariat, led the party for about a week before leaving the Secretariat on 14 March.
In September 1953 a Central Committee plenum created the office of First Secretary and elected Nikita Khrushchev to it. The post was not in the party rules, but it in effect revived the general secretaryship, and Khrushchev entrenched it by removing Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich in 1957. When Khrushchev was removed in October 1964 Leonid Brezhnev became First Secretary, and in 1966 the Twenty-Third Congress restored the title General Secretary and wrote it into the party rules. Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev followed. When the party lost its monopoly of power in 1990, Gorbachev kept his position as leader through the new office of President of the USSR, and a post of Deputy General Secretary was created for Vladimir Ivashko. After the failed August coup of 1991 Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary on 24 August; Ivashko acted in the post for five days before the party’s activity was suspended, and the office ended with it.