Orgburo of the CPSU Central Committee

The first Orgburo, of three members — Vladimirsky, Krestinsky and Sverdlov — was elected at a Central Committee meeting on 16 January 1919. In March the Eighth Congress amended the party rules so that the Central Committee would set up a Politburo, an Orgburo and a Secretariat. Under the congress resolution the Orgburo consisted of five Central Committee members, each heading a field of work; it met at least three times a week, directed all the party’s organisational work and reported to the Central Committee plenum every two weeks. On 25 March a plenum elected a new Orgburo of five full members and one candidate, and the arrangement was written into the party rules adopted by the Eighth All-Russian Conference in December 1919. Republican, regional and lower party committees had no equivalent of the Orgburo.

While the Politburo dealt with strategy and kept watch over the country, the Orgburo oversaw the work of local party committees and placed party members in posts. It was meant to carry the same political weight as the Politburo and the Secretariat, but it was soon overshadowed by the Secretariat, whose secretaries handled the same questions full-time while Orgburo members combined the work with other posts. Some leading figures — Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich — sat in both the Orgburo and the Politburo, but most Orgburo members were less important than those of the Politburo and the Secretariat. Under Stalin the Orgburo’s work in effect merged with that of the Secretariat. By the late 1930s no new candidate members were elected, Stalin rarely attended, and senior members such as Andrei Andreyev chaired meetings that dealt with purely technical matters.

In the 1940s Alexander Shcherbakov and Andrei Zhdanov, chairing it in turn, tried to revive its role. Georgy Malenkov chaired its meetings in 1945–1946, and from August 1946 Zhdanov did, which made him the second man in the Secretariat. Under Zhdanov the Orgburo intervened actively in ideology, issuing the 1946 resolution on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad. After Zhdanov’s death Malenkov and Zhdanov’s protégé Alexei Kuznetsov contended for leadership of the Orgburo, and Kuznetsov fell victim to the Leningrad affair. The Orgburo was abolished at the Nineteenth Congress in October 1952.