Plenum of the Central Committee

Naming and origins

CC members' meetings began to be called "plenums" around September 1919; before that they were simply called CC sessions. When the 8th Party Congress created the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat inside the Central Committee, general meetings of all full and candidate members were named plenums to distinguish them from Politburo and Orgburo sessions, and the name then became fixed.

The plenum of 14–15 January 1924 was the first to be stenographed; earlier sessions and plenums were not recorded in shorthand. Not until the Politburo resolution of 11 January 1989 was full publication ordered of all protocols and verbatim records of congresses, conferences and CC plenums. In total, from September 1919 to November 1989, roughly 300 CC sessions and plenums took place.

The venue of decisions

The plenum was the body that adopted many of the major policy decisions of Soviet history. The plenum of 23 February–2 March 1954 adopted the decree on enlarging grain production and developing virgin and fallow lands, opening the Virgin Lands campaign. The plenum of 19–23 November 1962 adopted the decree splitting party organizations into industrial and agricultural ones, reversed by the plenum of 16 November 1964. The plenum of 27–29 September 1965 adopted the economic reform plan, and the plenum of 24 May 1977 adopted the decrees on the draft USSR Constitution and the state anthem. The plenum was also where the top leadership changed. On 3 April 1922 Stalin was elected General Secretary; in September 1953 Khrushchev was elected First Secretary. On 14 October 1964 the plenum relieved Khrushchev of the duties of First Secretary and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, decided the two posts should not be combined, elected Brezhnev First Secretary and recommended Kosygin as head of government. Andropov was elected on 12 November 1982, Chernenko on 13 February 1984 and Gorbachev on 13 March 1985.

Relations with the Central Committee

The Central Committee was the highest party organ between congresses, elected by the congress and responsible to it. Under the statute, between congresses it directed all party activity and the local party organs, conducted cadre selection and placement, directed central state and public organizations through party groups, appointed the editorial boards of central press organs and administered the party budget. Within the CC, the Party Control Committee verified party discipline and the Central Revision Commission audited CC business and finances. Real authority was often concentrated in the smaller organs the CC elected: the Politburo, the Secretariat, the Orgburo (dissolved in 1952) and the office of General Secretary; from the late 1920s onward the Central Committee increasingly became a rubber-stamp institution. Lenin held the CC to be the supreme authority of the party, and in the first years after October 1917 it genuinely decided by majority vote, as in the vote that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.

The plenum, the congress, and plenums at other levels

The congress was the supreme party organ and alone revised the Programme and Statute, determined the party line and elected the Central Committee. The plenum, meeting between congresses, exercised the CC's leadership functions and elected the CC's executive organs; it is therefore neither a congress nor an All-Union party conference. The form itself was not exclusive to the Central Committee: the statute set plenums of republic, krai, oblast and okrug/city/district committees at least once every four months, and expulsion of a member of such a committee was likewise decided by a two-thirds vote of that committee's plenum. The CC plenum was the same organizational form repeated at the top of the hierarchy.

Example: the June 1957 plenum

On 18 June 1957 Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich, joined at the last moment by Shepilov, moved in the Presidium to replace Khrushchev as First Secretary; their proposal carried 7–4 among the Presidium's eleven full voting members. Khrushchev and his supporters argued that only the CC plenum could remove him, and CC members pressed the Presidium to convene it. At the extraordinary session that opened on 22 June, Khrushchev called his opponents an "anti-party group," and the decree of the 29 June plenum deposed them from party and government positions. The group had rejected Khrushchev's de-Stalinization and liberalization and sought a restoration of Stalinism; after defeat Molotov was posted as ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov became director of a Kazakh hydroelectric plant, Kaganovich of a small Urals potash works and Shepilov of the Economics Institute of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, and in 1961 they were expelled from the party altogether.

Personnel turnover continued at other plenums. The plenum of 28–29 October 1957 removed Zhukov from his posts, and the plenums of 27 February 1956, 31 October 1961, 8 April 1966, 9 April 1971, 5 March 1976, 3 March 1981 and 6 March 1986 elected compositions of the Presidium/Politburo and Secretariat. Convening outran the statutory minimum: 1957 had four plenums (13–14 February, 22–27 June, 29 October, 16–17 December), 1966 had six and 1989 had eight. The plenum of 2–7 July 1953 adopted the decree "On the criminal anti-party and anti-state actions of L. P. Beria."

Relations with the leadership, and what the plenum was turned against

After Stalin's death in 1953 the CC experienced a relative revival as collective leadership tried to limit the General Secretary's powers. It was the CC plenum, not the Presidium, that decided the failed attempt to remove Khrushchev in 1957 and his removal in 1964. Under Brezhnev the CC grew to hundreds of full and candidate members and became more ceremonial; in the final years Gorbachev's reforms, its sidelining by state organs and the banning of the party in late 1991 brought it to an end.

The February–March plenum of 1937 (23 February–5 March 1937) followed R. I. Eikhe's letter to the Politburo, and the source presents it as heralding the start of the Great Terror. The body that formally convened the plenum opening the purge was itself among its targets: during 1936–1938 a significant portion of Central Committee members were executed or imprisoned.

Termination

On 29 August 1991 the USSR Supreme Soviet suspended the activity of the CPSU Central Committee and sealed the party's buildings and property; on 6 November 1991 President Yeltsin banned the activity of the CPSU and its republican organization (the CP RSFSR) on Russian territory. On 30 November 1992 the Russian Constitutional Court ruled the dissolution of primary party organizations unlawful but left the dissolution of the party's Central Committee in force, which is why this entry takes 1991 as its end year.