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Assessing the Results of the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
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10030 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1986 |
2,234 Words |
| Author
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Alexander Shtromas
Alexander Shtromas is a reader in politics in the Department
of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of
Salford, United Kingdom. |
Nothing has happened at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that was either unexpected or not predicted--no coups or secret speeches, no revelations or special resolutions. The Congress has proceeded in a regular and orderly manner, praisingly discussing and then unanimously adopting without substantial changes the documents published and widely publicized well before the Congress. When I asked one Soviet colleague about his impressions of the Congress, his quick and rather apt response was--"ten days of emptiness."
Indeed, the widely expected change in the membership of the Central Committee--the party's supreme ruling body in between Congresses--was, in fact, not a change at all, for its structure, based on representation of central and local bodies of authority, intermingled with a handful of grass-roots party members, remained exactly the same as it was in Brezhnev's time. Only the faces have changed--true, quite a lot of them, around 40 percent or so--but they were known already beforehand as the new appointees to those officers qualifying for Central Committee membership.
There was not much change in the Politburo either. Only one new full member, Lev Zaikov, recently promoted from the secretaryship of the Leningrad Party organization to that of the Central Committee, was selected and a slight reshuffling took place among the candidate members: two octogenarians, Boris Ponomarev and Vasili Kuznetsov, were removed, and leaders of the Leningrad and Byelorussian Party, Yuri Solovyev and Nicolai Slyun'kov, were promoted. The most significant changes took place in the secretariat of the Central Committee, whose long-depleted ranks were at last replenished by five new members replacing only the
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