Leadership and Succession in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China

Martin McCauley, Stephen Carter, Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315494876
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

First Published in 1986. The papers in this volume were originally delivered at a series of seminars held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, between January and May 1984. The inspiration for the scheme was the Soviet succession struggle of 1982 but further reflection indicated that the problem of elderly leaderships, and the apparent absence of legitimate succession mechanisms, applied to nearly all communist systems.

1 The Soviet Union

PETER FRANK

Political regimes see the social order as being eternal and sacred and their prime duty as being the maintenance of the social order. In contrast, revolutionary movements are intent upon the destruction of the prevailing social order; yet, once in office, they, too, consider themselves to be guardians of the eternal, sacred, new social order.

The Bolsheviks were no exception to this general rule. Dedicated to the overthrow of Tsarist autocracy and, after that, to the elimination of nascent bourgeois democracy, after October 1917 they embarked upon the calculated destruction of the existing political order, social structure and economic system. To a very large degree (although not, perhaps, so thoroughly as they had wished) they accomplished this task, and so inaugurated a new social order, an order centred upon the creation of 'the new Soviet man and woman'.

A vital ideological component of the new society was collectivism, and the extent to which the elements of the new social order are collectivist is striking: the working class, narod (the people), the Party, the soviets. Again, if we consider the new institutions, then they, too, are collectivist: the Party Congress, the Central Committee, the Politburo, 'collective leadership'. Indeed, the official ideology scorned the role of the individual in history, and the institutions of the new Soviet state reflected that view.

Yet from the outset there was a disjunction between theory and practice, for towering above the revolution, the very creator and inspiration of the Bolshevik Party, was Lenin. Even allowing for the extravagent claims of Soviet hagiography, there can be no doubting the role of the individual, as personified by Lenin, in the Russian revolution. This disjunction of theory and practice still persists in the Soviet political process, and is particularly bothersome in matters to do with leadership and succession, as was made manifest as early as Lenin's last illness preceding his death in January 1924.

Realising that the end was imminent, Lenin became preoccupied with the question of who should succeed him as leader. Reading his 'Testament', it is immediately obvious that he is not concerned with the collectivist institutions of leadership, but with individuals. It is individuals' strengths and weaknesses, foibles and frailties that he is concerned about. Such potential successors as Bukharin, Stalin and Trotsky are assessed in isolation from any institutional office (except that Lenin is obviously acutely aware of the great bureaucratic power that Stalin has accumulated as Secretary General – though this office, significantly, is an individual appointment). Lenin's dilemma is exemplified by his proposed solution to the problem: enlarge the membership of the (collectivist) Central Committee. Anything less likely to succeed, or more likely to play into the hands of Secretary General Stalin (given his control of appointment), is hard to imagine; yet it expresses neatly the paradox of an ostensibly collectivist political system, rooted in a collectivist ideology, throwing up strong charismatic leaders.

Since the system does not formally recognise personalised, individual leadership, yet at the same time is characterised by precisely that phenomenon, every change of leader in the USSR is in some sense irregular. In any political system there are certain costs relating to succession that the social order must bear. These may, at a mundane level, be tangible, financial costs arising out of, for example, the election campaign. More importantly, leadership change effected by election may, by heightening awareness, highlight and exacerbate social tensions. But successions may benefit the social order, too. Government may be reinvigorated; there is the possibility of changing persons and policies (or not, as the electorate prefers), and all this may be done speedily and without damaging the social order. To the extent that participation involving choice tends to legitimate regimes, it could be argued that the social order is both ratified and strengthened. In other words, embodied in this kind of leadership succession are elements of both continuity and change.

To accommodate the twin objectives of continuity and change (contradictory though they may appear to be), political systems try to devise means of reconciling them in an orderly, regular, legitimate and legitimising fashion. This is done by creating technical mechanisms to ensure smooth succession, mechanisms that will cope with change of leadership and with the reinforcement and continuation of the social order. An instance of a simple technical mechanism is encapsulated in the formula 'The King is dead; long live the King!' A more complicated example is the election of an American president, where there are clear rules concerning such matters as fixed-term elections, not serving for more than two terms, and so on. We shall refer to such mechanisms as technical content.

In those systems where technical content is high, there is little or no ambiguity about how a leader is to be appointed or who that leader is. Thus, if we say that Reagan is President, what we mean is that Reagan is President because he has properly fulfilled certain technical requirements of the American political system. In short, leadership is defined by the office, and not by the personality.

Technical mechanisms are to do with change, with installing a leader. What about continuity? Obviously, that is also reinforced by virtue of there having been a regular, orderly, legitimate succession. But systems also often tend to try to enhance the legitimacy and continuity of the social order by the use of ritual. Few actually see an incoming British Prime Minister kissing the reigning monarch's hands, nor, in practical terms, does it have much force; but it symbolises nonetheless the continuity of the system and the social order. Similarly, there is no constitutional requirement that an out-going American president should be present at the inauguration ceremony of his successor, yet this custom has powerful ritualistic and symbolic force in emphasising that, despite the strains imposed by the recently-fought election campaign, the system – the social order – is intact. Ritual in countries such as Britain and the United States is relatively weak, and its effect, when linked with the technical content of succession, is to enhance the status, dignity, legitimacy and the authority of the incumbent leader and to emphasise the continuity of the social order. In other words, ritual supplements and enhances technical content; it is not a substitute for it.

In the Soviet Union, technical content in leadership succession is low. Taking the Soviet period as a whole, there appears to be no orderly, established, regular and well understood mechanism for changing leaders. In so far as technical content exists at all, it relates to collectivist institutions; in fact, individual leadership is not formally recognised. Therefore, as a substitute for technical content, what is often referred to as ritual becomes salient, and must serve both the social order and the individual leader.

An early example of the use of 'ritual' in the succession process is the 'Lenin enrolment' of 1924. Lenin, despite his charisma, never held specific office within the Party. He would have disdained the General Secretaryship, and there was (and is) no such office as Chairman or President of the Party. Instead, after 1917, he was head of the government: more precisely, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Sovnarkom, When Lenin died, Stalin (and all the other aspirants) were not in the least interested in occupying this post. It was an office which, so far as supreme leadership was concerned, had very little power. In other words, so long as Lenin was chairman of Sovnarkom it was important; once he went it was not. Similarly, Stalin had perceived the potential of the General Secretaryship; he rose to dictatorial pre-eminence via that post; and skilfully used it as an instrument in the struggle for power. Stalin invested the General Secretaryship with power; not the other way round.

Still, matters were not cut and dried in 1924 when Lenin died, and as a device to enhance his chances Stalin proposed that the Party should swell its ranks with a special 'Lenin enrolment' in honour of the deceased leader. It was an astute move. How could Trotsky or Bukharin resist such a suggestion: to have done so would have seemed disloyal to the great Lenin, and place-seeking to boot. But who would be responsible for the enrolment? Who would decide who was admitted to the Party? The Secretary General, of course; and if the new members soon swamped the old, Leninist membership, who might be far less pliant, so much the better.

However, devices such as the Lenin enrolment are not ritual. Ritual suggests something regular and unvarying. To take church ritual as an example: each week the service is read in a particular order and each component of the service has its particular meaning, yet is part of the whole. The Lenin enrolment, on the other hand, was a once-for-all device to gain political advantage in the leadership contest. It was an opportunistic symbolic act intended to facilitate a particular contestant's (Stalin's) succession. For convenience, we shall refer to other, similar devices as facilitating symbolism.

Stalin's death in March 1953 and the ensuing succession struggle once again exemplify the low technical content and the use of facilitating symbolism. By the time he died, Stalin was both Party leader and Prime Minister. He had risen to supreme leadership by exploiting the power potential of the Party post, but in later years he had ruled through the organs of the state, notably the agencies of physical repression, and the Party had paid a particularly heavy toll in the mass purges of the 1930s. By 1953 it was by no means self-evidently obvious that the Party was still the main locus of political power in the Soviet Union. To begin with, Malenkov was the main contender to succeed. A Party Secretary, he also assumed the premiership: the same two offices that Stalin had occupied. Then, shortly after Stalin's death there appeared on the front page of Pravda a photograph purporting to show Mao, Stalin and Malenkov posing together. The symbolism was obvious. Here is the new leader, the successor to Stalin and the colleague of Mao. The picture was designed to facilitate and fortify Malenkov's succession. The picture was a fake! The point is obvious: had the system had a sufficient degree of technical content no subterfuge would have been necessary.

In the contest that ensued, such was the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the leadership office that, faced with having to make a choice, Malenkov relinquished the Party post and retained the premiership. It was Khrushchev's skill as a politician, his manipulation of the Party Secretaryship and his policy of rehabilitating the Party generally that had the important effect of making the Party First (or General) Secretaryship the senior position within the Soviet collective leadership. He also renounced terror as a weapon in the succession struggle, so that, since the execution of Beria in 1953, violence has not been used when changing leaders. As a general rule, we can say that, since Khrushchev, the occupancy of the Party office has been the necessary (but not in itself the sufficient) pre-condition for attaining national leadership status.

Khrushchev, as a leader, was more politician than bureaucrat: he led from the front. Ebullient, impetuous, expansive, bullying, sentimental, he was given to experimentation and innovation. Inspired by praiseworthy motives, if things did not go his way he would change tack and try something else. The 'virgin lands' campaign, abolition of ministries and creation of sovnarkhozy, bifurcation of the party and soviet apparatuses – these were the kinds of arbitrary 'hare-brained schemes' that were to bring about his political demise in 1964. Before that, following the defeat of the so-called 'anti-Party group' in 1957, he had, like Stalin before him, added the premiership to his Party Secretaryship. The result was that, following his ousting, it was stated that never again would both these offices be embodied in the same person.

This was a protective ruling (designed to obviate too great a concentration of power in one person's hands) and it had the effect of making attainment of national leadership even more difficult. By 1964, there could be no doubt but that the Party Secretaryship was the senior position in the Soviet political system. Yet considerations of personal ambition plus the exigencies of rule seemed to impel Soviet leaders towards acquiring the government office, too (which is how we would define 'national leadership', as distinct from 'senior position'). But with the 1964 ruling in place, how would this now be possible?

It is remarkable how firmly established, both within and without the USSR, has become the notion that the state presidency goes with the Party post. Yet these two offices were linked in the USSR for the first time only in 1977. Now it is commonplace to read phrases such as 'It took Brezhnev thirteen years to become President . . .' Such a formulation seems to imply that, with the premiership closed to him, Brezhnev from 1964 to 1977 was patiently wheeling and dealing, so that eventually he 'managed' to secure the presidency. I do not think that it was like that at all.

The presidency in the Soviet Union had never hitherto been regarded as being important or influential. But Brezhnev had himself served as President between May 1960 and July 1964, while from June 1963 he was simultaneously a member of the CPSU Secretariat, so the utility of linking the Party and the state offices may have had its genesis in that experience. Also, this institutional linkage had become quite common by the 1970s in several Soviet-type political systems. Moreover, Brezhnev was extremely active in the foreign policy realm in his early years in office, and this brought him into contact with foreign leaders bearing the title of President.

The crucial point in the evolution of the institutionalisation of the Soviet leadership was reached in August 1975 when Brezhnev went to Helsinki to sign the Final Act on behalf of the USSR. On the document he designated himself:

Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [and] head of the delegation of the USSR at the concluding stage of the conference.

Later, this was changed to simply: 'Secretary General CC CPSU'. Whether the redesignation occurred for purely protocol reasons, or whether it was because his colleagues objected to the original description, is not known. But with thirty-five heads of state or government present (no fewer than six of them leaders of Soviet-type systems) it was embarrassing both personally and from a national standpoint not to be able to ratify an important international document in a way which reflects the status and dignity of the signatory.

Confirmation of the correctness of this analysis is to be found in the speech made by Suslov to the USSR Supreme Soviet on 16 June 1977 when he proposed Brezhnev for the state presidency (that is, the chairmanship of the presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet). First, Suslov emphasised that the decision to link the two offices had been taken at a plenary session of the CPSU Central Committee on 24 May, thus emphasising the primacy of the Party, and, by extension, of the Party post, over the state office. Secondly, he linked this new development with considerations of foreign policy; Brezhnev, he said, 'worthily represe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on the Contributors
• Preface
• Map of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
• Introduction
• 1 The Soviet Union
• 2 Soviet Leadership Profiles
• 3 Poland
• 4 The German Democratic Republic
• 5 Czechoslovakia
• 6 Hungary
• 7 Romania
• 8 Bulgaria
• 9 Albania
• 10 Yugoslavia
• 11 China
• 12 Regime and Citizen in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China
• References
• Index