PARTY CONGRESSES AND CONFERENCES

Party congresses, the nominal policy-setting conclaves of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, were held at intervals ranging from one to five years, and extended from the First, in 1898, to the last, the Twenty-Eighth, in 1990. Made up since the 1920s of two- to five thousand delegates from the party's local organizations, party congresses were formally empowered to elect the Central Committee, to determine party rules, and to enact resolutions that laid down the party's basic pro-grammatic guidelines. Party conferences, from the

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first in 1905 to the nineteenth in 1988, were smaller and less authoritative gatherings, usually held midway in the interval between congresses. Like the congresses, they issued policy declarations in the form of resolutions, but did not conduct elections to the top party leadership.

Before the Revolution of 1917 and for the first few years thereafter, party congresses and conferences were marked by lively debate. The transcripts of those proceedings, published at the time and republished during the 1930s, are important sources concerning the problems the country faced and the viewpoints of the various party leaders and factions. With the ascendancy of Josef Stalin, however, party congresses and conferences became creatures of the central party leadership. As described by the concept of the circular flow of power, local officials who were de facto appointed by the center handpicked their delegations to the national congress, which in turn endorsed the makeup of the Central Committee and the central leadership itself, thus closing the circle.

prerevolutionary party congresses and conferences

The meeting that is traditionally considered the First Party Congress was an ephemeral gathering in Minsk in March 1898 of nine Marxist undergrounders who managed to proclaim the establishment of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) before they were arrested by the tsarist police. Before the Revolution, there were four more congresses and numerous conferences, distinguished by struggles between the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of the party that led up to their ultimate split. The Second Party Congress, convened in Brussels in July 1903 with fifty-seven participants but forced to move its proceedings to London under threat of arrest, was the first true congress of the RSDWP. It saw the outbreak of the Bolshevik-Menshevik schism when Vladimir Lenin tried to impose his definition of party membership as a core of professional revolutionaries rather than the broad democratic constituency favored by the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov.

The next congress, later counted by the Communists as the Third, was an all-Bolshevik meeting in London in April 1905, with just twenty-four voting delegates plus invited guests. The First Party Conference (as counted by the communists) was a gathering in December 1905 of forty Bolsheviks and a lone Menshevik in the city of Tammerfors (Tampere) in Russian-ruled Finland. They endorsed reunification with the Mensheviks and supported boycotting the tsar's new Duma (over Lenin's objections). At this meeting, Stalin made his initial appearance at the national level and first met Lenin face-to-face.

Following the abortive revolutionary events of 1905, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came together in Stockholm in April 1906 for the Fourth Party Congress (by the Bolshevik enumeration), styled the Unification Congress, with a Menshevik majority among the 112 voting delegates. The two factions met together again in London in April and May 1907; this Fifth Party Congress was the last embracing both wings, and the last before the Revolution.

Small meetings later considered by the Bolsheviks as their Second through Fifth Party Conferences were held between 1906 and 1909, mostly in Finland, with Bolshevik, Menshevik, and other Social-Democratic groups represented. These gatherings continued to revolve around the questions of party unity and parliamentary tactics.

In 1912, going their separate ways, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks held separate party conferences. Twelve Bolsheviks plus four nonvoting delegates (including Lenin) met in Prague in January of that year for what they counted as the Sixth Party Conference. Excluding not only the Mensheviks but also the Left Bolsheviks denounced by Lenin after the Fifth Party Conference in 1909, this gathering established an organizational structure of Lenin's loyalists (including Grigory Zinoviev), to whom Stalin was added soon afterwards as a coopted member of the Central Committee. The Sixth Party Conference was the real beginning of the Bolshevik Party as an independent entity under Lenin's strict control.

from the revolution to world war ii

Shortly after the fall of the tsarist regime in the February Revolution of 1917 (March, New Style), but before Lenin's return to Russia, the Bolsheviks convened an All-Russian Meeting of Party Workers of some 120 delegates. Contrary to the stand Lenin was shortly to take, this March Conference, of which Stalin was one of the leaders, leaned toward cooperation with the new Provisional Government and reunification with the Mensheviks. For this reason, the March Conference was expunged from official communist history and was never counted in the numbering.

A few weeks later the Bolsheviks met more formally in Petrograd, with 133 voting delegates and eighteen nonvoting, for what was officially recorded as the Seventh or April Party Conference. On this occasion, by a bare majority, Lenin persuaded the party to reject the Provisional Government and to oppose continued Russian participation in World War I. Unlike postrevolutionary party conferences, the Seventh elected a new Central Committee, with nine members, including Lev Kamenev and Yakov Sverdlov along with Lenin, Zinoviev, and Stalin.

The Sixth Party Congress, all-Bolshevik, with 157 voting delegates and 110 nonvoting, was held in the Vyborg working-class district of Petrograd in August 1917 under semi-clandestine conditions, after the Provisional Government tried to suppress the Bolsheviks following the abortive uprising of the July Days. Lenin and other leaders were in hiding or in jail at the time, and Stalin and Sverdlov were in charge. The congress welcomed Leon Trotsky and other left-wing Mensheviks into the Bolshevik Party, and Trotsky was included in the expanded Central Committee of twenty-one. However, the gathering could hardly keep up with events; it made no plans directed toward the Bolshevik seizure of power that came soon afterwards.

Four congresses followed the Bolshevik takeover in quick succession, all facing emergency circumstances of civil war and economic collapse. The Seventh, dubbed "special," was convened in Moscow in March 1918, with only forty-seven voting delegates, to approve the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending hostilities with Germany and its allies. Lenin delivered a political report of the Central Committee, a function thereafter distinguishing the party's chief, while Nikolai Bukharin submitted a minority report for the Left Communists against the treaty (a gesture last allowed in 1925). After bitter debate between the Leninists and the Left, the treaty was approved, and Russia left the war. However, Bukharin was included in the new Central Committee of fifteen members. The Seventh Party Congress also formally changed the party's name from Russian Social-Democratic Party (of Bolsheviks) to Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks). All subsequent party congresses continued to be held in Moscow.

The Eighth Party Congress met in March 1919 at the height of the civil war, with around three hundred voting delegates. It adopted a new revolutionary party program, approved the creation of the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat, and saw its Leninist majority beat down opposition from the Left, who opposed the trend toward top-down authority in both military and political matters. The first postrevolutionary party conference, the Eighth, was held in Moscow (like all subsequent ones) in December 1919. It updated the party's rules and heard continued complaints about centralism in government.

Three months later, at the Ninth Party Congress in March 1920, Lenin and Trotsky and their supporters again had to fight off the anti-centralizers of the Left on both political and economic issues. Such protest was carried much farther at the Ninth Party Conference, which met in September 1920. The "Group of Democratic Centralists" denounced bureaucratic centralism and won a sweeping endorsement of democracy and decentralism, unfortunately undercut by their acquiescence with respect to organizational efficiency and a new control commission.

This spirit of reform was soon smothered at the Tenth Party Congress, meeting in March 1921 with approximately seven hundred voting delegates. After some three hundred of its participants were dispatched to Petrograd to help suppress the Kronstadt Revolt, the congress voted in several crucial resolutions over the futile opposition of the small left-wing minority. It condemned the "syndicalist and anarchist deviation" of the Workers' Opposition, banned organized factions within the party in the name of unity, and supported the tax in kind, Lenin's first step in introducing the New Economic Policy. The Central Committee was expanded to twenty-five, but Trotsky's key supporters were dropped from this body as well as from the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat.

Party congresses and conferences during the 1920s marked the transformation from a contentious, policy-setting gathering to an orchestrated phalanx of disciplined yes-men. This progression took place as Stalin perfected the circular flow of power through the party apparatus, guaranteeing his control of congress and conference proceedings. The Eleventh Party Congress, which met in March and April 1922, was the last with Lenin's participation. It focused on consolidating party discipline and strengthening the new Central Control Commission to keep deviators in line. Immediately after the Eleventh Party Congress, the Central Committee designated Stalin to fill the new office of General Secretary.

The Twelfth Party Congress took place in April 1923 during the interregnum between Lenin's incapacitation in December 1922 and his death in January 1924. Trotsky, Stalin, and Zinoviev were all jockeying for advantage in the anticipated struggle to succeed the party's ailing leader. Debate revolved particularly around questions of industrial development and policy toward the minority nationalities, while Stalin maneuvered to cover up Lenin's break with him and pack the Central Committee (expanded from twenty-seven to forty) with his own supporters.

The Tenth and Eleventh Party Conferences in 1921 and the Twelfth in 1922 were routine affairs, but the Thirteenth proved to be a decisive milestone. At this gathering just before Lenin's death, the left opposition faction supporting Trotsky was condemned as a petty-bourgeois deviation. Stalin demonstrated his mastery of the circular flow of power by allowing only three oppositionists among the voting delegates.

By the time of the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924, the Soviet political atmosphere had changed even more. Lenin was dead; the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev was trumpeting the need for discipline and unity; and opposition had been virtually outlawed. Stalin's party apparatus had ensured that among the 748 voting delegates there was not a single voice to represent the opposition, and Trotsky, merely one of the 416 nonvoting delegates, temporarily recanted his criticisms of the party. The Central Committee was expanded again, to fifty-two, to make room for even more Stalin loyalists, especially from the regional apparatus.

The Fourteenth Party Conference, held in April 1925, endorsed Stalin's theory of socialism in one country and condemned Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. It marked the high point of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by way of liberalizing policy toward the peasants. However, this emphasis contributed to growing tension between the Stalin-Bukharin group of party leaders and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group.

At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 these two groups split openly. The so-called Leningrad Opposition, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev and backed by Lenin's widow Nadezhda Krupskaya, rebelled against Stalin's domination of the party and took with them the sixty-two Leningrad delegates. Kamenev openly challenged Stalin's suitability as party leader, but the opposition was soundly defeated by the well-disciplined majority. The NEP, especially as articulated by Bukharin, was for the time being reaffirmed, although subsequent Stalinist history represented the Fourteenth Congress as the beginning of the new industrialization drive. The Central Committee was expanded again, to sixty-three.

Acrimony between the majority and the newly allied Zinovievists and Trotskyists was even sharper at the Fifteenth Party Conference of October–November 1926. Kamenev now denounced Stalin's theory of socialism in one country as a falsification of Lenin's views. Nevertheless, the opposition was unanimously condemned as a "Social-Democratic" (i.e., Menshevik) deviation.

When the Fifteenth Party Congress met in December 1927, the left opposition leaders Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had been dropped from the party's leadership bodies, and Trotsky had been expelled from the party altogether. At the congress itself, the opposition was condemned and its followers were expelled from the party as well. At the same time, the congress adopted resolutions on a five-year plan and on the peasantry that subsequently served as legitimation for Stalin's industrialization and collectivization drives. Eight more members were added to the Central Committee, not counting replacements for the condemned oppositionists, bringing the total to seventy-one (a figure that held until 1952).

By the time of the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929, the Soviet political scene had changed sharply again. Stalin had defeated the Right Opposition led by Bukharin, government chairman Alexei Rykov, and trade-union chief Mikhail Tomsky, and was initiating his five-year plans and forced collectivization. The main task of the conference was to legitimize the First Five-Year Plan (already approved by the Central Committee), backdating its inception to the beginning of the annual economic plan that had already been in force since October 1928. A new party purge, in the older sense of weeding out undesirables from the membership, was also authorized by the conference.

The Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June and July 1930, could hardly keep up with events. Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky had been condemned and had recanted, although the congress allowed them to keep their Central Committee seats for the time being. The congress unanimously acclaimed the program of the Stalin Revolution in industry and agriculture. The industrialization theme was echoed by the Seventeenth Party Conference of January–February 1932; it approved the formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan, to commence in January 1933 (even though by that time the First Five-Year Plan would have been formally in effect for only three years and eight months).

When the Seventeenth Party Congress convened in January–February 1934, collectivization had been substantially accomplished despite the catastrophic though unacknowledged famine in the Ukraine and the southern regions of the Russian Republic. Following the accelerated termination of the First Five-Year Plan, the Second had begun. The congress was dubbed "the Congress of Victors," while Stalin addressed the body to reject the philosophy of egalitarianism and emphasize the authority of individual managers and party leaders. Yet there was surreptitious opposition over the harshness of Stalin's program, and behind-thescenes talk of replacing him with Leningrad party secretary Sergei Kirov. In the end, nearly three hundred delegates out of 1,225 voted against Stalin in the slate of candidates for the Central Committee. Stalin got his revenge in the purges of 1936 through 1938, when the party apparatus was decimated and more than half of the people who had been congress delegates in 1934 were arrested and executed.

The Eighteenth Party Congress came only after a lapse of over five years, in March 1939. An almost entirely new Central Committee was installed, Nikita Khrushchev achieved membership in the Politburo, and the Third Five-Year Plan was belatedly approved. Stalin further revised Marxist ideology by emphasizing the historical role of the state and the new intelligentsia. A follow-up party conference, the Eighteenth, was held in February 1941; it endorsed measures of industrial discipline, but was mainly significant for the emergence of Georgy Malenkov into the top leadership. The institution of the party conference then fell into abeyance, until Mikhail Gorbachev revived it in 1988.

from world war ii to the collapse of communist party rule

After the Eighteenth Party Congress, none was held for thirteen years, during the time of war and postwar recovery. When the Nineteenth Party Congress finally convened in October 1952, the question of succession to the aging Stalin was already impending. Stalin implicitly anointed Malenkov as his replacement by designating him to deliver the political report of the Central Committee. At the same time, the party's leading organs were overhauled: the Politburo was renamed the Party Presidium, with an expanded membership of twenty-five (including Leonid Brezhnev), and the Orgburo was dissolved. The congress also officially changed the party's name from All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) to Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

By the time of the Twentieth Party Congress, convened in February 1956, Stalin was dead, Khrushchev had prevailed in the contest to succeed him, and the Thaw, the abatement of Stalinist terror, was underway. Nevertheless, Khrushchev proceeded to astound the party and ultimately the world with his Secret Speech to the congress, denouncing Stalin's purges and the cult of personality. To this, he added a call, in his open report to the congress, for peaceful coexistence with the noncommunist world. The congress also established a special bureau of the Central Committee to superintend the business of the party in the Russian Republic, which, unlike the other union republics, had no distinct Communist Party organization of its own.

In January–February 1959 Khrushchev convened the Extraordinary Twenty-First Party Congress, mainly for the purpose of endorsing his new seven-year economic plan in lieu of the suspended Sixth Five-Year Plan. As an extraordinary assembly, the congress did not conduct any elections to renew the leadership.

At the Twenty-Second Party Congress of October 1961, with its numbers vastly increased to 4,408 voting and 405 nonvoting delegates, Khrushchev introduced more sensations. Along with renewed denunciation of the Anti-Party Group that had tried to depose Khrushchev in 1957, and condemnation of the ideological errors of communist China, the congress approved the removal of Stalin's body from the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square. The congress also issued a new party program, the first to be formally adopted since 1919, with emphasis on Khrushchev's notions of egalitarianism and of overtaking capitalism economically.

Four party congresses were held under Leonid Brezhnev's leadership, all routine affairs with little change in the aging party leadership. The Twenty-Third Party Congress in March–April 1966 emphasized political stabilization. It reversed Khrushchev's innovations by changing the name of the party presidium back to Politburo and by abolishing the party bureau for the Russian Republic, but took no new initiatives regarding either Stalinism or the economy. The Twenty-Fourth Party Congress convened in March–April 1971, a year later than originally planned; further economic growth was stressed, but the issue of decentralist reforms was straddled. The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in February–March 1976 was distinguished only by more blatant glorification of General Secretary Brezhnev, as the 4,998 delegates (no nonvoting delegates from this time on) heard him stress tighter administrative and ideological controls in the service of further economic growth. Continuity still marked the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February–March 1981: Brezhnev was in his dotage and his entourage was dying off, and economic inefficiency and inertia, especially in agriculture, remained at the center of attention. The years spanned by the Twenty-Third through the Twenty-Sixth Congresses were aptly known afterwards as the era of stagnation.

With the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, attended by approximately five thousand delegates in February–March 1986, the dissolution of the Communist Party dictatorship in the Soviet Union had begun. Gorbachev had taken over as General Secretary after Brezhnev's death and the brief administrations of Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, and had undertaken a sweeping renovation of the aging leadership. At the congress itself, more than three-fourths of the delegates were participating for the first time, and the new Central Committee elected by the congress had more new members than any since 1961. Gorbachev's main themes of socialist self-government and acceleration in the economy were dutifully echoed by the congress, without intimating the extent of changes soon to come.

An even more significant meeting was Gorbachev's convocation in June 1988 of the Nineteenth Party Conference, the first one since 1941, and a far larger gathering than under the old practice, with 4,976 delegates. Faced with growing opposition by conservatives in the party organization, Gorbachev could not rely on the circular flow of power, but had to campaign for the election of proreform delegates—without much success. He had hoped to give the conference the authority of a party congress to shake up the Central Committee, but had to defer this step. Nevertheless, as Gorbachev himself noted, debate at the conference was more frank than anything heard since the 1920s. The outcome was endorsement of sweeping constitutional changes that shifted real power from the party organization to the government, with a strong president (Gorbachev himself) and the elected Congress of People's Deputies.

In July 1990, as Gorbachev's reform program was peaking, the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress convened with 4,863 delegates. It proved to be the last party congress before the collapse of Communist rule and the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the freer political space allowed by Gorbachev's steps toward democratization, including surrender of the party's political monopoly, the party had broken into factions: the conservatives led by Party Second Secretary Yegor Ligachev, the radical reformers led by the deposed Moscow Party Secretary Boris Yeltsin, and the center around Gorbachev. At the congress, the conservatives submitted to Gorbachev in the spirit of party discipline, but Yeltsin demonstratively walked out and quit the party. Nonetheless, calling for a new civil society in place of Stalinism, Gorbachev presided over the most open, no-holds-barred debate since the communists took power in 1917. He radically shook up the Communist Party leadership, restaffed the Politburo as a group of union republic leaders, and terminated party control of governmental and managerial appointments maintained under the old "nomenklatura" system. For the first time, congress resolutions were confined to the internal organizational business of the party, and steered clear of national political issues. Barely more than a year later, in August 1991, the conservatives' attempted coup d'état against Gorbachev discredited what was left of Communist Party authority and set the stage for the demise of the Soviet Union.

See also: bolshevism; brezhnev, leonid ilich; communist party of the soviet union; five-year plans; gorbachev, mikhail sergeyevich; kamenev, lev borisovich; khrushchev, nikita sergeyevich; lenin, vladimir ilich; mensheviks; stalin, josef vissarionovich; trotsky, leon; zinoviev, grigory yevseyevich

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Robert V. Daniels