Soviet Communists Meet
NICOLAEVSKY, BORIS I.
Soviet Communists Meet Behind the 20th Party Congress By Boris I. Nicolaevsky The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to convene February 14, is the first since the death...
...Party members could not be brought before the regular courts, even for ordinary criminal offenses, without the approval of special Party organs...
...Even Stalin could not decide this struggle...
...his behavior in 1953-54, therefore, undoubtedly had Malen-kov's sanction...
...The special rights of Party members were restricted, and the jurisdiction of the state punitive organs was extended to Party members...
...Tvardovsky, incidentally, was a protege of Malenkov as early as 1929...
...The chief function of the coming congress is to bolster organizationally the political victory already won by the Khrushchev-Bulganin bloc-in other words, to consolidate the latter's position within the Party...
...Such questions are, in fact, the fundamental issues of Soviet social structure...
...But it is clear that such is the trend...
...This system was modified in 1933-34...
...Moreover, the Secretariat of the Central Committee has gradually assumed a whole series of important Government functions...
...Therefore, they try to conduct their political work in such a way as to keep the Party members conscious of their isolation from the rest of Soviet society, without actually cutting them off completely from the surrounding non-Party world...
...It was he who shook up the magazine Novy Mir and dismissed the editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, who had encouraged such articles...
...And the Khrushchev-Bulganin group is becoming more than ever boss of the Party apparatus...
...Since 1918, the Communist party has always been the only ruling party, but the role of its apparatus in the overall regime has changed several times...
...A former member of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, Mr...
...On the other hand, there are the relations between the Parly as a whole and all other groups of the population...
...Concretely, it is whether Malenkov and his allies, Pervukhin and Saburov, will remain in the Presidium or will be subjected to repressive measures...
...Articles begin to appear in which Communist authors sought to express the broad intelligentsia's weariness with the cultural straitjacket (V...
...Khrushchev opposed such sentiments as manifestations of bourgeois influence, and at the same time fought to strengthen the role of the Party apparatus within the overall Soviet regime...
...The coming congress will unquestionably leave its mark on the Soviet regime for some time to come...
...In the late 1920s, the Party apparatus became the officially recognized bearer of supreme power, and Party members were raised to the position of a special privileged class, exempt from ordinary responsibility under the law...
...In the postwar years, a struggle developed between those who favored restoring the Party's pre-eminence and those who favored concentrating power in the hands of the Government...
...This was especially noticeable during the first year after Stalin's death...
...A Party member was responsible only at a Party court-a system for which one must go back to the medieval church to find a parallel...
...Molotov not only has become a mere executor of Presidium decisions, but even in the purely diplomatic sphere his jurisdiction is limited to the Western democracies...
...It also plays an exceptional role in foreign policy...
...Kruglov's weakened MVD would not dream of taking arbitrary action against Party representatives...
...Nicolaevsky has written on Soviet affairs for This Week and other periodicals here and abroad...
...On Sincerity in Literature"), or even championed Russia's most oppressed class, the collective-farm peasantry (F...
...To secure freedom of movement in determining major policies, however, the ruling group must have a safe majority in the leading organs of the Soviet regime and, particularly, the leading Party institutions (above all, in the Central Committee and its Presidium...
...The Party's pre-eminence, established in the 1920s, continued up to World War II...
...Boris I. Nicolaevsky, veteran Social Democratic scholar, is co-author of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union and a biography of Karl Marx, as well as author of Azeff the Spy...
...During the post-Stalin crisis, there were signs of an impending link-up between the discontented within and outside the Party...
...The unity of the ruling party, as a force distinct from all other strata of Soviet society, is the basis of the entire Soviet social structure...
...The Khrushchev-Bulganin group won its decisive victory last February, when it overthrew Malenkov...
...The punitive organs' power over Party members was maintained right up to Stalin's death...
...Soviet punitive organs are likewise dependent on the Party apparatus...
...All the major political changes which it considered necessary have already been made, and present Soviet policy is in its main lines the policy of Khrushchev and Bulganin...
...Khrushchev's policy from Stalin's death on was to secure more power for the Party apparatus...
...The Soviet ambassadors to almost all the people's democracies" were originally professional workers in the Party apparatus...
...Hence, questions of Party organization and intra-Party politics have a unique significance...
...Such purges, of course, strengthen Khrushchev...
...One cannot yet say with complete assurance that the prewar supremacy of the Party apparatus has been completely restored...
...The Party apparatus is increasingly recovering its rights as "boss" of the state...
...The whole apparatus depends on preventing any alliance between discontented strata inside and those outside the Party...
...A number of provincial Party Secretaries have already been dismissed (including the secretaries of the Sverdlovsk, Gorki, Vologda, Saratov and other Provincial Committees and of the Central Committee of the Karelian Republic)-dismissed, no doubt, for insufficient loyalty to the Khrushchev-Bulganin clique...
...The position of the present ruling clique, headed by Khrushchev and Bulganin, seems secure...
...Abramov, "The People of the Kolkhozes...
...Throughout the post-Stalin period, the Presidium of the Party Central Committee has held supreme power in the country...
...The leaders of the regime are aware of this...
...During the war, however, the State Defense Committee concentrated power in its hands, and ruled supreme over Party, Government and armed forces alike...
...For example, the Secretariat today is in complete control of Soviet agriculture...
...Pomerantsev...
...The question now is how far his victorious bloc will go...
...In the Soviet regime, the Communist party is more than the governing party or the apparatus of dictatorship...
...These two planes of relationship naturally overlap, but the regime manfully attempts to keep them as separate as possible...
...Relations between Government organs and leading Party institutions were even more complex...
...This reform had been initiated by oppositionists who favored democratization of the Soviet order, but Stalin exploited it to carry out the Great Purges...
...The processes of Soviet internal development unfold on two planes: On the one hand, there are relationships within the ruling party, among the members of the various strata and groups, who are usually allied according to their functions...
...they cannot but feel themselves bound to Party Secretary Khrushchev...
...The Party institutions were the bosses, the Government organs the managers...
...Soviet Communists Meet Behind the 20th Party Congress By Boris I. Nicolaevsky The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to convene February 14, is the first since the death of Stalin, whose presence had overwhelmed both the country and the Party for three decades...
...In either case, the outcome of the 20th Congress of the CPSU seems predetermined: It will confirm the victory of Khrushchev and Bulganin...
...In Soviet society, the Party fulfils the function of a ruling class-organized in a special way, and differing sharply from ruling classes in other societies, but a ruling class nonetheless...
...The most dangerous possible situation for the Soviet regime would be for discontent in various strata of the ruling group to begin to coalesce with similar feelings in the population at large...
...The relations then between Party and Government can best be compared to those between the owners of a business and its managers...
...The basis of Khrushchev's victory was his decisive opposition to these sentiments...
...at different times, he himself held different views...
...One should not expect major surprises in domestic or foreign policy...
...For the Soviet regime, problems of intra-Party politics are as important as problems of general policy...
...As a result, the various strata and groups within the ruling apparatus arc usually more conscious of their ties with one another than with any of those who are outside the apparatus and the Party...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
