The 1990 central committee of the CPSU in perspective

ON 13 JULY 1990 the XXVIII CPSU Congress elected a new Central Committee (CC). Drastic changes were made to the official posts 'represented' on the CC and to the individuals who held CC membership. The changes can best be judged by comparing the new with the old, and the purpose of this article is to put the composition of the new CC into a historical perspective by comparing it with the CCs elected in 1981 and 1986. The 1990 Congress took place in what might be called the era of 'developed perestroika'; the 1981 Congress in contrast reflected the situation at the end of the Brezhnev period; the transitional 1986 Congress was the product of early perestroika. Taken together, the composition of the three CCs suggests a number of important conclusions about a changing leadership and a changing political system at a critical time in the history of the CPSU. The present article is based on a larger Soviet Elite Project, which is essentially a database on all CC members since 1917;1 for this article I made use of machinereadable biographies of the 1,044 individuals who served in the 1981, 1986 and 1990 CCs. The analysis of the changing composition of the CC has been helped by the release of large amounts of biographical information about individual leaders, a process which actually antedated perestroika. For a number of senior officials there is even 'family' information on wives, children and grandchildren. More important, perhaps, is more complete information than in the past on nationality. Paradoxically, however, the great majority of the CC members of 1990 were entirely 'new people', who had not been documented in earlier Soviet reference sources.2 The general assumption of the Soviet Elite Project has been that from the mid1920s until the mid-1980s the membership of the CC could be taken as the embodiment of the top Soviet political elite. This CC elite included the top Soviet leaders in various spheres: the central party secretaries and state ministers, the key generals and diplomats, as well as the party and state leaders from the republics, and the 'party bosses' who actually ran the country at regional level. The question of the composition of the CC in the pre-perestroika era was perhaps most clearly laid out by Robert V. Daniels.3 Writing in 1976, Daniels complained that there had been little investigation of 'the exact composition of the Central Committee and the specific posts that are associated with Central Committee status'. His fundamental perception was that the 'apportionment of representation operates not in terms of individuals, fundamentally, but of job slots', and he reached the following conclusion

Composition (language · Elite · Immigration · Nationality · Period (music · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History

• A note on women in the CPSU central committee, 1990

  Peter Lentini•Europe Asia Studies•1993

  Add to list

• New Directions in Soviet History

  Isabel A Tirado, Stephen E White et al.•The Russian Review•1994

  Add to list