The Nineteenth Party Congress

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AGAP of thirteen and one-half years lay between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Congresses of the Soviet Communist Party instead of the three-year interval provided by the former Party statutes. Although various references were made, from 1948 on, to plans for holding a new Party Congress, Pravda's announcement, on August 20, of the date and the agenda came without forewarning. The assembling of the Congress on October 5 was preceded by many and varied speculations concerning its significance. Its conclusion was followed by no less puzzlement as to why it had been held. The delay in the calling of a Congress and its purely formal rôle once it had met emphasized the fact that in the Soviet party-state the self-chosen and self-perpetuating Party leadership has made the nominally ruling Party a handmaiden of its own absolute control over the state apparatus. In this Siamese-twin relationship, the power of the state apparatus has flourished, and that of the theoretically all-powerful Party has withered.

One formal purpose of calling the Congress was to change the Party name from "All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" to that of the "Communist Party of the Soviet Union." For this, was it necessary to call together 1,359 leading members? The official explanation is that the term "Bolsheviks" now has a purely historical significance, recalling the split of 1903 between Lenin's followers and the Mensheviks, who, after various manœuvres by Lenin, found themselves in a minority at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Perhaps another historic echo, better left unvoiced in view of the present Soviet dogma of the primacy of the Great Russian "elder brother" over the other Soviet peoples, was that the now discarded word "All-Union" recalls the period of 1922-1924, when the Ukrainian, Byelo-Russian, Georgian and other parties were fused with their All-Russian counterpart into a single "All-Union" Party on an allegedly equal and voluntary footing. The new terminology conforms to the fact of completely centralized control over the Party, and eliminates any faint recollection of the time when the various non-Russian Communist parties believed that, at least for them, there would be some element of genuine federalism within both Party and state in the Soviet Union.^[i]