Copyright 1998 ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Kaleidoscope
COUNTRY:
Russia
HEADLINE: Organizations
Academy of Sciences
The Academy of Sciences was founded in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1724 by Peter
the Great as the Russian Academy of Sciences. It later became the St.
Petersburg Academy of Sciences and then the Imperial Academy of Sciences. From
the 1917 Revolution until 1925 it was known as the Academy of Sciences of
Russia, and from then until the breakup of the Soviet Union as the Academy of
Sciences of the U.S.S.R.
The Academy of Sciences is the chief coordinating body for scientific research
and membership constitutes the highest honor in the scientific community.
Academies of Sciences existed in all republics. In 1986 a 75-year age
limit was established along with four-yearly elections for the president and
council and biannual general meetings to elect new members. It has 300 full
members, who are mainly established but largely retired scientists, and 600
corresponding members, who are active scientists. The academy became
independent of the
state in 1990.
After the failed coup against the regime of Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev, the organization was renamed the Russian Academy of Sciences.
However, another organization with the same name was created around the same
time. The new grouping is merely an honorary society with no institutions or
research funds. Its
leaders have been pressing the original academy to merge, a move that some say
would undermine the scientific integrity of the academy because the new
grouping is open to nonscientists.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; Science]
Central Committee
The highest organ of the Soviet Communist Party, the Central Committee
directed all party activities
between congresses. Members were formally elected at party congresses every
five years, with the membership actually selected in advance of the congresses
by the party leadership.
Party statutes declared the Central Committee to be the party's most important
continuing body. In theory, the Politburo and the Secretariat reported to the
Central Committee. In practice, the Central Committee's power was severely
limited by its infrequent meetings and large membership, and true power lay
with the Politburo and Secretariat. The committee's major function was to
provide a sense of legitimacy and national consensus for Politburo decisions,
with major decisions being issued
in its name. The committee met twice a year, with sessions lasting one or two
days. Plenary (full) sessions would be held before a major event, such as the
introduction of a five-year plan or to announce the selection of a new general
secretary. The committee was supported by a
staff of about 1,500 people.
The Central Committee was first created at the Bolshevik Congress of 1898.
From 1917 to 1934, the Central Committee acted as a quasi-parliament, with room
for discussions and factions, even outvoting Joseph Stalin on some occasions.
To free himself from dependency on
majority support in the Central Committee, Stalin purged 70% of the body
between the 17th and 18th party congresses (1934-39) and installed his own
supporters. Thus, until Stalin's death, its role was greatly diminished. During
the period of collective leadership, after Stalin's death, the membership was
selected to represent
key elements of society and leaders again had to win support of the various
factions of the committee. Wider in scope than the Supreme Soviet and the
Council of Ministers, the Central Committee was the main tool of the government
following World War II. Its members included republic party leaders, key
ministerial figures, representatives of the
military and security forces, and major economic and scientific figures.
Following the failed hard-line coup in 1991 the committee dissolved itself.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; The European Political Dictionary]
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), now known as the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, was founded in 1898 as the Russian
Social Democratic Labor Party. A major figure in the party's early days was
Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that
overthrew the political system that communists believed exploited and destroyed
people. Following the
revolution, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin, emerged as the single, dominant party
and adopted the name Communist Party. The party was originally seen as the
leader of the working class and devoted to developing a society in which
everyone was equal and no one was exploited by their employers. Under Joseph
Stalin the party grew from
a relatively small, elite group to a ruling bureaucracy with a much larger
membership. Rules binding party members to obey all decisions of the central
party leadership helped make the party increasingly bureaucratic. The CPSU came
to be run by officials who had more lavish
lifestyles than ordinary people. The average citizen often had to share small
apartments with other families and had limited access to plentiful supplies of
basic food. Party officials had country homes and ate caviar.
According to the rules adopted by the 22nd Congress of the party on Oct 31,
1961, the Communist
Party
"unites, on a voluntary basis, the more advanced, politically more conscious
section of the working class, collective-farm peasantry, and intelligentsia of
the USSR." Its principal objectives are to build a communist society by means of gradual
transition from socialism to communism, to raise the material and cultural
level of the
people, to organize the defense of the country, and to strengthen ties with the
workers of other countries.
The CPSU was the Soviet Union's only legal party until the late 1980s, when
organized opposition groups began forming inside and outside the party. Because
of the party's powerful role and its status as the nation's only legal party,
the general
secretary of the Central Committee was effectively the head of state.
The supreme organ was the party congress. Ordinary congresses were convened
not less than once in four years. The congress elected a Central Committee,
which met at least every six months, carried on the work of the party between
congresses, and guided the work of central Soviet and public organizations
through party groups within them.
The Central Committee formed a political bureau ( Politburo) to direct the
work of the committee between plenary meetings, a secretariat to direct
day-to-day work, and a commission of party control to consider
appeals against decisions about expulsion. Similar rules held for the regional
and territorial party organizations. Every republic of the Soviet Union (except
for Russia) had its own Communist Party organization. The Politburo was the
party's effective policymaking body.
The party's most important principle was democratic centralism, which
includes three basic ideas:
1. Monolithic unity is fundamental to Marxism-Leninism (the political
philosophy of Soviet communism).
2. All party decisions are irrevocably binding on party members.
3. Any restriction or questioning of party policy is considered revision,
which is contrary to the CPSU's role as the only
interpreter of Marxist-Leninism.
In 1990 the Communist Party had 19,228,217 members (about 9% of the adult
population). Women accounted for 30% of membership and Russians for 59%.
In February 1990 the CPSU denounced its constitutional guarantee of monopoly
power. The following month, the Congress of People's Deputies
repealed Article six of the Soviet Constitution, which had guaranteed political
power for the party. The CPSU's position was undermined when many key members
of the party participated in the Aug 18, 1991 coup that failed to oust
reformist President Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev resigned from the Communist
Party leadership on
Aug 24, 1991, ending the traditional link between party and political
leadership, and on Aug 29, the Supreme Soviet voted to suspend the CPSU's
activity indefinitely. However, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union,
many hard-line republic leaders who had been able to retain their power have
since
legalized republic Communist parties. A virtual opposition bloc, the party
dominated December 1995 State Duma elections under the stewardship of longtime
apparatchik Gennady Zyuganov.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; The European Political Dictionary]
Congress of People's Deputies
Under the constitutional reforms of 1988 the
Soviet Union's Congress of People's Deputies formally became the highest body
of state authority. It was empowered to pass legislation and elect the Supreme
Soviet, which performed the more important legislative activities. However,
effective political power was held by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU) and its constituent organs. The
Congress of People's Deputies was also mandated to adopt and amend the Soviet
Constitution and ratify the election of the Supreme Court and the chairperson
of the Council of Ministers.
Under the 1988 amendments to the Constitution, the Congress consisted of 2,250
deputies elected to five-year terms by universal suffrage. One third of the
Congress' membership was reserved
for the main all-union public organizations such as the CPSU, trade unions, the
Komsomol ( communist youth), women's councils, the Academy of Sciences, and so
on. Only 100 seats were saved for party members, but most of the deputies were
communists who gained election to the Congress through other
avenues. The remaining two thirds of the members were elected from the nation's
republics and regions, with 750 being directly elected in territorial
constituencies and 750 representing national-territorial areas (union
republics, autonomous republics, autonomous regions, and autonomous districts).
The Congress met five times and its last act was to
approve arrangements for an interim government after the failed coup of August
1991.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; Europa World Year Book; World
Almanac of the Soviet Union]
KGB
KGB is the abbreviation of Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Committee
of State Security, which was the Soviet security service from
1953 to 1991. In 1991 the KGB merged with the Interior Ministry to form the
Russian Security and Internal Affairs Ministry. Earlier similar organizations
have been the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, and MGB. All these organizations served as
instruments of control for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
There now exist a
Federal Security Service (FSB) and a Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Prior to the 1991 reforms, the KGB was charged with preserving the power of
the state and maintaining surveillance over civilians. The agency was
responsible for both foreign and domestic security. The KGB's responsibilities
included:
1. foreign and domestic espionage
2. intelligence gathering and analysis
3. counterintelligence
4. political control over the population
5. protecting borders
6. covert activities and disinformation
The KGB was divided into main directorates, independent directorates, and
departments, all of which had subordinate agencies. The main directorates
included:
* First Directorate, responsible for
clandestine foreign activities and counterintelligence
* Second Directorate, responsible for domestic intelligence
* Third Directorate, responsible for military counterespionage
* Fifth Directorate, control of dissent
At its height, the KGB employed more than 200,000 border guards, security
troops, and a secret service. It was organized
along military lines, with its members having military ranks.
During Joseph Stalin's rule, the secret service was responsible only to him
and conducted a reign of terror. Nikita Khrushchev, the CPSU leader from 1953
to 1964, brought the organization more under party control. Under Leonid
Brezhnev, who led the
Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, the organization was devoted more to foreign
affairs.
Although it was nominally subordinate to the Council of Ministers, the KGB was
actually solely responsible to the CPSU, with operatives present at all levels
of government and within all industrial and other organizations. The KGB
wielded great influence
over the secret police forces of other Eastern bloc nations.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; The European Political Dictionary;
The Soviet and East European Dictionary]
Liberal Democratic Party
Originally founded by Vladimir Bogachev, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
was chaired by the extreme right-wing populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky beginning in 1990. After being expelled by
the party leadership for his incendiary rhetoric, Zhirinovsky claimed the party
name for himself in 1991 with the reputed connivance of officials from the
Soviet-era KGB, or secret police.
The LDP is an ultranationalist
grouping whose membership consists largely of former and current members of the
military, pensioners, communists, and nationalists, but it also includes a
growing contingent of mainstream supporters from Russia's emerging business
class. The party was considered a negligible extremist grouping until
Zhirinovsky's favorable showing in 1991
presidential elections in which he secured roughly 8% of the vote, or over 6
million votes.
In December 1993 legislative elections the LDP took the most votes of any
party in the popular vote component of the election 64 of 225 elected seats in
an upset that has subsequently
made President Boris Yeltsin and other moderate politicians more respectful of
nationalist political sentiment. The party effectively controlled about
one-fifth of the seats in the State Duma until 1995 elections, when it lost a
substantial amount of representation. At the LDP's fifth party
congress in April 1994 its 340 deputies granted Zhirinovsky absolute control of
the organization and nominated him as their candidate in 1996 presidential
elections, in which he placed a distant fifth.
[Sources: Europa World Year Book; Political Handbook of the World]
National Salvation Front
The National Salvation
Front is a Russian grouping of communist hard-liners and right-wing
nationalists. It was founded on Oct 24, 1992 and banned by President Boris
Yeltsin three days later. Its leaders were drawn from military, antireform, and
anti-Semitic groups. The party advocated Yeltsin's overthrow.
In February 1993, a court ruling overturned Yeltsin's ban, although the group
had never ceased its activities in the first place. It advocates a halt to
further privatization.
Leader: Valery Smirnov
[Source: Facts on File World News Digest]
Politburo
The Politburo was the
political bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the most
powerful institution of the party. It was responsible for party work between
plenary sessions of the Central Committee. It was the chief policymaking organ
of the party and it consisted of 14 full members and eight candidate
(nonvoting) members, although the
numbers sometimes varied. Its membership included the nation's most important
politicians, with seats in the Politburo being the most tangible indication of
power in the Soviet Union.
The Politburo was first constituted by Vladimir Lenin in October 1917 to
direct the Bolshevik Revolution and was the true locus of power
for most of Soviet history. It made policy for both the government and the
party, although technically its mandate extended only to the party. The fusion
of power stemmed from the fact that leading party personnel held key government
posts and party discipline assured the implementation of party policy by
all government organs. The Politburo's main areas of focus were international
affairs, the economy, and national security.
The members of the Politburo were selected informally by the body's own
membership through a secret process. The Politburo was formally responsible to
the Central Committee, with its membership subject to the approval of that
body. The body included
full and candidate members and only once had a woman member. Although it had no
formally designated head, the Politburo was effectively led by the general
secretary of the party. An inner circle of about six members generally
constituted the Politburo Secretariat, the ultimate seat of power for the
communist regime.
Its role changed in 1990 when the 28th Congress agreed on the transfer of
power to parliamentary institutions. The Politburo ceased activities in August
1991.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; The Soviet and East European
Dictionary]
Socialist Workers Party
The Russian Sotsialisticheskaya Partiya Trudiashchikhsia (Socialist Workers Party) was led by former dissident historian Roy Medvedev,
who is now a member of the State Duma (legislature). A small leftist
organization, it has sought alliances in the past with communist and agrarian
parties.
[Source: Political Handbook of the World]
State Duma
The
State Duma is the lower house of the Federal Assembly, the bicameral
legislature approved in a new December 1993 Constitution as a replacement for
the Supreme Soviet. It is a 450-member body of which 225 seats are filled by
proportional representation, the other half in single
member constituencies. Its formal powers are somewhat circumscribed by the
comprehensive executive powers that President Boris Yeltsin wrote into the
Constitution as a result of past power struggles with recalcitrant deputies of
the Soviet-era legislature. The State Duma's counterpart is the upper-house
Federation Council, a 178-member
chamber comprising two deputies each from Russia's 89 regions and republics.
[Sources: Keesing's Record of World Events; Political Handbook of the World;
Time]
Supreme Soviet
The Supreme Soviet was the highest legislative organ of the Soviet Union and
was empowered to pass constitutional amendments. Most legislation was initiated
by the
Cabinet or the Presidium and most of the Supreme Soviet's work was carried out
by functionally specific committees that developed from the 1960s onwards.
However, the dominance of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the
effective instrument of government meant that legislative processes were not
clear and, given the duplication in membership of various party and government
organs, whether a legislative proposal originated in the Politburo, Presidium,
or Council of Ministers was difficult to determine and probably not important.
Key positions in the Supreme Soviet were held by members of the Communist
Party, although it was a highly representative body in that it also included
women,
nonparty members, peasants, young people, and workers.
The Supreme Soviet consisted of two chambers with equal legislative rights,
elected for a term of five years. The Soviet of the Union represented
individuals and the Soviet of Nationalities represented the constituent units
of the Soviet federation. The Soviet of the Union was elected on the
basis of electoral districts that were all the same size, with one deputy for
every 300,000 people. In 1989 there were 750 members. The Soviet of
Nationalities was elected on the basis of 25 deputies from each union republic,
11 from each autonomous republic, five from each autonomous region, and one
from
each autonomous area, but the deputies were not required to be, and very often
were not, of the nationality they were supposed to represent. In 1989 there
were 750 members. Constitutional amendments in 1988 provided for the election
in 1989 of a 2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies, which would elect a
542-member
Supreme Soviet.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; The Soviet and East European
Dictionary]
Tass
Founded in 1925, Tass (Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union) was the
official Soviet news agency. For most of its existence it was a government
"mouthpiece." It was recognized for providing some of the
frankest reporting during glasnost, but during the failed hard-line coup of
August 1991 it issued statements from the leaders of the insurrection. As a
result, the director general was replaced following the unsuccessful coup. The
agency is now a pool for news agencies from the Commonwealth of Independent
States.
Press releases from Russia are labeled Itar-Tass. In 1990, Tass had 1,300
reporters, photographers, and editors in 113 countries.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; Time]
Writers' Union
The Writers' Union was founded in the Soviet Union by party decree in 1932 and
was established
in 1934. It was the only professional organization for Soviet writers and
nonmembers could not be published. Members were required to follow the union
doctrine of socialist realism and criticism of the regime was not permitted. By
1977 it had 7,955 members. It controlled two publishing houses: Literaturnaja
gazeta and
Sovetskij pisatel. The union's newspaper was Literaturnaja gazeta. It published
several journals, including Novy Mir (New World).
The Writers' Union was notoriously conservative, and in the 1930s and 1940s it
informed on its own members. After the failed Soviet coup against President
Mikhail Gorbachev
in August 1991, liberals in the organization took over a meeting and ousted the
union's hard-line secretariat. The liberals wanted to assure the continued
existence of a centralized organization representing writers throughout the
former republics of the Soviet Union, although the Baltic and Georgian branches
of the union had
left the group before the coup attempt. The future of the group is uncertain,
in part because of the secession of republican groups and also because the
government has mounted some challenges to the union's ownership of its property
and to the Litfund, which provides money to support writers.
Among the writers expelled by the Writers' Union were Boris Pasternak and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
[Sources: The Soviet Union Figures-Facts-Data; World Almanac of the Soviet
Union]
LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1998
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1998 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
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