page_title: Eastern Bloc politics
section_title: Ruling parties
hierarchical_section_title: Eastern Bloc politics / Political systems / Ruling parties
caption_attribution_description: Magyar: BUDAPEST XIV., VÁROSLIGET BUDAPESTI NEMZETKÖZI VÁSÁR megnyitó 1948. június 11-én, Rákosi Mátyás beszél.
context_page_description: Eastern Bloc politics followed the Red Army's occupation of much of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and the Soviet Union's installation of Soviet-controlled Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Eastern Bloc through a process of bloc politics and repression. The resulting regimes contained vestiges of representative democracy to initially conceal the process.
  Once in power, each country's Soviet-controlled Communist Party took permanent control of the administration, political organs, police, societal organizations and economic structures to ensure that no effective opposition could arise and to control socioeconomic and political life therein. Party and social purges were employed along with the extensive use of secret police organizations modeled on the Soviet KGB to monitor and control local populations. While multiple political parties continued to nominally exist in some countries, they were all subordinated to the government, and supported government policies. While elections continued to be held, voters were usually presented with a single candidate.
context_section_description: Non-Soviet Eastern Bloc Communist Parties held congresses every five years, not long after the Soviet Communist Party had held its congress, to elect central committees and endorse new party programs, though "emergency" congresses could be called by central committees.  Attendance at party congresses was frequently given as a reward for long service.  Parties also sometimes held national conferences to address specific issues.
  The Central Committees usually met in full, or plenary, sessions two to three times per year to elect members of the politburo or praesidium and the communist party "secretariat", which numbered 15-20 senior party individuals who each was in charge of a department of the party secretariat.  These departments were either party "shadows" of the actual government departments they ended up governing (e.g., agriculture, foreign affairs, education, etc.) or party specific institutions in charge of cadres or a party control commission that investigated any alleged infringements of party discipline.
  The General Secretary or First Secretary of the Central Committee was the most powerful figure in each regime.  He exercised his day-to-day authority through the politburo or presidium, which generally possessed 10-15 full members. During the Stalinist period, the head of the party also led the executive branch, with variations in the practice occurring after Stalin's death, though executive authority always resided in the party's highest organs.  In Romania after the mid-1960s, no politburo existed and, instead, General Secretary Nicolae Ceauşescu nominated a small permanent executive committee from which he nominated a small permanent bureau consisting of himself, his wife, and four to five other members.  In general, the longer the First or General Secretary was in office, the more powerful he became, and he could generally retain power as long as he remained healthy.  The degree of leadership freedom varied, with Ceauşescu facing little debate, while Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov could undertake actions such as forcing Bulgarian names on ethnic Turks without even discussing the matter.
  The party over which the politburo held sway was not a mass party but, comporting with Leninist tradition, a smaller selective party of between three percent (e.g., Albania) and fourteen percent (e.g., Czechoslovakia) of the country's population who had accepted total obedience.  For example, a Polish communist described faith in the Polish United Workers' Party as that it "means that his faith in it is uncritical at every stage, no matter what the party is saying.  It is a person with the ability to adapt his mentality and his conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the party is never wrong, even though it is wrong all the time."  Entry usually required a period of probation. Those who secured membership in this selective party received considerable rewards, such as access to special lower priced shops with a greater selection of goods, special schools, holiday facilities, cinemas, homes, furniture, works of art, and official cars with special license plates so that police and others could identify these members from a distance. These members, also called nomenklatura, also obtained permission to travel abroad, which was rarely given to the general public. Envelopes containing banknotes, and sometimes foreign hard currency, were not infrequently passed out to certain party or politburo members.  After the confiscation through nationalizations from prior owners following Soviet occupation, the party at first possessed considerable additional property and real estate to give members.  All members possessed a party card or book in which were recorded attendance at meetings, service to the party, and any deviation from party conduct. Periodically, these cards would be inspected, frequently as a prelude to a culling or purge of those considered undesirable or insufficiently committed.
  The Communist Party was at the center of the political system in the Eastern Bloc, with its leading role being absolute 
caption: People's Republic of Hungary Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi, called the "bald murderer" for running a harsh dictatorship,[11][40] who was the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party
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