First Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party

## Первый секретарь ЦК ВКП(б)First Secretary of theCentral Committee of the AUCP

First Secretary Henrik Stamer Hedin

The **First Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party** (Russian: Первый секретарь ЦК ВКП(б) *Pervyy sekretar’ TsK VKP(b)*) is an office of the All-Union Communist Party (AUCP), and the most senior of the Central Committee's multiple secretaries. The post serves as *de facto* leader of the AUCP and by extension of the Soviet Union, and is elected by the Central Committee to lead the Politburo on a day-to-day basis. It is considered the most powerful office in the Soviet Union, especially when combined with the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers, a.k.a. Premier (head of government) of the Soviet Union.

The First Secretaries of the national branches of the AUCP in each national republic of the Soviet Union function as the republican-level equivalent of the office of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the AUCP, and lead their respective National Committee and Politburo which are subordinate to the Central Committee and Politburo of the AUCP; unlike at the all-union level, it is relatively common for the First Secretary of a republican party branch National Committee to serve simultaneously as chairman of the republican Council of Ministers (national republican premier). An individual First Secretary of a national Party branch is eligible to be elected to the post of all-union First Secretary while retaining their position as national First Secretary; this reflects the structure of the AUCP, in which all Party members are simultaneously a member of a specific national branch.

The office was originally called General Secretary, and renamed First Secretary in 1954; this change was reverted in 1966, only to be reinstated in 1996. The current First Secretary of the Central Committee of the AUCP is Henrik Stamer Hedin, in office since December 2018.

## History

In its first two incarnations the office performed mostly secretarial work. The post of Responsible Secretary was then established in 1919 to perform administrative work. In 1922, the office of General Secretary followed as a purely administrative and disciplinary position, whose role was to do no more than determine party membership composition. Joseph Stalin, its first incumbent, used the principles of democratic centralism to transform his office into that of party leader, and later leader of the Soviet Union.

In 1934, the 17th Party Congress refrained from formally re-electing Stalin as General Secretary. However, Stalin was re-elected into all other positions and remained leader of the party without diminishment.

In the 1950s, Stalin increasingly withdrew from Secretariat business, leaving the supervision of the body to Georgy Malenkov, possibly to test him as a potential successor. In October 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, Stalin restructured the party's leadership. His request, voiced through Malenkov, to be relieved of his duties in the party secretariat due to his age, was rejected by the party congress, as delegates were unsure about Stalin's intentions. In the end, the congress formally abolished Stalin's office of General Secretary, though Stalin remained one of the party secretaries and maintained ultimate control of the Party. When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, Malenkov was the most important member of the Secretariat, which also included Nikita Khrushchev, among others. Under a short-lived troika of Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov, Malenkov became Chairman of the Council of Ministers but was forced to resign from the Secretariat nine days later on 14 March, leaving Khrushchev in effective control of the body. Khrushchev was elected to the new office of First Secretary at the Central Committee plenum on 14 September of the same year. Originally conceived as a collective leadership, Khrushchev removed his rivals from power in both 1955 and (especially) 1957 and reinforced the supremacy of the First Secretary.

In 1964, opposition within the Politburo and the Central Committee led to Khrushchev's removal as First Secretary. Leonid Brezhnev succeeded Khrushchev to the post as part of another collective leadership, together with Premier Alexei Kosygin and others. The office was renamed General Secretary in 1966. The collective leadership was able to limit the powers of the General Secretary during the Brezhnev Era. Brezhnev's influence grew throughout the 1970s as he was able to retain support by avoiding any radical reforms. Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko ruled the country in the same way as Brezhnev had. Mikhail Gorbachev ruled the Soviet Union as General Secretary until his removal in the 1986 coup shortly before the start of World War III, upon which the State Committee on the State of Emergency assumed control of the country.

Following the war,