Nothing has happened at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that was either unexpected or not predicted--no coups or secret speeches, no revelations or special resolutions. The Congress has proceeded in a regular and orderly manner, praisingly discussing and then unanimously adopting without substantial changes the documents published and widely publicized well before the Congress. When I asked one Soviet colleague about his impressions of the Congress, his quick and rather apt response was--"ten days of emptiness."
Indeed, the widely expected change in the membership of the Central Committee--the party's supreme ruling body in between Congresses--was, in fact, not a change at all, for its structure, based on representation of central and local bodies of authority, intermingled with a handful of grass-roots party members, remained exactly the same as it was in Brezhnev's time. Only the faces have changed--true, quite a lot of them, around 40 percent or so--but they were known already beforehand as the new appointees to those officers qualifying for Central Committee membership.
There was not much change in the Politburo either. Only one new full member, Lev Zaikov, recently promoted from the secretaryship of the Leningrad Party organization to that of the Central Committee, was selected and a slight reshuffling took place among the candidate members: two octogenarians, Boris Ponomarev and Vasili Kuznetsov, were removed, and leaders of the Leningrad and Byelorussian Party, Yuri Solovyev and Nicolai Slyun'kov, were promoted. The most significant changes took place in the secretariat of the Central Committee, whose long-depleted ranks were at last replenished by five new members replacing only the outgoing Boris Ponomarev.
On the whole, these non-spectacular changes are significant for having streamlined and normalized the organization of work within the party's leadership. The anomaly of having only one person, apart from the General Secretary himself, combining the positions of full Politburo member and secretary of the party's Central Committee--an anomaly that arose after Nicolai Ryzhkov was moved in July 1985 from the Central Committee's secretaryship to the chairmanship of the Soviet Union's council of Ministers--has been eliminated. Now, as was always the case before, a team of three senior secretaries--the general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the secretary for ideology and external affairs, Yegor Ligachev, and the secretary for economic and other internal affairs, Lev Zaikov--is in place, dividing among themselves all the functions of running the Soviet Union. The five newly appointed junior secretaries have taken charge of their respective departments, and together with the ones already in place, work under the guidance of the three senior colleagues mentioned above. Traditional representation of regions in the Politburo was mainly restored, too, although on the lower level of candidate membership for "both capitals," Moscow (the newly selected party boss of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, was elevated to candidate membership of the Politburo just before the congress) and Leningrad.
Questioning Gorbachev
But what is the meaning of the Congress in terms of the concentration and distribution of political power in the Soviet Union? Has, for example, Gorbachev's personal power been consolidated by the first Congress conducted under his leadership, and if it was, to what extent? I
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