General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
| General Secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Генеральный секретарь ЦК КПСС) |
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Emblem of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
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| Residence | Grand Kremlin Palace, Moscow |
| Appointer | Central Committee |
| Formation | April 1917 |
| First holder | Elena Stasova |
| Final holder | Vladimir Ivashko (acting) |
| Abolished | 29 August 1991 |
| Unofficial names | (acronym) (gensek) |
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Генеральный секретарь ЦК КПСС) was an office of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that by the late 1920s had evolved into the most powerful of the Central Committee's various secretaries. With a few exceptions, from 1929 until the union's dissolution the holder of the office was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, because the post controlled both the CPSU and the Soviet government.Joseph Stalin elevated the office to overall command of the Communist Party and by extension the whole Soviet Union.Nikita Khrushchev renamed the post First Secretary in 1953; the change was reverted in 1966.
The office grew out of less powerful secretarial positions within the party: Technical Secretary (1917–1918), Chairman of the Secretariat (1918–1919), Responsible Secretary (1919–1922) (when Lenin was leader of the party of Bolsheviks). It grew in power to become the de facto leading office of the Soviet Union for two reasons: One, the general secretary in reality controlled the staffing of party positions, which meant that he could pack them with his own most loyal supporters, many of whom owed their career to him, and could create an environment where all intraparty opposition to his whims was thus either prevented from existing in the first place or outnumbered and overpowered when it arose. Two, the party in reality controlled the state and was more powerful than it. Thus the general secretary came to control the country.
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