Quotes About Politburo

The Politburo and Secretariat for many terms now have made some big mistakes, especially having not prevented and remedied corruption and the deterioration among some party members.

it was the higher party organs, notably the Central Committee and its subcommittee, the Politburo, that decided Soviet policy in both internal and external affairs, and the government evolved as the party's main executive agency.

The Orgburo was shifting leading personnel around in implementing policy decisions taken in the Politburo. Lower-level personnel decisions were within the jurisdiction of the Secretariat, and the latter, through Uchraspred, was able to effect appointments and transfers in the system of party organizations throughout the country. Here was a boundless field of opportunity for empire-building by a man of Stalin's ambitions and aptitudes.

At the time of Lenin's death there were in the party four different factional groupings with representation on the Politburo.

five days later, the Politburo heard his report on the situation in the Caucasus and decided "to pursue toward Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, and Persia a maximally conciliatory policy, that is, aimed primarily at avoiding war."[381]

Six out of eight members of the first politburo of the Bolshevik Party created in November 1917 – Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Krestinsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Bubnov, and Grigori Sokolnikov – were killed by Stalin between 1936 and 1941; only Lenin and Stalin himself died natural deaths.

By 1981, the seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, hobbled by a series of strokes and barely able to function, could be seen drooling on himself on his rare appearances on Soviet television. Rather than removing him, however, the Politburo merely nominated him for still more medals. Lenin—the "incandescent" Lenin, as Churchill called him—would have been appalled.

I was a member of the Politburo for seven years, a foreign minister.

All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held 'elections.' Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things.

The pinnacle of power in China is the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the tiny body that sets policy for the nation's 1.4 billion citizens.

So, we never even knew that they were here, but the militia captain with our team did, and he kind of blurted it out. His exact words were, 'My God, the Politburo's in there!

All that is very relevant to Afghanistan. To a startling degree, the Politburo's 1979 deliberations about how to deal with it mirror the Bush administration's close-minded and secretive decision-making that led to its invasion. The Bush White House might have modeled itself on the Soviet gerontocracy under Brezhnev that brushed aside warnings from military and regional experts who knew the situation in Afghanistan to be far more complicated than the Politburo stated.

The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Vaclav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.

Lenin supported extreme measures. On March 19, 1922, he wrote to the Politburo: . . . the only moment when we can smash the enemy's head with a 99 percent chance of success . . . Now and only now, when there is cannibalism in the famine areas and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are lying on the roads, we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of Church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy, not stopping at the crushing of any resistance. . . .

In 1937, Stalin ordered the executions of 680,000 people judged politically unreliable, including military officers, party officials, and members of the politburo—an incredible number.

Shatov stared at me and said, 'Old boy, you don't understand. A member of the Politburo who can speak for forty minutes without notes — he must be a genius!