The Changing Composition of the Communist Party

Abstract

Leonard Schapiro has identified six main features in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as it appeared to him in 1952 on the eve of Stalin’s death. In the first place he put the fact that while retaining its selectivity the CPSU had become a ‘mass party’. This was at a time when there were slightly over 6,700,000 party members. Shortly after the political demise of Khrushchev (1 January 1965) the party had a membership of 11,758,000. By 1974 party membership stood at well over 15,000,000. Of course, the population of the USSR has increased considerably since 1953 (from 184.8 millions to 248.6 millions in 1973). As Table 5.1 shows, party membership more than doubled in the same period, although expressed as a percentage of the population the increase in party size was far less dramatic. Moreover, comparison would be more realistic had we full information on percentages of party size in relation to that part of the Soviet population aged eighteen and over. Brezhnev at the XXIV Congress mentioned that the figure (March 1971) stood at 9 per cent, or one out of every eleven adults.