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General Secretary of the CPSU - definition of General Secretary of the CPSU in Encyclopedia (196 words) |
 | The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (sometimes called First Secretary) was the title synonymous with leader of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death in 1924. |
| The position was originally an administrative one when it was created in 1922 with Stalin being the first to hold the title but the access to and authority over the party bureaucracy which accrued to the position allowed Stalin to increase his power during Lenin's illness and particularly after his death. |
| Once Stalin came to dominate the Politburo the position of General Secretary became synonymous with that of party leader and de facto ruler of the USSR though the General Secretary often did not hold official government positions. |
| MSN Encarta - Boris Yeltsin (2346 words) |
| In November 1976 CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev made Yeltsin first secretary of the CPSU’s Sverdlovsk Oblast committee, a position that entitled him to a seat on the party’s Central Committee in 1981. |
| After Mikhail Gorbachev became the new general secretary in 1985, Yeltsin was one of the first provincial officials to be brought to Moscow as part of Gorbachev’s drive to revitalize the Soviet system. |
| General Lebed, who had finished third in June, campaigned on Yeltsin’s behalf and was rewarded with a senior position in his administration; however, the president deposed him several months later after a series of spats. |
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