Word: secretariat
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Deng began his effort by abandoning the personality cult and dictatorial system fostered by Mao. In 1980 he replaced the autocratic position of party chairman with an eleven-man secretariat. In an even bolder move, he gave the spotlight position of General Secretary not to himself but to Hu Yaobang, 70, a former chief of the Communist Youth League and his occasional bridge partner. Since then, Deng has chosen to operate largely behind the scenes, stressing that the reform program is not his work but that of the party. He has thus allowed his two deputies, General Secretary...
...region. Andropov often vacationed at hot-springs resorts near Stavropol. Gorbachev in effect served as his host. Suslov and Andropov engineered Gorbachev's appointment to higher and higher posts in the regional party and, in 1978, his sudden call to Moscow as a member of the Communist Party Secretariat, a group of about ten officials who run the vast Soviet bureaucracy on a day-to-day basis. Gorbachev was given responsibility for all of Soviet agriculture. A rough American parallel would be the appointment of a little-known Governor of, say, South Dakota to be officially Secretary of Agriculture...
...indeed, has traditionally been a road to oblivion. Among the septuagenarians in the Politburo, which he joined as a candidate member in 1979 and full voting member a year later, he stood out primarily for his youth and energy. He seems to have used his positions in the Secretariat and later the Politburo to gain influence over who was rewarded and who was fired throughout the Soviet bureaucracy, in the process building a political machine inside the 300-member Communist Party Central Committee, theoretical parent body of both the Secretariat and Politburo...
...year- old Konstantin Chernenko. But Chernenko was all too obviously an interim leader, and when he also became too ill to function, Gorbachev conducted the weekly Politburo meetings and headed the government in all but name. The final step occurred on March 10, 1985, when Chernenko died and the Secretariat elected Gorbachev General Secretary less than five hours later. Nominating Gorbachev for that post, Gromyko gave what has since become the standard one- line description of the new boss. Said Gromyko: "This man has a nice smile, but he has got iron teeth...
...been fired. At the top, Gorbachev has named four new voting members of the Politburo, bringing its membership to 13, and nine new government ministers. Grigory Romanov, 62, the Leningrad party boss who was widely considered to be Gorbachev's chief rival, was unceremoniously dumped from the Politburo and Secretariat; officially he resigned for reasons of health. Gromyko, 76, was artfully nudged upstairs to the prestigious but largely % ceremonial post of President and head of state, and replaced as Foreign Minister by Eduard Shevardnadze, 67, a white-haired Georgian with an engaging personality but no experience in foreign policy...