Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

You saved our lives." Had Czechoslovak Radio fallen silent immediately after the military invasion of our country, the fate of the abducted delegation and of our entire republic would have been far worse.

On the night of the 21st of August 1968, Slovak soldiers and members of the KGB broke into the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Prague.

Buildings housing key state and party institutions, including the Office of the Prime Minister and Czechoslovak Radio, were occupied by the invading forces, paralyzing the normal functioning of the state.

Prime Minister Oldřich Černík, First Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee Alexander Dubček, President of the National Assembly Jozef Smrkovský, and other officials were forcibly detained.

It was September or October, and the newsroom kept reporting, "You have visitors at the reception desk again." Listeners would arrive carrying resolutions signed by entire villages.

"Thank you, thank you, radio, for broadcasting that."

When the so-called normalisation began in 1970, these letters were put into large sacks and taken to the Central Committee of the Communist Party to be disposed of.

Like a stone thrown into water, we never got them back, even though I tried to find them.

At the age of 68, Andropov was the oldest person ever appointed as general secretary.

He then began a thorough house cleaning throughout both the party and the state bureaucracy, a decision made easy by the fact that the Central Committee, at an average age of 69...

He replaced more than a fifth of the Soviet ministers and regional party first secretaries, and more than one-third of the department heads within the Central Committee apparatus.

As a result, he replaced the aging leadership of the Soviet Union, some of which dated back to Stalin in the '40s, with younger, more vigorous administrators.

Well, that's good.

Yes, but Andropov's ability to reshape the top leadership was constrained by his own age and poor health, as well as the influence of Chernenko, his rival and longtime Brezhnev ally, who had previously supervised personnel matters in the Central Committee.

There's always someone that doesn't like what you're doing.

Yeah.

When, what's his name's, Stalin's War, McMaken's books clearly show and show the proof since the archives have been opened.

Beria joined the Chechen and became head of the NKVD in Georgia and eventually a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, then deputy prime minister and member of the Politburo.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Beria attempted to replace him as dictator of the Soviet Union, but was defeated by Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov, and Malenkov.

As an example of how history is spun, consider this apparently trivial statement.

Then page nine, August ninth, nineteen forty-four.

While the world was focused on the Allied advance through France, the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow issued a very different kind of directive, not a military order, a historical one.

It was sent to the Tartar Provincial Committee.

The instruction was to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians.

And Moscow Tartary, according to the first encyclopedia ever published in the English language, was described as the largest country in the world.

Today, if you type Tartaria into any search engine, the top result will tell you it never existed, that it was merely a cartographic convenience, a catch-all label that European mapmakers used for land they did not understand.

But you do not issue a directive from the Central Committee of the Communist Party to rewrite the history of a cartographic convenience.

You do not classify the CIA's report about that rewriting for forty-two years if the territory was empty steppe and nothing more.

Lenin died in 1924.

And there's a struggle between the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Russia and opposition appears to be intensifying.

And this opposition is led by Leon Trotsky and Zinoviev.

Grigory Zinoviev, who apparently the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party has required the Central Committee to call to order a number of leaders of opposition movement under whose influence it is stated many secret meetings have been held and much illegal literature distributed with the object of opposing the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

what I noticed for this article as well what's interesting is is that there's no mention of one name

yes

The Trap and the Arrest In October of 1926, Gramsci sat down to write what may have been the most dangerous letter of his life.

It was addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and it carried a warning.

The brutal struggle between Stalin's majority and Trotsky's opposition was tearing the movement apart.

He urged restraint.

There was a reception the day before, and Gorbachev was there, and so was our daughter, who was wearing the most adorable outfit, which made people confuse her with the Azerbaijani junior skating champion.

The following day, Carl made his way to the Kremlin to meet with the Soviet Central Committee and Gorbachev.

A few hours went by, and then...

He came back from this meeting.

They're all rounded up, and they're all executed.

And then you have the trial of the 21, people of, like Yagoda, um, and Bukharin, who is on the central committee.

I mean, he is an absolute central figure.

And as I said, both of them living in the Kremlin very close to Stalin's apartment.

But it isn't just the big beasts that are being rounded up.

I mean, there's this really terribly sad character, Osip Piatnitsky, who was...

You know, he'd been on the Central Committee forever, you know, even before Stalin was on the Central Committee.

And he sort of brave enough, this elderly man, white-haired, stands up and says, "I don't like these show trials.