ABSTRACT
The party congresses and conferences of early 1986 probably devoted less time and publicity to matters of mass party membership than on any previous occasion since the death of Stalin. As recently as under K. U. Chernenko there had been a lively discussion of party recruitment policy in Pravda, 1 but this was not pursued once M. S. Gorbachev took office. In place of questions of the mass membership, the stress under Gorbachev has been conspicuously on questions of leadership — the selection, training, deployment and performance of officials. The main reason for this shift in emphasis would seem to be the following: Gorbachev is clear, in a way the older generation were not, that a profound change has affected party membership since the early 1970s. The era is past in which the party strove to establish its presence in all walks of life, the era, in fact, of partiinoe stroitel’stvo (‘party construction’); the party presence in society is probably considered to be close to its optimum, 2 needing only routine maintenance and fine-tuning. Far more important now is the more efficient and intensive utilisation of the party in social management; hence the preoccupation with leadership.
