dominance of a single party, a formal commitment to Marxism-
Leninism, a command economy, and special relations with other
communist parties. In the mature Soviet system on the eve of the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet Government, organisa-
tionally based on the Council of Ministers and the ministries and
state committees which its members headed, pursued policies
broadly determined by the leadership of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, which under Article 6 of the 1977 Constitution
of the USSR was formally accorded the role of ‘guiding and
directing force’ of Soviet society. The party, with nearly 17 million
members, had ceased to be a ‘vanguard’ party; but party member-
ship remained the key point of entry for those who aspired to
become part of the elite. While primary party organisations existed
at workplace level, and a theatrical ‘Congress’ was held roughly
every five years, real power was located in the party’s profession-
al bureaucracy, the Secretariat (with its own departments); in the
party Central Committee, which met several times a year
(Mawdsley and White, 2000); and in the ‘Politburo’ (Political
Bureau) of the Central Committee, which brought together the top
dozen or so Soviet leaders, and came as close to being a real
Cabinet as did any Soviet organ. Known from 1952–66 as the
‘Presidium’, it comprised both voting and non-voting (or ‘candi-
date’) members. The formal Head of State was the Chairman of
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a largely rubber-stamp
bicameral ‘Parliament’; but the key leader was the principal party
secretary, known from 1952–66 as the ‘First Secretary’, and then
from 1966 as the ‘General Secretary’. The power of a General
Secretary tended to grow during his term of office compared to
what it was at the outset, as the tools of patronage at his disposal
permitted him to promote those whom he believed to be support-
ers, but after 1953 this power was never absolute, and, arguably,
the power of successive General Secretaries was increasingly cir-
cumscribed by a range of normative and prudential constraints.
The party’s tentacles penetrated all corners of society, prompting T.
H. Rigby to describe the Soviet system as ‘mono-organisational’
(Rigby, 1976; Rigby, 1990), and recruitment into the elite was
18 The Afghanistan Wars