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even a member of it after 1923. He remained officiallyonly general secretary of the party and member (as hehad always been) of the Politbureau, i.e. the PoliticalBureau of the Central Committee of the Party. Butthis was the inmost citadel of power, the real centre ofgovernment (nominally elected by the Central Committee,in fact it seems usually co-opted), not the Council ofPeople's Commissars, which, though entirely composedof party men, was officially the servant of the Congressof Soviets.From 1928 onwards the party, working through anincreasingly elaborate series of committees, both centraland local, became more and more a general staff fororganizing and enforcing the carrying out of collectivizationand the five-year plans and of all-round defencemeasures. Its controlling position was to some extentofficially recognized for the first time in the 1936constitution, which described it as "the directing nucleusof all organizations, both social and state, of the workers,"but the parallelism of two governments—the Politbureauand the Party, the Council of Commissars and theSupreme Council of Soviets—remained unacknowledged.While the party has thus been more than ever thedriving centre of the state apparatus, it has at the sametime during the last ten years almost entirely changedits composition, as a result of the mass purges and thetrials (and for the first time execution) of most of theOld Bolsheviks and the higher army officers. For thefirst time since the early twenties the party declinedheavily in numbers. Then in the two years 1939 and1940 a special recruiting campaign produced a millionnew members, drawn from ' people of a new formation,'' non-party activists,' Stakhanovites, works foremen,collective-farm brigadiers, technical experts, the newSoviet intelligentsia. This was an immense increase,amounting to forty per cent, of the membership of theparty (February 1941, 2,515,481 members; in addition,1,361,404 'candidates,' i.e. probationers); and of theremainder far the greater part were also men and womenof the Stalin generation who had come in during the lastdecade. At the top, in control of all this new and62