The 25th congress of the Communist party of the USSR met in Moscow from February 24 to March 5 1976. The general secretary of the party Leonid Brezhnev greeted 4,998 Soviet delegates and representatives from 96 foreign countries. Among Communist-ruled nations, only the People's Republic of China and Albania did not send representatives. The congress itself produced few surprises, with the main emphasis placed on the stability of the political and economic situation and the prospects of continued success in the future, Brezhnev declared that the USSR will not invade or fight other countries. Little mention was made of fundamental problems facing the Soviet Union— the slowdown of the rate of economic growth, the low output of agriculture despite heavy investment. The only critical voices raised were those of foreign Communists. French Communist leader Georges Marchais boycotted the congress after criticizing the Soviet Union's suppression of dissidents. A major problem faced Soviet leaders, and one that has been continually evaded was the need to rejuvenate the Politburo. Once again the membership remained virtually unchanged, as did the members' average age of 66. Brezhnev himself was 69. Two new members were elevated to the Politburo, Dmitriy Ustinov and Gregory Romanov, bringing its total number to 16.
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, congress, communist, party, soviet and/or union:
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
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“It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Busy people begrudge the days being short.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
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“The women’s liberation movement at this point in history makes the American Communist Party of the 1930s look like a monolith.”
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“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
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“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
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