Politburo
executive committee of a communist party
A politburo ( ) (Russian: политбюро, romanized: politbyuro, IPA: [pəlʲɪdbʲʉˈro] ) or political bureau is the highest organ of the central committee in communist parties. The term is also sometimes used to refer to similar organs in socialist and Islamist parties, such as the Political Bureau of Hamas. Politburos are part of the governing structure in most former and existing communist states.
Names
The term politburo in English comes from the Russian politbyuro (политбюро), itself an abbreviation of politicheskoye byuro (политическое бюро 'political bureau'). The Spanish term Politburó is directly loaned from Russian, as is the German Politbüro. Chinese uses a calque (Chinese: 政治局; pinyin: Zhèngzhìjú), from which the Vietnamese (Bộ Chính trị 部政治), and Korean (정치국, 政治局, Jeongchiguk) terms derive.
History
Origin and the Soviet Union
The concept of a politburo was created during the Russian Revolution. On 23 October 1917, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee established a political bureau to manage the operational direction of the armed insurrection in Petrograd. It initially had seven members: Vladimir Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Grigori Sokolnikov, and Andrei Bubnov. However, this initial body was short-lived, ceasing operations shortly after the success of the Petrograd coup and the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government.
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This entry incorporates text from “Politburo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.