Exempt secretary

Soviet Union

Virtually every workplace (and military force) in the Soviet Union had lower-level subdivisions of the three major Soviet organizations: the CPSU, Komsomol, and Soviet trade unions. Heads of these organizations were titled "secretary". For small organizational subdivisions the secretary was usually an employee of the corresponding workplace subdivisions. For sufficiently large organizational subdivisions, the elected secretary was either temporarily relieved from his workplace duties, or, more frequently, was part of nomenklatura and his salary was paid from the membership dues of the corresponding organization.

Tony Cliff in his 1958 Changes in Stalinist Russia wrote: "In factories of some size, there is a full-time Party secretary appointed by the town, regional, territorial or republican Party Committees, who is responsible not to the management of the plant, but to his superiors in the Party hierarchy." ... "The factory Party secretary has the power to compel the manager to change his decisions, including the annual production plan of the plant or of an individual shop. He can appoint “technical brigades of specialists”, whose suggestions to the manager are irrevocable orders. He can also compel the manager to change his subordinate personnel."

The charter of the CPSU specifies the number of members required in a party organization of a workplace or military unit to have a full-time party secretary.

In 1953 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that in Soviet Army full-time party secretaries (i.e., the ones without military duties) were typically assigned in party organizations on regimental and divisional levels and they were nominated by the political departments of the military command one level above. (There were two structures of political control over the Soviet armed forces: immediate control via the structures of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Soviet Navy (best known by the concepts of politruk and zampolit) and mediated via the local organizations of the CPSU within the Army. The two were intertwined: Political Directorate itself was controlled by the Communist Party. At the same time, the Political Directorate had some control over Communist organizations down the military hierarchy.

References

References

1. [[Alexei Yurchak]], ''Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More'', 2013, Chapter 3: "Ideology Inside Out. Ethics and Poetics"
2. [[Margaret Pearson]], ''China's New Business Elite. The Political Consequences of Economic Reform'', Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, [https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6g50070c&chunk.id=d0e1832&toc.depth=100&toc.id=d0e1762&brand=ucpress p. 70]. ''Quote'': "With the exception of a few joint ventures set up in the early 1980s, most have eschewed a full-time Party secretary. Any Party cadre working in the joint venture has to maintain a full-time 'productive' job."
3. You Ji, ''China's Enterprise Reform: Changing State/Society Relations After Mao'', [https://books.google.com/books?id=cngsh6hoVUwC&pg=PA80 p. 80], ''Quote'': "I visited five small firms in Haidian District, Beijing, in 1992 and found each of them had a full-time party secretary"
4. John Reppert, [https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA232504.pdf EMERGING CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS: THE ROLE OF THE MAIN POLITICAL ADMINISTRATION IN THE NEW SOVIET UNION], a [[Strategic Studies Institute]] report (unclassified), February 11, 1991
5. Tony Cliff [https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1958/xx/changes.htm Changes in Stalinist Russia]
6. [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]], "Party Controls in the Soviet Army", The Journal of Politics, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1952), pp. 565-591