Exempt secretary (), also translated as 'freed secretary', 'relieved secretary', 'full-time secretary', etc. was a

management Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a Government agency, government bodies through business administration, Nonprofit studies, nonprofit management, or the political s ...

position in branches civic organizations in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, notably the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...

Komsomol The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, usually known as Komsomol, was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), although it w ...

, and

Soviet trade unions Trade unions in the Soviet Union, headed by the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS or ACCTU in English), had a complex relationship with industrial management, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet government, giv ...

, established at plants, factories, institutions, etc. In the

Chinese Communist Party The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP emerged victorious in the ...

, a similar term is 'full-time party secretary', who deals only with party matters and is not involved in "productive" work. The same concept existed in various parties of Germany: ''hauptamtlicher Parteisekretär'' ('full-time party secretary').

Soviet Union

Virtually every workplace (and military forceJohn Reppert
EMERGING CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS: THE ROLE OF THE MAIN POLITICAL ADMINISTRATION IN THE NEW SOVIET UNION
a

Strategic Studies Institute The Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) is the U.S. Army's institute for strategic and national security research and analysis. It is part of the U.S. Army War College The United States Army War College (USAWC) is a United States Army, U.S. ...

report (unclassified), February 11, 1991) 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 The ''nomenklatura'' (; from , system of names) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity: ...

'' and his salary was paid from the membership dues of the corresponding organization.

Tony Cliff Tony Cliff (born Yigael Glückstein, ; 20 May 1917 – 9 April 2000) was a Trotskyist activist. Born to a Jewish family in Ottoman Palestine, he moved to Britain in 1947 and by the end of the 1950s had assumed the pen name of Tony Cliff. A fo ...

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 Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński (, ; March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017), known as Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was Jimmy Carter's National Securi ...

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 The Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Soviet Navy () was the central military-political organ of administration in the Soviet Armed Forces in 1919 through 1991 and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The directo ...

(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.

, "Party Controls in the Soviet Army", The Journal of Politics, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1952), pp. 565-591

References

{{reflist Occupations in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Management occupations