Politburo in the context of "Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"

East China (Chinese: 华东; pinyin: huá dōng) is a geographical region in the People's Republic of China, mainly consisting of seven province-level administrative divisions, namely the provinces (from north to south) Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, and the direct-administered municipality Shanghai.

The region was defined in 1945 as the jurisdiction area of the Central Committee's East China Bureau (华东局), which was a merger politburo agency of the Shandong Bureau and the Central China Bureau previously established during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the region included all the aforementioned provinces except Jiangxi, which was previously considered part of South Central China before being reassigned in 1961. The East China Bureau was abolished in 1966 due to the Cultural Revolution, but in 1970 the fourth five-year plan redefined the region as the East China Coordinated Region (华东协作区), which supported the logistics of the Jinan and Nanjing Military Regions. This geographical definition was retained after the economic reform of the 1980s.

Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1941 until his death in 1953, governed the country as its General Secretary from the late 1920s until his death. He had initially been part of the country's informal collective leadership with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, but consolidated his power within the party and state, especially against the influences of Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, in the mid-to-late 1920s.

Prior to the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin was a revolutionary who had joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) led by Vladimir Lenin, in 1903. In Lenin's first government, Stalin was appointed leader of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities. He also took military positions in the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War. Stalin was one of the Bolsheviks' chief operatives in the Caucasus and grew closer to Lenin, who saw him as tough, loyal, and capable of getting things done behind the scenes. Stalin played a decisive role in engineering the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia. His successes in Georgia propelled him into the ranks of the Politburo in late 1921. At the 11th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1922, the leaders decided to expand the party's Central Committee. This decision led to the creation of the office of the General Secretary which Stalin assumed on 3 April. Stalin soon learned how to use his new office to gain advantages over key persons within the party. He prepared the agenda for the Politburo meetings, directing the course of meetings. As General Secretary, he appointed new local party leaders, establishing a patronage network loyal to him.

The title of General Secretary or First Secretary is commonly used for the leaders of most communist parties. When a communist party is the ruling party of a communist state the general secretary is typically the country's de facto leader. Except in Vietnam, it is not uncommon for this leader to also assume state-level positions, such as president or premiership, thereby also becoming the de jure leader of the state. The position of general secretary is typically elected by the communist party's central committee (with the Workers' Party of Korea as an exception), and the holder of this title also serves on the communist party's politburo and secretariat.

The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (German: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, pronounced [zotsi̯aˈlɪstɪʃə ˈʔaɪnhaɪtspaʁˌtaɪ ˈdɔʏtʃlants] ; SED, pronounced [ˌɛsʔeːˈdeː] ) was the founding and ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the country's establishment in 1949 until the Peaceful Revolution of 1989. Formed in 1946 through a forced merger of the East German branches of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the SED aimed to consolidate working-class politics under a common platform of Marxism–Leninism. The SED played a central role in the building of East Germany's socialist institutions, economy and governance, steering the country's development in line with a planned economy and collective social welfare.

The SED was structured according to democratic centralism, with authority flowing from the Party Congress through the Central Committee to the Politburo. Though the Party Congress formally held supreme authority, the Politburo and the Secretariat carried out decision-making between congresses. The SED's General Secretary wielded absolute power, often serving concurrently in key state roles. Walter Ulbricht, the party's leading figure from the early 1950s until 1971, oversaw the construction of East Germany's socialist economy and institutions, but was eventually deposed for a series of failed economic reforms aimed at raising the GDR's competitiveness, as well as a worsening relationship with the Soviets. His successor, Erich Honecker, presided over a period of increasing economic stagnation until 1989. The SED promoted universal education and healthcare, the collectivisation of agriculture and the nationalisation of industry, while placing emphasis on ideological training, including mandatory instruction in Marxism–Leninism and the Russian language in schools and universities. Near the end of the Cold War, it remained skeptical of perestroika and glasnost under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, viewing these as destabilising for the socialist project. This position eventually contributed to East Germany's political isolation and the rapid transformation that followed in 1989.

The German Democratic Republic, commonly known in English as East Germany or the GDR, was a Marxist-Leninist communist state that existed from 7 October 1949 to 3 October 1990. Politics were dominated by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) which ruled the country as a one-party state for most of its existence. The Constitution of East Germany created a liberal democratic socialist republic from 1949 until 1968, when a new constitution formalised many of the Marxist-Leninist practices including the "leading role" of the SED.

East Germany was officially governed by a parliamentary system with power invested in the elected Volkskammer, the State Council (from 1960), the Council of Ministers, and the Supreme Court. The SED instituted a de facto Stalinist political system based on the Soviet Union where actual power was held by the SED's Politburo, maintaining a facade of democracy with rigged elections, and all political opposition was subjected to widespread repression.

A central committee is a political-executive organ designated as the highest organ of a communist party between two congresses. Per the principles of democratic centralism, a central committee is empowered to deal with any issue that falls under the party's purview. While formally retaining this role in socialist states, commonly referred to as communist states by outside observers, in practice, it delegates this authority to numerous smaller internal organs due to the infrequency of its meetings.

The term of a central committee of a ruling communist party is usually five years. The party congress elects individuals to the central committee and holds it accountable. At the first central committee session held immediately after a congress, it elects the party leader, an office usually titled general secretary of the central committee, a political organ, commonly known as the politburo, and an executive organ, customarily named the secretariat.

The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer: អគ្គលេខាធិការគណៈកម្មាធិការមជ្ឈិមបក្សកុម្មុយនីស្តកម្ពុជា) was the highest office in the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The General Secretary was elected at plenary sessions of the party's Central Committee, and chaired the Secretariat and Politburo. The office was abolished when the CPK dissolved in 1981, two years after being removed from power in the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

Spanish coup of March 1939, in historiography often referred to as Casado's coup (Spanish: Golpe de Casado), was a coup d'état organized in the Republican zone against the government of Juan Negrín. It was carried out by the military with support of the Anarchists and a major faction of the Socialists; its leader was commander of the Army of the Centre, Segismundo Casado. The conspirators viewed the Negrín government as a hardly veiled Communist dictatorship. Most concluded that the government-endorsed strategy of unyielding resistance against the Nationalists would produce nothing but further deaths and sufferings while the war had already been lost. The military and some politicians intended the coup as a first step towards opening peace negotiations with the Nationalists; for the Anarchists and Socialists the priority was to remove the Communists from power.

The coup began on March 5, when rebels declared the setup of their own quasi-government, Consejo Nacional de Defensa (CND), based in Madrid. Following few hours of discussions the Negrín government, at the time based near the town of Elda at the Levantine coast, decided that any resistance was pointless; the following day they left Spain. The rebels easily took control of all provincial capitals with very little or no fighting recorded. The exception was Madrid, where the local Communist executive, unaware of the PCE Political Bureau decision to avoid bloodshed, mounted resistance. Communist-controlled units recalled from the frontline took control of most of Madrid and on March 9 they were closing in on CND headquarters. However, Anarchist-controlled units also recalled from the frontline entered the city on March 10 and in 3 days they ensured the triumph of the rebels. During the next 3 weeks the Republican zone was ruled by the CND.