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Hungary Secretariat
The Secretariat served as the staff of the Politburo,
administering a bureaucracy that oversaw all aspects of
the
party's and the country's activities. The Secretariat,
which
consisted of five secretaries, prepared decisions for
Politburo
approval and either implemented these decisions itself or
ensured
that the responsible government bodies carried them out.
In early
1989, four secretaries--Grosz, Berecz, Lukacs, and
Ivanyi--also
sat on the Politburo and were the most powerful of the
five
members of the Secretariat.
The general secretary supervised the work of the
Secretariat
as a whole. In 1989 the five secretaries maintained
responsibility for ideology, defense and internal
security, party
organization, foreign policy, and economic policy. Each
secretary
worked with a small staff of three to five assistants. The
four
powerful secretaries--Grosz, Berecz, Lukacs, and
Ivanyi--also
chaired committees of the Central Committee for
international,
legal, and state management policy; social policy; party
policy;
and economic and social welfare policy, respectively. In
1989
working groups of the Central Committee formulated
long-term
policy recommendations in the areas of party building,
economics,
educational and cultural policy, science policy, and
cooperatives
policy.
In the late 1980s, the heads of the five Central
Committee
departments for social policy, party policy, economic and
social
welfare policy, international party relations, and
management and
the head of the Central Committee Office (also considered
a
Central Committee department) answered to the secretaries.
Departments controlled the work of their counterparts on
the
county and district levels of the party. In addition, they
maintained working relations with their counterparts in
the CPSU
and the relevant departments in the allied communist
parties of
Eastern Europe. The departments worked closely with their
corresponding ministries to ensure that the government
properly
implemented party policies. In the late 1980s, this task
changed,
however, as the party leadership sought to lessen the
involvement
of the party apparatus in the day-to-day administration of
the
economy. As a result, in late 1988 the Politburo targeted
the
249-member staff of the Central Committee for reductions
of 8 to
10 percent.
Data as of September 1989
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