Activating the ‘Apparatchik’: Brigade Deployment in the SED Central Committee and Performative Communist Party Rule

Abstract

The Communist ruling parties of East Central and Eastern Europe in the post-1956 era developed ‘softer’ methods of staying in power, both vis-a-vis the societies they ruled as well as within the Party itself, methods which proved more effective than ‘purges’ and ‘party discipline’. This article investigates these methods, taking the East German ‘Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands’ (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) or SED as a case study and focusing on one specific control procedure in particular: the ‘brigade deployments’ of the Central Committee apparatus of the SED, that is ‘on the job inspections’ of subordinate party organs. A systematic analysis of Central Committee brigade deployments shows that, rather than serving to punish these organs, the inspections were primarily a means of consensus creation in which brigade members effectively used staged performances and a ‘language of intimacy’ to keep their comrades ‘in line’. Though ultimately still a form of repression, this ‘performative’ style of party rule was much more subtle than the common conception of monolithic power machines would suggest.