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Collective leadership
Communist states have historically produced many charismatic leaders, such as Vladimir Lenin, Josip Broz Tito and Fidel Castro, but Marxism–Leninism ideology stresses collectivism and impersonal historical forces that bring societal development instead of any great man theory. For example, Lenin, on reacting to the inordinate praise he received in the Soviet press, remarked, "Why this is horrible! And where does it come from? All our lives, we have carried out a struggle against the glorification of the personality of the individual. We long ago solved the question of heroes, and now we are again witnessing the glorification of personality." After his death, and especially after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the media began to extoll Lenin as a firm defender of collective leadership and party democracy. The new Soviet leadership headed by Nikita Khrushchev accused Stalin of establishing a personal dictatorship based on the cult of personality, which was treated as anathema to the very notion of collective leadership which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) officially championed.

However, despite these statements, collective leadership is a rather vague term with few specifics. Communist states are formally headed by collective decision-making bodies like the politburo, the central committee and the council of ministers. The term itself does not clarify the relationship between, for example, a communist party general secretary and the politburo. In the CPSU, and in most ruling communist parties for that matter, there existed no official explanation of this relationship, but lower-level cadres in the 1960s often referred to "the Politburo headed by the General Secretary of the Central Committee, Comrade Leonid Ilich Brezhnev." Despite such statements, according to scholars Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, there was nothing that pointed in the direction that the general secretary had more than one vote, could dictate the politburo's policies or dismiss other politburo members from office. In line with this, most communist party general secretaries have extolled collective leadership at one time and treated it as the "highest principle" of party life, "indispensable" to decision-making and an important tool against arbitrariness. The CPSU Central Committee newspaper Pravda defined collective leadership as follows, "The principle of collectivity in work means, above all, that decisions adopted by party committees on all cardinal questions are the fruit of collective discussions." Soviet scholar Anatoly Vodolazskiy, writing in the CPSU Central Committee's theoretical journal Kommunist, stated that collective leadership entailed that all members of a collective body were independent to make their own decisions, that the minority accepted the decisions of the majority and "the recognition of the extremely important role of leaders and leading personalities as well as the simultaneous impermissibility of a cult surrounding them, an autocracy."

In practice, collective leadership can often be discerned by the division of political offices. For example, in Vietnam, the offices of general secretary, government, state and highest organ of state power are given to four different individuals. These offices are referred to as the "four pillars" in Vietnamese media and symbolise that political power is dispersed. In contrast, outside scholars, such as Li Cheng, have noted that China was run by a collective leadership under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, with both serving as the "first amongst equal" in the politburo. Both Jiang and Hu held the office of general secretary, state president and military chief, with power being more centralised than in Vietnam. This has led observer John McCarthy to conclude, "Vietnam puts greater emphasis on collective leadership than does China, or arguably than, in its day, did the Soviet Union."