When the 18th Party Congress convened in 1939, 31 individuals remained in the Central Committee. Of these, seven were not reelected, and of them five were pensioned or relieved of leading offices (Grigory Petrovsky, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Grigory Broydo, Mikhail Chuvyrin and Isaak Schwartz) while Tikhon Yurkin and Avraami Zavenyagin were reelected to the CC at the 19th Party Congress (in 1952) and the 20th Party Congress (in 1956) respectively. Of the 24 reelected at the 18th Party Congress, four would be subject to violent repression (Mikhail Kaganovich in 1941, Solomon Lozovsky in 1952, Lavrentiy Beria in 1953 and Mir Jafar Baghirov in 1956). Klavdiya Nikolayeva became the only CC member who had previously been active in intra-party opposition to survive the purge. When asked in an interview how the Central Committee approved its own destruction (the decision to expel a member from the CC or for a member to be arrested by the authorities had to be approved by the CC itself through a plenary session), Vyacheslav Molotov replied; "In the first place, on democratic centralism—Listen, it did not happen that a minority expelled a majority. It happened gradually. Seventy expelled 10–15 people, then 60 expelled another 15. All in line with majority and minority. ... Essentially, it happened that a minority of the composition of the TsK [CC] remained of this majority, but without formal violation [of democratic centralism]." According to J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov the CC "In the name of party unity and with a desperate feeling of corporate self-preservation, the nomenklatura committed suicide." However, there were some within the CC who breached party tradition and spoke against the purges, such as Grigory Kaminsky and Osip Piatnitsky for example. The CC was not a permanent institution. The CC was convened for fourteen plenary sessions between the 17th Congress and the 18th Congress. When the CC was not in session, decision-making powers were transferred to inner bodies of the CC itself; the Politburo, Secretariat and Orgburo (none of these bodies were permanent either, but convened to decide on crucial matters). Individuals employed by Central Committee's bureaus, departments and newspapers made up the apparatus between the 17th Congress and the 18th Congress.