 The first or General Secretary of the central committee in each communist party was the most powerful figure in each regime.The party over which the politburo held sway was not a mass party but, conforming with Leninist tradition, a smaller selective party of between three and fourteen percent of the country's population who had accepted total obedience.Those who secured membership in this selective group received considerable rewards, such as access to special lower priced shops with a greater selection of high-quality domestic and/or foreign goods (confections, alcohol, cigars, cameras, televisions, and the like), special schools, holiday facilities, homes, high-quality domestic and/or foreign-made furniture, works of art, pensions, permission to travel abroad, and official cars with distinct license plates so that police and others could identify these members from a distance.