Communist Parties

I

Introduction

Communist Parties, political organizations espousing Communism, theoretically dominated by the working class and generally patterned on the party established in Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Most Communist parties have been totalitarian and monolithic in both spirit and practice.

Communist parties have existed in many countries of the world. In the 1980s more than a quarter of the world's population lived under Communist rule. Two of the world's most populous nations, China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), had Communist governments, and Communist parties also held power in Afghanistan, Albania, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Mongolia, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, political and economic upheavals in Eastern Europe, the USSR, and elsewhere led to the collapse of numerous Communist regimes and severely weakened the power and influence of Communist parties throughout the world.

II

The USSR

Throughout the 1980s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was the dominant legal political party in the USSR. Its parent organization was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, established in 1898. That group split into Bolshevik (“majority”) and Menshevik (“minority”) factions in 1903. The Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, were actually a minority of the party membership after 1904. In 1912 they broke away from the Mensheviks to form a separate party, which in 1917 seized control of the Russian revolutionary movement and founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1918 Bolsheviks adopted the name Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1925 this name was changed to the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). The name Communist Party of the Soviet Union was adopted in 1952.

A

Organization and Composition

Traditionally, the structure of the CPSU paralleled the administrative structure of the USSR. At the lowest level were an estimated 400,000 primary party organizations; above them, in ascending order of power, were a much smaller number of rural, city, district, regional, and republic committees. At the apex of the pyramid were the All-Union Congress, nominally the party's supreme policymaking body; the Central Committee, elected by the Congress; the Political Bureau (Politburo), chosen by the Central Committee; and the Secretariat. The general secretary of the CPSU, the party's highest official, wielded pre-eminent political power in the USSR. The composition of the Politburo and Secretariat generally reflected the preponderance of ethnic Russians in party affairs.

B

Leading Role

The 1977 constitution recognized the CPSU as “the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, all state organizations and public organizations”. As such, the party permeated all facets of Soviet economic, political, military, and cultural life. Mass organizations that regularly carried out CPSU policies included the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), from which nearly 75 per cent of party members were recruited, and the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, with more than 100 million members. The main CPSU organs were the newspaper Pravda (Truth), with a circulation of nearly 10 million, and the ideological journal Kommunist.

Until the end of the 1980s, the CPSU was the leader of the international Communist movement by virtue of the power and prestige of the USSR, despite the changes made under glasnost and perestroika. Its authority was particularly evident in relations with the Communist parties in Eastern Europe and with the smaller parties of Western Europe and the western hemisphere. Although the primacy of the CPSU was challenged by certain European parties, and above all by the Chinese Communist Party, the CPSU long remained the most powerful Communist political organization in the world.