Rethinking the CPSU

Abstract

IT USED TO BE EASY to identify a communist system. There would, first of all, be a public commitment to Marxism-Leninism: in the Soviet case, the 1977 Constitution specified that the October revolution had established a new type of state whose 'supreme goal' was the 'building of a classless communist society in which there [would] be public, communist self-government'. The economy, in the second place, would be based upon public ownership and management. In the Soviet case once again, state and collective ownership were identified in the Constitution as the 'foundation of the economic system of the USSR' and accounted for the overwhelming share of productive resources. Thirdly, political life was dominated by a communist or workers' party within which power was highly centralised, and which based itself upon the principles of democratic centralism and a 'ban on factions'. The Soviet government, admittedly, had been a coalition for the first few months after the revolution, and private ownership retained a prominent position in the economy for at least a decade. From the late 1920s until the late 1980s, however, the USSR remained the locus classicus of a communist system, with its formal commitment to Marxism-Leninism, its largely state-owned economy and its centralised direction of all aspects of public life.1 If there was a single essential element in these arrangements, it was the dominance of a Leninist vanguard party. The Russian Communist Party (as it then was) received no mention in the first and second Soviet Constitutions, of 1918 and 1924 respectively; and it was mentioned only in passing in the Constitution of 1936, which listed the 'All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)' in Article 126 after it had referred to trade unions, sports clubs and cultural associations. Its real political role was first openly acknowledged in the 1977 Constitution, which specified in Article 6 that the CPSU was the 'leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organisations and public bodies'. The republican constitutions, approved the following year, made similar commitments.2 Nor were these merely words. The party, through the nomenklatura system, controlled all positions of executive authority. It enjoyed an effective monopoly of the right to nominate candidates at local and national elections. Its deputies, through the formation of party groups, dominated the soviets to which they were elected. It had a network of branches in factories, farms and offices throughout the USSR. And it controlled the media, the courts, trade unions and all other forms of associational life through its operation of a 'leading role' in the wider society. It had orginally been Stalin who had described bodies of this kind as 'transmission belts' for party policy; Stalinist or