Communist Parties

C

The CPSU in Crisis

As the 1990s began, economic and political upheavals in Eastern Europe and the USSR forced the CPSU to give up its leading role both domestically and internationally. CPSU membership declined from about 19.5 million in 1988 to 15 million in 1991. The USSR legalized opposition parties in February 1990, and a new party charter proposed in July 1991 veered away from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. In August hardline Communists sought to re-establish their authority by ousting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The collapse of the coup marked a disastrous defeat for the CPSU. Within days, the Central Committee was disbanded, CPSU operations were suspended, and the party's files were sealed and its property was nationalized. By the end of 1991 the USSR had dissolved and its Communist remnant was in disarray. Communists remained active in Russia following the dissolution of the USSR, despite the ban by President Boris Yeltsin on the CPSU. Several new communist political parties formed, including the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (AUCPB), the Union of Communists, the Russian Communist Workers' Party (RCWP), and the People's Party of Free Russia. The membership of these parties consisted primarily of Russian citizens opposed to Yeltsin's market reforms, although the People's Party was founded and headed by Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoy. These parties grew rapidly by taking in ex-CPSU members after Yeltsin's ban was decreed. In April 1992 the RCWP claimed to have 150,000 members, which would have made it the largest party in Russia at the time. These parties organized numerous public rallies against government domestic and foreign policies, with some of the rallies ending in violence.

Yeltsin's decree banning the CPSU was challenged in Russia's Constitutional Court. The court's decision in November 1992 supported the ban of the national organization of the CPSU, but ruled against the ban at the local level. As a result of the decision, local remnants of the CPSU in Russia banded together to form the Russian Federation Communist Party (RFCP), which grew rapidly. By April 1993 the RFCP claimed 600,000 members. The RFCP established relations with other Russian communist parties and communist groups in other republics of the former Soviet Union. In February 1993 the Constitutional Court delivered another political blow to Yeltsin by rejecting his ban on the National Salvation Front, a Communist-nationalist organization that sought Yeltsin's removal from office. Nonetheless, the revived Communist forces showed little ability to alter policy or reimpose Communist rule.

III

Eastern Europe

The drastic decline of the CPSU closely followed the collapse of many Eastern European Communist parties, which had been historically linked to the CPSU. After more than 40 years of domination, every Communist government in Eastern Europe surrendered its monopoly on political power between 1989 and 1991. East Germany first ousted its Communist leaders and then dissolved itself to become part of the unified Federal Republic of Germany. Communist regimes gave way to multi-party governments in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Poland. Romania's Communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu was killed in a bloody coup.

With the exception of the Albanian Party (founded in 1941), all the Communist parties of Eastern Europe had their origins in the period 1891-1921. Most were outlawed during the 1920s and functioned illegally until the end of World War II. Their assumption of power in the late 1940s followed the occupation of the countries of Eastern Europe by the Soviet army. Until 1948, when the Yugoslav Party removed itself from Soviet tutelage, all Communist parties of Eastern Europe were almost totally subordinated to the CPSU. The East German organization, known from 1946 to 1989 as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, was always firmly allied to the CPSU, as were the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party and Poland's United Workers' Party. The Albanian Party of Labour remained Stalinist even after the CPSU began turning away from Stalinism in the late 1950s. In Romania, the Communist Party, although organized strictly along Soviet party lines, pursued a semi-independent foreign policy.

Bowing to the new political realities of the 1990s, some Eastern European Communist organizations sought to mask their origins by changing their names. The Bulgarian Communist Party restructured itself as the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and the Communists who continued to rule Romania called themselves the National Salvation Front. In Poland, the Communists split into rival Social Democratic factions. Prospects for the Communist remnant in Germany were doubtful.

IV

China

Unlike the Communist organizations of Eastern Europe and the USSR, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was able to stem the tide of democratic protest in the late 1980s. Founded in 1921, it is the largest Communist party in the world, with an estimated membership of about 66.4 million (2002), and devoted to the doctrine of Maoism. Since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, it has been the country's only legal party. The Chinese and Soviet parties were once closely allied, but were divided by an ideological dispute during the 1960s and subsequently became bitter rivals.

The leading body of the CCP is the National Party Congress, which elects the Politburo, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and the chairman and vice-chairmen of the Central Committee. The Central Committee elected at the 16th National Party Congress in September 2002 had 198 full and 158 alternate members. The first secretaries of all 30 major administrative divisions—provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities—are full members.

Below the Central Committee is a network of party committees at the provincial, special district, county, and municipal levels. Primary party organizations, or party branches, are located in factories, mines, and other enterprises as may be needed—for example, in people's communes, offices, schools, shops, and neighbourhoods.

Because of the political instability that followed the death of its longtime chairman, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), the CCP resolved to avoid repetition of such excesses—identified with the late chairman—as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1969). It therefore sought to lessen the monopoly of power by individual leaders. Thus, according to the state constitution adopted in December 1982, the highest organ of state power in China is the National People's Congress. It exercises that power through its Standing Committee, to which the State Council, or government, is responsible.

To wipe out the remaining effects of the Cultural Revolution, the new CCP leaders also sought to destroy the power of “revolutionary committees” that Mao had used to undermine his adversaries. At the same time, mass organizations that had disbanded during the Cultural Revolution were reactivated. The most important of these are the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Youth League of China, and the All-China Women's Federation. Beginning in 1979, the party undertook a programme of rapid modernization.

The CCP's influence in the international Communist movement declined after Mao's death, but it remains identified with the interests of several Communist parties in Asia, Africa, and even Europe. All these parties shared a common opposition to CPSU hegemony in the international Communist movement.

V

Other Asian Communist Parties

The various ruling Communist parties in Asia, such as the Communist Party in Vietnam, the Lao People's Revolutionary (Communist) Party of Laos, and the Korean Worker's Party of North Korea, have followed pro-Russian or pro-Chinese lines according to their local political circumstances. Most are more or less totalitarian, with some making more or less effort to assimilate to new thinking towards the global free market, and few have approached the murderous character of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Communist parties have also been significant in many non-Communist Asian countries. The Communist Party was an important element in India's struggle for independence from the British Empire, and the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, was a key political player in the Republic of Indonesia until its brutal suppression in 1965. In South Korea, underground Communist cells long practised a pro-North Korea policy opposed to the successive right-wing military governments which preceded democratic rule, and in Japan Communists orchestrated opposition to military ties with the United States.

VI

France

The French Communist Party was founded in 1920 by members of the French Socialist Party who wished to follow the lead of the Russian Bolsheviks. Since the early 1960s the party has followed a policy of electoral alliances with non-Communist parties of the Left and Centre. Although it has never won the allegiance of a majority of the voters, the French Communist Party by the late 1970s was the largest of all French parties, with a membership of some 700,000. The proportion of women members—36 per cent of the total—was among the highest in the world. About 50 per cent of the members were from the working class. Four Communists served in the Cabinet from June 1981 to July 1984, when the party withdrew from the government because of differences with the Socialists over economic policy.

The French party was organized along the same lines as the CPSU. At its peak the Communist Youth Movement had more than 100,000 members, including those belonging to the Union of Communist Students, the party's organization among university students. The General Confederation of Labour, with a membership of some 1.6 million, was the major mass organization within the Communist sphere of influence. Other Communist-dominated mass organizations have included the National Union of Higher Education, the National Union of Secondary Teachers, and the militant feminist Union of French Women.

The party maintained an active press and publication programme, and its principal daily newspaper, L'Humanité, had a circulation of more than 110,000 copies up until the 1990s. During the 1970s the French Communist Party joined with those of Italy and Spain in advocating a more liberal, pluralistic form of communism (Eurocommunism). However, with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, the proportion of votes cast for the party in national elections declined to less than 15 per cent. In the 2002 presidential elections the party received just 3.4 per cent of votes cast.