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.