Communist Party of the Soviet Union (TheodoresTomfooleries)

Communist Party of the Soviet Union Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза
Abbreviation	CPSU КПСС
General Secretary	Sabrican Garayev
Founded	January 5, 1912 (1912-01-05)
Preceded by	Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP
Headquarters	4 Staraya Square, Moscow
Newspaper	Pravda
Youth wing	Little Octobrists (Ages 7-9) Young Pioneers (Ages 9-14) Komsomol (Ages 14 - 28)
Membership (2023)	37,192,980
Ideology	Communism Marxism-Leninism Socialist patriotism (Soviet)
Political position	Far-left
National affiliation	Bloc of Communists and Non-Partisans
International affiliation	IMCWP
Subnational affiliation	List Communist Party of Russia Communist Party of Byelorussia Communist Party of Ukraine Communist Party of Kazakhstan Communist Party of Kirghizia Communist Party of Uzbekistan Communist Party of Tajikistan Communist Party of Turkmenia Communist Party of Azerbaijan Communist Party of Armenia Communist Party of Kartvelia Communist Party of Moldavia Communist Party of Estonia Communist Party of Latvia Communist Party of Lithuania
Slogan	"Workers of the world, unite!"
Anthem	"The Internationale"
Supreme Soviet	1,749 / 2,000
Soviet of Nationalities	874 / 1,000
Soviet of the Union	875 / 1,000
Party flag
Website
en.kpss.su

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) is the founding and sole-legal party of the Soviet Union. The Soviet constitution gives the CPSU a monopoly on all political and state power. Soviet press often refer to the CPSU as simply "the Party" (партия). As of 2023, the CPSU has more than 37 million members, which makes it among the largest political parties by membership in the world.

The CPSU was founded as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1903. Under the leadership of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government in October 1917 and established the first communist state in history. It reorganized itself first as the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and then as the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) after the union of the soviet republics, becoming the sole ruling party in the Soviet Union.

The CPSU is a Marxist-Leninist communist party organised on the basis of democratic centralism. The highest institution of the CPSU is the Party Congress, which convenes every five years and elects the Central Committee. The Central Committee oversees party affairs between party congresses and elects the Politburo and Secretariat, and appoints the General Secretary, the highest party office. It considers itself the "party of the entire people", has disavowed class conflict, and emphasizes Soviet patriotism. The CPSU participates in the annual International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Party.

History

Names

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union originated as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Following the Prague Conference, which the Bolsheviks claimed leadership of the RSDLP, the RSDLP titled itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) (Russian: Российская социал-демократическая рабочая партия (большевиков), or RSDLP(b). This name continued until 8 March 1918, when the party renamed itself to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (Russian: Российская коммунистическая партия (большевиков))). Shortly after the creation of the Soviet Union, the party renamed itself again on 31 December 1925 to the All-Union Communist Party (Russian: Всесоюзная коммунистическая партия (большевиков)). Shortly before Stalin's death, on 14 October 1952, the party was renamed finally to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Early history (1898-1924)

Origins

Main article: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

The Bolsheviks were originally a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist and socialist party in the Russian Empire that united various revolutionary organizations. A young intellectual, known by his pen name Vladimir Lenin, had joined the party in 1898. Vladimir Lenin's belief that the RSDLP should be a vanguard party of disciplined and committed revolutionaries put him at odds with others in the party that favored a mass approach to membership in the RSDLP. This split of ideals resulted in the emergence of two factions: On the one end, the Bolsheviks, coming from the Russian bolshinstvo ("majority"), and the Mensheviks, menshinstvo (minority). At the 2nd Party Congress, a question of the definition of party membership appeared. The Bolsheviks supported Lenin's idea that the RSDLP should be an elite party of dedicated and disciplined revolutionaries. Lenin defined a member of the party as "one who accepts its program and who supports the party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organizations". On the other hand, the Mensheviks, represented by Julius Martov, proposed a more broad definition of a party member: "A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts the Party's programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations". Initially, Martov's broader definition of party membership won 28-23. This majority was mostly the result of Bundist and Economist members who favored his definition. However, following their exit from the party, Lenin's stricter definition of party membership won a majority. From this, the two factions got their names.

Following the congress, the party permanently split into two factions which over time split the party into what would soon become two entirely separate parties. Differences in beliefs became no longer just ideological, as the Bolsheviks believed that only the proletariat and peasantry could carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks in Russia, while the Mensheviks believed that the proletariat and peasantry should seek out progressive members of the liberal bourgeoisie to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks. The Bolsheviks fundamentally believed that the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution had to be carried out without the participation of the bourgeoisie and that the peasantry could serve as a replacement for them, while the Mensheviks saw the liberal bourgeoisie ass their main allies.

By the time of the 5th Party Congress in 1907, the Bolshevik faction de-facto had become the dominant faction in the RSDLP. In January 1912, Lenin called for a Conference in Prague, in which they expelled the Bolsheviks' rival factions, both within and outside the Bolshevik movement. The result of this split was the creation of two separate parties, one which would go on to be the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), while the Mensheviks established the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks). All future attempts to unite the two branches of the party failed. Both parties would operate underground until the February Revolution in 1917.

Russian Revolution and Civil War

Main articles: Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War

The leadership of the RSDLP(b), as a result of Tsarist suppression, had been forced either into exile across Europe, imprisoned, or sent underground. The Bolsheviks, despite having a majority in their own party- were among the smaller socialist groups in the Russian Empire at the time. The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (or SRs) were a more popular force. Indeed, upon Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917 (in the Julian Calendar February) as a result of the ongoing February Revolution, a provisional government was formed that was dominated by the interests of these democratic socialists, alongside the military and capitalists. The provisional government lifted the ban on the RSDLP, and Lenin negotiated with the German Empire to permit him safe passage through Germany back to Russia. Lenin arrived back in Saint Petersburg in April and condemned the provisional government in his April Theses, where he called for the various workers' councils (known as soviets) that had popped up throughout Russia to take control of the state and to rebel against the provisional government. The Bolsheviks' support of immediate peace to the unpopular war, land reform to the peasants, and the restoration of food allocation to the urban population resulted in their support skyrocketing from a largely unknown force in Russian socialism to among its largest factions.

Such was the support of the Bolsheviks and their ideals that mass unrest in July resulted in their suppression once again. Even despite this repression, the Bolsheviks continued to gain popularity within the Soviets, which were quickly beginning to supersede the provisional government both in authority and popularity. The Bolsheviks were tremendously bolstered both in numbers and in power when it was called upon them by Kerensky's government to stop General Lavr Kornilov's putsch, being supplied vital weapons and ammo in the process. Unsurprisingly, when the Bolsheviks were asked to return the wepaons given to them, they refused: and by October, the Bolsheviks were actively demanding the full transfer of state power to the Soviets, which they mostly controlled. The provisional government at this point had lost nearly all popular support as a result of their continuance of the incredibly unpopular war in the east. On 7 November (25 October in the Julian calendar), the Bolsheviks led an insurrection in which they, for the most part, 'peacefully' captured key government buildings in Saint Petersburg, the nation's capital. The Soviets became the dominant political force in Russia following the revolution, and united into the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the world's first constitutionally socialist state. Bolshevik-controlled Soviets elsewhere in the former Russian Empire also began to pop up in areas such as the Baltics, Byelorussia and Ukraine. Fulfilling their campaign promises, the Bolsheviks signed a devastating peace to end the war with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and transfer the estates and former imperial lands to the workers' and peasants' soviets. Seeking to distance themselves from the social-democratic label, in March 1918 the RSDLP(b) renamed itself the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Social-democrats who supported the Bolsheviks would identify as communists, while those who opposed them continued to call themselves social democrats.

The Bolshevik government did not have universal recognition however, especially from the Entente, and consequentially the Russian Civil War began between the Reds, which were almost entirely represented by the Bolsheviks, and the Whites, which were a loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik forces. Initially close to defeat in 1919, by 1920 and soon 1921 the Bolsheviks had secured dominance over Russia and much of the former Russian Empire. The Kronstadt rebellion, which was a rebellion of anti-Bolshevik forces near Saint Petersburg, resulted in the banning of nearly all political parties in the Soviets save for the Bolsheviks, which established one-party rule in both Russia and its soviet republic satellites.

In December 1922, following the federation of Russia and the other soviet republics into the Soviet Union, the various satellite parties of the Russian Communist Party merged into the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) shortly after Lenin's death.

Stalin era (1924-1953)

Consolidation of power

Joseph Stalin (born Joseph Jugashvili), was an Old Bolshevik who had became one of Lenin's closest associates through his operations in the Caucasus. Stalin's close relationship with Lenin resulted in him becoming part of an informal leadership group in the Soviet government alongside Trotsky and Yakov Sverdlov. Stalin enthusiastically supported the actions of the Bolsheviks and participated in the drafting of the new Soviet Russian constitution. As an editor for Pravda, the Bolsheviks' primary newspaper, Stalin became influential despite being less prominent than either Lenin or Trotsky. When Stalin left Pravda, he was appointed People's Commissar for Nationalities, in his capacity advocating for a federalist union of Soviet republics based on national self-determination. Stalin later achieved support from the top members of the Red Army through friendships with its top commanders. His victory in the Battle of Tsaritsyn, which was soon renamed Stalingrad, is his best-known achievement. Stalin would be appointed in February 1920 as the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate. Despite being reprimanded and humiliated multiple times, Stalin's power within the Bolshevik government continued to grow. Stalin would be appointed general secretary of the party's secretariat in 1922. While not a powerful position on its own, the secretariat, which de-facto led the day-to-day activities of the Bolshevik party, meant that Stalin de-facto headed the Bolsheviks' day-to-day affairs while Lenin was incapable of performing his duties. By the time of Lenin's first stroke in May 1922, Lenin had become partially paralyzed, leaving him unable to achieve the former tasks of state. Lenin's main connection to the Soviet government became Stalin himself, and he became among the closest advisors to Lenin. Such was Stalin's influence, supposedly, that it was a compromise between Lenin's wish of a federation of equal soviet republics and Stalin's wish of an enlarged RSFSR with autonomous republics that would emerge the Soviet Union.

In his position as General Secretary, along with his posts in the Orgburo and the Workers' and Peasants Inspectorate and the Commissariat for Nationalities, Stalin began to place his supporters in positions of authority. Stalin soon became an incredibly influential and powerful member of the Bolshevik party. By the time of Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin was hailed as the successor to Lenin as the leader of the Bolshevik party, and thus the Soviet Union itself. Despite the power he had as the de-facto leader of the Soviet Union however, his power was not consolidated. Initially, Stalin ruled in a troika consisting of himself, deputy chairman Lev Kamenev and chairman of the Comintern Grigory Zinoviev. Even despite the revelation of Lenin's well-documented testament, in which he repudiated Stalin and supported his removal from power, Stalin remained in his position as General Secretary as a result of its suppression and Trotsky's wish to not split the party so soon after Lenin's death. Even then, Stalin's alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev proved short lived.

Stalin's alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev was fractured when he came out with the support of the idea of socialism in one country, which entailed that the Soviet Union should work to strengthen socialism within itself rather than globally. Stalin would align himself with Pravda writer and Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin, who would later elaborate Stalin's theory. By the time of the 14th party conference in April 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev were in the minority over their belief that socialism could only be achieved through international revolution. The troika fell apart following this conference, and Stalin allied himself thoroughly with Bukharin.

Stalin would posit himself as an anti-faction moderate within the party against the extremism of Trotsky, who would come to be his primary political opponent. Stalin and his supporters would have Trotsky expelled from the Politburo in 1926, while Kamenev and Zinoviev, his two former allies, were thrown out of the party's Central Committee and then exiled from the party entirely following an anti-Stalin rally by the United Opposition. The United Opposition was banned and Trotsky was exiled, resulting in the fragmentation of the so-called "Left Opposition". Stalin's attention following this turned to the so-called "right opposition", represented by Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. In 1928, Stalin called for the seizure of grain stockpiles from so-called kulaks and then the collectivization of agriculture, putting him at odds with Bukharin, who supported a more moderate approach to the economy. By 1930, nearly all open criticism of Stalin within the Party had ceased out of fear of reprisal from him and his allies. Stalin would spend the next 4 years dealing with the consequences of famines that emerged partially as a result of forced collectivization.

Great Purge

Main article: Great Purge

Stalin had previously used show trials of his opponents to intimidate his would-be opponents, but the scale of such trials was dwarfed by the trials and repressions that would come following the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. Stalin would accuse his former allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, of responsibility for Kirov's death. They would be imprisoned after a forced confession, and then later executed following new accusations that Trotsky, from exile, was responsible for Kirov's death. Supposedly fearing counter-revolutionaries both in the government and in the party which planned to assassinate him, Stalin would begin a mass suppression and purge of both the party and the government. In a series of show trials, where confessions were achieved through coercion and torture, Stalin's opposition, from the party to the government to the army, were purged. Millions were arrested, while hundreds of thousands were killed; though exact numbers are called into question. By the last of the so-called Moscow Trials, which saw the execution of Bukharin, and Rykov, nearly all members of the Lenin-era party leadership, with the exception of Stalin and Kalinin, were tried- with many of them arrested and then executed. Of 1,966 delegates to the 1934 party congress, 1,108 were arrested, while 98 out of 139 members of the party's central committee were arrested. By the end of the so-called "great purge" in 1938, Stalin had unquestioned absolute rule over the Soviet Union and the party. Stalin took the power he had over the Soviet Union, and consequentially the Comintern, to push for foreign communist parties to adopt ideals pertaining to his party line and to purge anti-Stalinists. Stalin would later have his most prominent critic, Trotsky, assassinated in 1940.

World War II

Stalin's foreign policy leading up to World War II was often contradictory, both in practice and in theory, and one supposedly rooted entirely in opportunistic pragmatism. Initially, Stalin supported the idea that communists and social democrats should ally together to defeat fascist movements, before turning on this idea and positing social democracy as the main enemy to communism. The sudden near annihilation of Germany's communist movement by the rising Nazi Party resulted in a return to the so-called idea of a popular front which Stalin was once opposed to. Despite Stalin's Comintern calling for militant opposition against fascism, the Soviet Union would ironically sign a treaty of peace and friendship with Fascist Italy and then a reapproachment with the Nazi German government throughout the 1930s. By 1939, when Stalin's attempts to form an alliance with the western powers had failed, he repudiated this so-called "collective security" and proceeded to pursue closer relations with Nazi Germany.

Stalin's government would notoriously sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which called for the partition of the lands of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union would send copious amounts of resources and materials to Germany, which fueled the Wehrmacht that would soon thereafter invade Poland and much of Europe. The Soviet Union, in its support for Germany, became a pariah state. The position of the Party and the Comintern became opposition to the war. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers and the Soviet alliance with the Allies, the party immediately began advocating for cooperation between the Soviet Union and the capitalist west.