The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Russian: Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза, Kommunisticheskaya partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza; short: КПСС, KPSS) was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world. It lost its dominance in the wake of the failure of the August putsch.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union emerged from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The party led the 1917 October Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and claimed to have established the world's first socialist state.
Given the central role under the Constitution of the Soviet Union, the party controlled all tiers of government and social institutions in the Soviet Union. Its organization was subdivided into communist parties of the constituent Soviet republics as well as the mass youth organisation, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) and, for children, the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union. The party was also the driving force of the Third International (Comintern).
The party ceased to exist after the coup d'état attempt in 1991 and was succeeded by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Russia and the communist parties of the now-independent former Soviet republics.
Read more about Communist Party Of The Soviet Union: Names, Structure CPSU, History, Branches, Conventions (1917–1991)
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, communist, party, soviet and/or union:
“In the Soviet Union everything happens slowly. Always remember that.”
—A.N. (Arkady N.)
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Nothing an interested foreigner may have to say about the Soviet Union today can compare with the scorn and fury of those who inhabit the ruin of a dream.”
—Christopher Hope (b. 1944)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)