The Party’s Over

JUST when you think Boris Yeltsin has become a respectable Soviet politician, he proves you wrong. On July 20, just after Mikhail Gorbachev flew back from London, Yeltsin dropped a bombshell: a ban, effective in 14 days, on all “organized political structures” in all state institutions and enterprises on Russian soil.

Yeltsin’s decree is nominally aimed at all political organizations, but in reality it strikes solely at one—the Communist Party—because that is the only one with organized political structures. The Party, as it is still simply referred to here, can no longer claim anything resembling popular support. Yeltsin’s own overwhelming election as president of Russia was the latest proof of that. But the Party retains power through the ubiquitous network of Party cells spread throughout every institution of Soviet society. The Party overlaps so much with the state bureaucracy that Soviet intellectuals derisively refer to the “partocracy.”

DS

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Dan Sneider

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JUST when you think Boris Yeltsin has become a respectable Soviet politician, he proves you wrong. On July 20, just after Mikhail Gorbachev flew back from London, Yeltsin dropped a bombshell: a ban, effective in 14 days, on all “organized political structures” in all state institutions and enterprises on Russian soil.

Yeltsin’s decree is nominally aimed at all political organizations, but in reality it strikes solely at one—the Communist Party—because that is the only one with organized political structures. The Party, as it is still simply referred to here, can no longer claim anything resembling popular support. Yeltsin’s own overwhelming election as president of Russia was the latest proof of that. But the Party retains power through the ubiquitous network of Party cells spread throughout every institution of Soviet society. The Party overlaps so much with the state bureaucracy that Soviet intellectuals derisively refer to the “partocracy.”