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Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Major political party of Russia and the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to 1991. It arose from the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. From 1918 through the 1980s it was a monolithic, monopolistic ruling party that dominated the Soviet Union's political, economic, social, and cultural life. The constitution and other legal documents that supposedly regulated the government were actually subordinate to the CPSU, which also dominated the Comintern and the Cominform. Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to reform the country's economy and political structure weakened the party, and in 1990 it voted to surrender its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly of power. The Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 marked the party's formal demise.

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