communist parties

Political parties, based on cells under the leadership of centrally directed officials, devoted to the implementation of one or other versions of communism. The communist parties which dominated Eastern Europe and Asia for much of the 20th century were the heirs of the left wing of the Social Democratic parties which grew up in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

Communist parties before 1945 The first Communist Party was the German, which was formed in 1918. The Russian Bolsheviks, the first communists to seize and maintain power, took the name of Communist Party in 1918, and in 1919 set up the Third International or ‘Comintern’, thus formalizing the split with moderate social democracy.

In Germany, in the four Reichstag (parliament) elections of 1930–32, the Communist Party polled between 5 and 6 million votes; but after these successes they were gradually overtaken by the Nazis; their leader, Thaelmann, was imprisoned and repressive measures were taken against the party as a whole. The Reichstag fire of 1933 was blamed, though without evidence, on the Communist Party. In Austria, the government decided to dissolve the Communist Party on account of its ‘subversive’ propaganda.

The Communist Party played only a minor role in the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish communists affiliated to the Third International comprising a negligible minority; the more influential left- wing party in that country was identified with the ‘Sindicate Union’, an independent Labour organization. Late in the Civil War (1939) there was a communist revolt in Madrid, but it was swiftly crushed by the Republicans, and attempted uprisings in Valencia, Almeria, and other provincial centres were similarly overcome.

In Britain in 1933 the Communist Party agreed with the Independent Labour Party that a ‘united front’ should be presented by the two parties against capitalism and fascism. They approached the Labour Party and the TUC in the hope of securing their cooperation, but failed to do so.

There was a large Communist Party in Czechoslovakia up to about 1938, but, with the German threat to the Sudetenland, its influence rapidly waned, and with the German invasion of the whole country it was driven underground.

The outbreak of World War II saw the rapid decline of communist parties in most countries whose sympathies were with the cause of the Western democracies. The treatment meted out by Stalin to the Poles and Finns in 1939–40 hardened world opinion against them.

Communist parties after 1945 With the end of World War II in 1945, communist parties made their influence felt in many countries in Europe, largely owing to the rise in the cost of living and to the installation of communist regimes in the East European countries by the Soviet army in 1944–45. But perhaps their most striking advance was in China, where during 1946–49 a successful civil war was waged between their forces and the nationalist forces of Jiang Jie Shi.

The military suppression of the revolt against the Russian-controlled Communist Party in Hungary in November 1956 caused widespread dissension and disaffection in communist parties all over Europe as did similar action against a reformist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1968. This was justified in Soviet eyes by the Brezhnev Doctrine which advocated the intervention of foreign forces to help ‘fraternal parties’ under domestic pressure. Moscow tried to check the ‘polycentric’ trend of increasing independence for communist parties from its own control by abolishing the Cominform, successor to the Comintern, in April 1956. But the Sino-Soviet quarrel of the late 1950s and early 1960s made Moscow's control of other communist parties through bilateral relations very difficult, mainly because the Chinese Communist Party was trying with some success to win over to its side (or to split) communist parties throughout the world, most successfully in Southeast Asia and in Albania in southern Europe.

Historically the largest electorally successful communist parties in Western Europe have been in Italy and France. The Communist Party of Great Britain (called Democratic Left since 1991) was founded in 1920 to propagate the principles of communism; many of its founder members had belonged to socialist bodies, particularly to the Social-Democratic Federation. The British Labour Party, by contrast, forms part of the Labour and Socialist International which is in line of succession of the former Second International and is supported by most of the democratic socialist parties in Europe and by some in other continents.

The 1990s The decline of communism in the late 1980s and 1990s saw many communist parties lose governing power, notably in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; by the late 1990s only China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea remained as examples of one-party Communist states. However, during the 1990s former communist parties have formed governments in Poland and Belarus.