Soviet and American Communist Parties

     The Soviet Communist party evolved from the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party's Bolshevik wing formed by Vladimir Lenin
in 1903.  Lenin believed that a well-disciplined, hierarchically
organized party was necessary to lead the working class in
overthrowing capitalism in Russia and the world.  In November
1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg (then called
Petrograd) and shortly thereafter began using the term Communist
to describe themselves.  In March 1918, the Bolsheviks named
their party the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).  The next
year, they created the Communist International (Comintern) to
control the Communist movement throughout the world.  After the
Comintern's dissolution in 1943, the Soviet party's Central
Committee continued to use Communist parties from other nations
as instruments of Soviet foreign policy.  Each national party was
required to adhere to the Leninist principle of subordinating
members and organizations unconditionally to the decisions of
higher authorities.  
     Strongly influenced by the success of the Bolshevik
Revolution, American socialists and radicals met in Chicago in
1919 to organize an American Communist party.  But the Americans
were so divided they created two parties instead.  One group
consisted primarily of relatively recent Russian and East
European immigrants, who emphasized adherence to Marxist
orthodoxy and proletarian revolution.  The other group, dominated
by native-born, somewhat more pragmatic American radicals, sought
mass influence.  Such conflicting goals combined with the
discrepancy between Communist doctrine and American reality, kept
the Communist movement in the United States a small sectarian
movement.
     In 1922 the Comintern forced the two American parties, which
consisted of about 12,000 members, to amalgamate and to follow
the party line established in Moscow.  Although membership in the
American party rose to about 75,000 by 1938, following the Great
Depression, many members left the party after the signing of the
Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939.  Others left in 1956
after Nikita Khrushchev exposed some of Stalin's crimes and
Soviet forces invaded Hungary.  Only the hard-core members
remained after such reversals of Soviet policy.  The American
party, a significant although never major political force in the
United States, became further demoralized when Boris Yeltsin
outlawed the Communist party in Russia in August 1991 and opened
up the archives, revealing the continued financial as well as
ideological dependency of the American Communists on the Soviet