Thirty-five years after Boris Yeltsin moved to dismantle the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, senior Communist figures are looking back at the cascading bans, legal showdowns, and political survival tactics that shaped modern Russian opposition politics, kprf.ru reported.
The campaign against the party unfolded in distinct waves, beginning on July 20, 1991, when Yeltsin issued a decree on departization. The measure forced political structures out of state bodies and organizations in the RSFSR without explicitly outlawing the party itself. That definitive ban arrived a month later, on August 23, 1991, signed directly on the rostrum of the Supreme Soviet while Mikhail Gorbachev was delivering an address.
The Dramatic Signing of Decree No. 79
The scene in the Supreme Soviet hall resembled political theater. As Gorbachev spoke following his return from the Foros d’eta, Yeltsin pulled out a prepared text for Decree No. 79, titled “On Suspending the Activity of the Communist Party of the RSFSR,” and signed it amid weak protests from the Soviet leader and loud applause from Russian deputies.
By the evening of August 23, protesters had gathered outside the CPSU Central Committee headquarters on Staraya Square, where someone scrawled a prophetic warning on the facade: “Today the Central Committee, tomorrow the criminal cell.”
Deputies Challenge Decree at Constitutional Court
The pressure escalated on November 6, 1991, with Decree No. 169. That document introduced a contentious legal formula asserting that the CPSU had never truly been a party at all, but rather an administrative mechanism of political power fused directly with state structures.
This framing created a severe judicial paradox. If the party had no formal legal existence as an independent association, officials struggled to explain how to prohibit it or how to handle millions of rank-and-file members.
Dissatisfied with the executive bans, a group of 43 people’s deputies took the matter to the Constitutional Court in the summer of 1992. The resulting hearings transformed into a sweeping public trial of the party’s seventy-year history. On November 30, 1992, the court issued a compromise ruling. It upheld the dissolution of the top-level governing bodies for merging with the state apparatus, but it ruled against banning grassroots primary organizations formed on a territorial basis.
From Underground Networks to the Rebirth of the Party
The court’s partial defeat of the presidential decrees provided communists with the legal opening they needed to regroup. Before that ruling, sympathetic factions built alternative structures to serve as backup vehicles. Activists formed the Union of Communists, the Russian Communist Workers’ Party, the Socialist Party of Workers, and the Agrarian Party of Russia.
Once the legal path cleared, delegates gathered in Moscow on February 13-14, 1993, for the extraordinary congress that formally re-established the organization as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. The regime launched a fourth attempt to halt the movement following the violent dissolution of the Supreme Soviet in October 1993, suspending the newly minted CPRF before it quickly rebounded to contest upcoming parliamentary elections. A fifth attempt loomed in March 1996 after the State Duma voted to invalidate the Belavezha Accords, though that crackdown ultimately stalled.
