In this comprehensive and latest statistical profile of the membership of the Communist Party during the first half-century of the Soviet regime, Professor Rigby analyzes the history of party recruitment and composition. Since the party makes vital contributions to the performance of several basic tasks within the Soviet political system, the author interprets his data mainly in functional terms. He identifies and evaluates the influence of these functional considerations on recruitment policies and on the changing patterns of membership, and determines the priorities assigned to different functions under changing circumstances. T.H. Rigby is Professor of Political Science, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University. Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Between 1945 and 1964, six to seven million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist is the first study of the Communist Party's internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. Edward Cohn uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen. As the regime grappled with a postwar economic crisis and evolved from a revolutionary prewar government into a more bureaucratic postwar state, the Communist Party revised its informal behavioral code, shifting from a more limited and literal set of rules about a party member's role in the economy to a more activist vision that encompassed all spheres of life. The postwar Soviet regime became less concerned with the ideological orthodoxy and political loyalty of party members, and more interested in how Communists treated their wives, raised their children, and handled their liquor. Soviet power, in other words, became less repressive and more intrusive. Cohn uses previously untapped archival sources and avoids a narrow focus on life in Moscow and Leningrad, combining rich local materials from several Russian provinces with materials from throughout the USSR. The High Title of a Communist paints a vivid portrait of the USSR's postwar era that will help scholars and students understand both the history of the Soviet Union's postwar elite and the changing values of the Soviet regime. In the end, it shows, the regime failed in its efforts to enforce a clear set of behavioral standards for its Communists—a failure that would threaten the party's legitimacy in the USSR's final days.

Countless studies have assessed the dramatic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, but their analysis of the impact on European communism has focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. This ambitious collection takes a much broader view, reconstructing and evaluating the historical trajectories of glasnost and perestroika on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Moving beyond domestic politics and foreign relations narrowly defined, the research gathered here constitutes a transnational survey of these reforms’ collective impact, showing how they were variably received and implemented, and how they shaped the prospects for “proletarian internationalism” in diverse political contexts.

A critical edition of the text that defined communist party ideology in Stalin's Soviet Union The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR--a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.