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membership rebounded in response to the Ger-
man invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and
the Communist Party contributed to the even-
tual Soviet victory through its organization of
the home front in support of the military effort.
In the final years of Stalin's long rule, the party
remained under the strict control of Stalin and
his inner circle, without a party congress called
between 1939 and 1952.
Nikita
KHRUSHCHEV
's Secret Speech at the
Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 launched a
campaign of de-Stalinization that peaked six
years later at the Twenty-Second Party Congress
of 1962, when Stalin's body was removed from
its place of honor alongside Lenin in the
LENIN
MAUSOLEUM
and buried in
RED SQUARE
along with
other prominent Communist Party functionaries.
Khrushchev's frequent administrative reorgani-
zations and personnel turnover contributed to
his own overthrow in October 1964. The collec-
tive leadership of Leonid
BREZHNEV
and Aleksei
KOSYGIN
that replaced him pledged themselves to
a policy of “stability of cadres” that promised to
end the terror of the Stalin years and the impul-
siveness of the Khrushchev era. By the 1970s
Brezhnev had emerged as the dominant figure in
the leadership, the preferred choice of an aging
group of party bureaucrats concerned with main-
taining their hold on power. The constitution of
1977 legalized the monopoly of power that the
Communist Party had enjoyed since 1921.
By 1985, after a three-year period of transi-
tion that witnessed the deaths of three elderly
Soviet leaders (Brezhnev, Yuri
ANDROPOV
, and
Konstantin
CHERNENKO
), Mikhail
GORBACHEV
was named first secretary of the Communist
Party and was charged with the task of reform-
ing the party and the Soviet Union. As Gor-
bachev advanced his reform program, the party
found itself divided, with some members calling
for greater reforms and others resisting what
seemed to be the end of their personal privileges.
A big issue of the late Gorbachev years was the
removal of the party's monopoly and “leading
role” in the Soviet political system. In February
1990, the Communist Party, prodded by Gor-
bachev and other reformists, called for the end
of its constitutional guarantee of power. In
March 1990 the Congress of Peoples' Deputies
repealed Article Six of the Soviet Constitution,
which had guaranteed the party's political
monopoly. In August 1991 hard-line party lead-
ers in alliance with like-thinking members of the
military and security services launched the failed
AUGUST COUP
hoping to halt the transformation
of the Soviet Union. In the backlash against the
plotters, Russian President Boris
YELTSIN
out-
lawed the party and confiscated its property on
the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
itself in December 1991.
In post-Soviet Russia, the party reemerged
from illegality as the Communist Party of the
Russian Federation (CPRF) under the leadership
of Gennadi Ziuganov. No longer the leading
political force in Russia, it tried to slow the over-
all transformation of the country into a non-
Communist society. Nevertheless, aided by the
hardships suffered by ordinary Russians through-
out the post-Soviet period, the Communists
remained a formidable political force that won
the largest bloc of seats in the 1995 parliamen-
tary elections, while Ziuganov ran close to Yelt-
sin in the 1996 presidential elections, before
losing in the second round. In the 1999 parlia-
mentary elections, the party gained a plurality of
the votes but was outnumbered by a pro-govern-
ment alliance. Soon after his election in 2000,
President Vladimir
PUTIN
surprised observers by
forming a parliamentary alliance with the Com-
munists, but in April 2002 the alliance collapsed
and the CPRF lost its leadership positions in the
parliament.
Congress of Berlin
See
BERLIN
,
CONGRESS OF
.
Copper Revolt
(1662)
The Copper Revolt of 1662 was one of the
briefest, but most intriguing disturbances in the
reign of
ALEKSEI MIKHAILOVICH
(1645-76), a reign
that witnessed frequent expressions of domestic
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