Communist state
After World War II, the Soviet Army occupied much of Eastern Europe and helped bring the existing communist parties to power in those countries.
In 1989, the communist states in Eastern Europe collapsed after the Iron Curtain broke under public pressure during a wave of mostly non-violent movements as part of the Revolutions of 1989 which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
[30] The Soviet Russia Constitution of 1918 stated: "The principal object of the Constitution of the R.S.F.S.R., which is adapted to the present transition period, consists in the establishment of a dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest peasantry, in the form of a powerful All-Russian Soviet power; the object of which is to secure complete suppression of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of exploitation of man by man, and the establishment of Socialism, under which there shall be neither class division nor state authority".
[34] Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky echoed this assumption and said that the socialist state was necessary "in order to defend, to secure, and to develop relationships and arrangements advantageous to the workers, and to annihilate completely capitalism and its remnants.
[36] Article 6 of the 1977 Soviet constitution stated: "The Communist Party, armed with Marxism–Leninism, determines the general perspective of the development of society and the course of the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR.
[40] It can be defined as a state and society in which feudal vestiges have been liquidated and where the system of private ownership exists, but the state-owned enterprises in the field of industry, transport, and credit eclipse it.
[58] While Vladimir Lenin first articulated the theory of non-capitalist development, the novelty of this concept was applying it to the progressive elements of the national liberation movements in the Third World.
[58] The term national-democratic state was introduced shortly after the death of Stalin, who believed colonies to be mere lackeys of Western imperialism and that the socialist movement had few prospects there.
[58] The countries where the national liberation movements took power and instituted an anti-imperialist foreign policy and sought to construct a form of socialism were considered national-democratic states by Marxist–Leninists.
[59] According to scholar Sylvia Woodby Edington, this might explain why the concept of the national-democratic state "never received full theoretical elaboration as a political system.
[84] This might explain why communist states have not developed terms such as delegates and trustees to give legislature representatives the power to vote according to their best judgement or in the interest of their constituency.
[84] Scholar Daniel Nelson has noted: "As with the British parliament before the seventeenth-century turmoil secured its supremacy, legislative bodies in communist states physically portray the 'realm' ruled by (to stretch an analogy) 'kings'.
[86] This shows that legislatures are tools to garner popular support for the government in which leading figures campaign and spread information about the party's policies and ideological development.
[100] Keith Hand has commented that "[i]t was not an effective institution in practice", being unable to prevent Nicolae Ceausescu's emasculation of Romania's Great National Assembly after the inauguration of the July Theses.
[100] It was empowered to review the constitutionality and legality of statutes, administrative regulations, and other normative documents; however, if the agency in question failed to heed its advice, it needed to petition the legislature.
[123] Scholar John Quigley wrote that "[s]ocialist law retains the inquisitorial style of trial, law-creation predominantly by legislatures rather than courts, and a significant role for legal scholarship in construing codes.
[126] The party controlled the armed forces through the Main Political Directorate (MPD) of the Ministry of Defense, a state organ that functioned "with the authority of a department of the CPSU Central Committee.
[135] Of significance is that the CMC eclipses by far the prerogatives of the CPSU Administrative Organs Department while the Chinese counterpart to the Main Political Directorate supervises not only the military, but also intelligence, the security services, and counterespionage work.
[140] In Foundations of Leninism (1924), Joseph Stalin wrote that "the proletariat [working class] needs the Party first of all as its General Staff, which it must have for the successful seizure of power.
"[141] The current Constitution of Vietnam states in Article 4 that "[t]he Communist Party of Vietnam, the vanguard of the Vietnamese working class, simultaneously the vanguard of the toiling people and of the Vietnamese nation, the faithful representative of the interests of the working class, the toiling people, and the whole nation, acting upon the Marxist–Leninist doctrine and Ho Chi Minh's thought, is the leading force of the state and society.
[148] The 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) resolved to institute "the maximum centralisation of production [...] simultaneously striving to establish a unified economic plan.
[151] According to Michael Ellman, in a centrally-planned economy, "the state owns the land and all other natural resources and all characteristics of the traditional model, the enterprises, and their productive assets.
McFarland and Ageyev noted that "Marxist–Leninist norms disparaged laissez-faire individualism (as when housing is determined by one's ability to pay), also [condemning] wide variations in personal wealth as the West has not.
[163] Similarly, Amartya Sen's own analysis of international comparisons of life expectancy found that several Marxist–Leninist states made significant gains and commented "one thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal.
[182][183] In Washington D.C., a bronze statue based upon the 1989 Tiananmen Square Goddess of Democracy sculpture was dedicated as the Victims of Communism Memorial in 2007, having been authorized by the United States Congress in 1993.
[191] According to anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, efforts to institutionalize the victims of communism narrative, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), and in particular the recent push at the beginning of the 2007–2008 financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme inequalities in both the East and West as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism.
Ghodsee argues that any discussion of the achievements under communist states, including literacy, education, women's rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Stalin's crimes and the double genocide theory.
[192] According to Laure Neumayer, this is used as an anti-communist narrative "based on a series of categories and figures" to "denounce Communist state violence (qualified as 'Communist crimes', 'red genocide' or 'classicide') and to honour persecuted individuals (presented alternatively as 'victims of Communism' and 'heroes of anti totalitarian resistance').
"[193] In the decades following the Revolutions of 1989, nostalgia for the defunct Marxist governments and the communist ideal reemerged among segments of the population in the former Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe.
[194] According to Kristen Ghodsee, a researcher on post-communist Eastern Europe: Only by examining how the quotidian aspects of daily life were affected by great social, political and economic changes can we make sense of the desire for this collectively imagined, more egalitarian past.
