For many years, the Russian SFSR had been the sole Soviet republic without a republican-level Communist Party of its own.

[1] In June 1989 an article was published in Nash sovremennik by Galina Litvinova, arguing that the Russian nation had regressed during Soviet rule and that it was necessary to form a Central Committee for the Communist Party of the RSFSR.

[4] The Communist Party of the RSFSR emerged from an alliance between Leningrad-based apparatchiks and Russian national-patriotic tendencies.

[6] The first session of the founding congress of the Communist Party of the RSFSR opened in Moscow on 19 June 1990.

Kuptsov, the candidate supported by Gorbachev and the all-Union party leadership, suffered a heavy defeat.

[7] After having been elected, Polozkov tried to distance himself from the most hardline elements (represented by Nina Andreyeva) and sought conciliation between Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and the Communist Party of the RSFSR.

[9][10] By then, the political struggle had sharpened; Polozkov called on the communists in the RSFSR to oppose the restoration of capitalism by Yeltsin's government.

[13] The party became a member of the Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces, which campaigned for a unified Soviet Union in the March 1991 referendum.

[14] On 6 August 1991, Polozkov was removed from his position as leader of the Communist Party of the RSFSR, after having called Gorbachev a traitor three days earlier.

[19][20] On November 30, 1992, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation recognized the ban on the activities of the primary organizations of the Communist Party, formed on a territorial basis, as inconsistent with the Constitution of Russia, but upheld the dissolution of the governing structures of the CPSU and the governing structures of its republican organization - the Communist Party of the RSFSR.