Although they grew very quickly during the Revolution from 24,000 to 100,000 members and got 25% of the votes for the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, the Bolsheviks were a minority party when they took power by force in Petrograd and Moscow.

Their advantages were discipline and a platform supporting the movement of workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who had seized factories, organized soviets, appropriated the lands of the aristocracy and other large landholders, deserted from the army and mutinied against the navy during the Revolution.

Karl Marx made no detailed proposals for the structure of a socialist or communist government and society other than the replacement of capitalism with socialism and eventually communism by the victorious working class.

Despite their relative discipline, the Bolsheviks were not of one mind, the party being a coalition of committed revolutionaries, but with somewhat differing views as to what was practical and proper.

[8] Through a constitutional amendment made by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Supreme Soviet became a permanent parliament which was elected by the Congress of the People's Deputies.

The new amendment called for a smaller working body (later known as the Supreme Soviet) to be elected by the 2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies.

[18] It coordinated and directed the work of the republics and their ministries, state committees and other organs subordinate to the All-Union Council.

[20] In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev created the office of the President of the Soviet Union, the head of the executive branch.

[23] As written in Article 157 of the Brezhnev Constitution, "[j]ustice is administered in the USSR on the principle of the equality of citizens before the law and the court".

Members of the nomenklatura were elected by the Communist Party to all important posts in Soviet society which could mean a locally or nationally significant office.

Along with the Communist party's monopoly on power, this led to the gradual physical and intellectual degeneration of the Soviet Union as a state.

As long as the General Secretary of the Communist Party commanded the loyalty of the Politburo, he would remain more-or-less unopposed and in all probability become the leader of the country.

[32] The Communist Party controlled the government apparatus and made decisions affecting the economy and society.

Party membership reached more than 19 million (9.7 percent of the adult population) in 1987 and was dominated by male Russian professionals.

Single party rule combined with democratic centralism, which in practice consisted of a hierarchal structure which with the aid of a secret police organization enforced decisions made by the ruling party as well on the personnel of all governmental institutions, including the courts, the press, cultural and economic organizations and labor unions.

The validity of ideas, public discourse, and institutional form were evaluated in terms of the official ideology of Marxism–Leninism as interpreted by the Communist Party.