Communist Party Banned

Boris Eltsin, Decree of the President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic on the Activity of the CPSU and the RSFSR Communist Party. November 6, 1991

Original Source: Pravda and Izvestiia, 6 November 1991.

The events of August 19-21 made it glaringly obvious that the CPSU was never a party. It was a special mechanism for shaping and exercising political power by fusing with state structures or making them directly subordinate to the CPSU. The CPSU leadership structures exercised their own dictatorship and created, at state expense, the property basis for unlimited power.

This was confirmed during the open hearings in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet on the role of the CPSU in the coup d’etat of Aug. 19-21.

It is the CPSU leadership structures, which to all intents and purposes swallowed up the state and used it as their tool, that bear responsibility for the historical impasse into which the peoples of the Soviet Union have been driven and the state of disintegration we have reached.

The activity of these structures was clearly anti-popular and unconstitutional in nature and was directly linked to the incitement of religious, social and nationality-based strife among the country’s peoples and to the infringement of basic human and civil rights and liberties that are recognized by the entire international community.

The logical finale of the Party’s political activity was the unconstitutional coup of Aug. 19-21, 1991 which was supported by the CPSU leadership.

Despite the measures taken with respect to these structures, they have not ceased their unlawful activity aimed at an even greater exacerbation of the crisis and the creation of conditions for a new anti-popular coup …

I decree:

1. That the activity of the CPSU and the RSFSR Communist Party is to cease on the territory of the RSFSR and that their organizational structures are to be disbanded …

3. That the property of the CPSU and the RSFSR Communist Party on the territory of the RSFSR is to be transferred to the ownership of the state. The RSFSR Council of Ministers is to handle the transfer of CPSU and RSFSR Communist Party property on RSFSR territory and the process of placing it under the jurisdiction of bodies of state administration of the RSFSR and the republics that are part of the RSFSR …

B. Eltsin,
President of the RSFSR
The Kremlin, Moscow
Nov. 6, 1991.

Source: Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XLIII, No. 35 (December 11, 1991), p. 4.

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