Historical processes shaping the mechanism of the disintegration of the CPSU. 1898–1982

Based on a comprehensive analysis of the identified set of published sources, the article examines the leading historical processes of the disintegration mechanism of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
At the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, V.I. Lenin and his followers, leaving to the party the leading political role in the revolutionary struggle, avoided turning the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) into a major element in the state economic mechanism.
After the October Revolution, faced with enormous economic difficulties, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party repeatedly called for the inadmissibility of the replacement of government activities by party organizations.
Stalin’s leadership began the process of transforming the party structures into the governing bodies of the Soviet economic machinery. In concurrence with this, the party apparatus grew into a fully-fledged regulatory authority operating on the basis of the nomenclature principle of leadership. The democratic beginnings in the activities of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPb) were winding down.
The period of the first five-year plans was marked by the search for optimal management methods: the sectoral structure of the party bodies was adjusted. As a result, during the Great Patriotic War, the absolute dominance of the state in the economy led to a coherent and efficient functioning of all its elements.
In the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, the efficiency of the national economy of the USSR decreased, and the intervention of the CPSU in economic affairs intensified.
The second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s were marked by a technological backwardness of the USSR vis-à-vis the world’s leading economies, which was directly linked to the growing degradation of the party leadership in certain regions of the country. The named historical processes shaped the dissolution mechanism of the CPSU.

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