Perestroika in the context of "Mansi people"

A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a form of government that combines the state leadership of a communist party, Marxist–Leninist political philosophy, and an official commitment to the construction of a communist society. Modern communism broadly grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe as a program to replace capitalism with a stateless, classless, and moneyless society, but its application as Marxism–Leninism began later in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

In the 20th century, several communist states were established, first in Russia with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. The institutions of these states were heavily influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and others. However, the political reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev known as Perestroika and socio-economic difficulties produced the revolutions of 1989, which brought down all the communist states of the Eastern Bloc bar the Soviet Union. The repercussions of the collapse of these states contributed to political transformations in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and several other non-European communist states. Presently, there are five states which are officially communist in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.

Corrective Movement (Arabic: الحركة التصحيحية, romanized: al-Ḥarakah at-Taṣḥīḥīyya), also known as the Corrective Methods, was a revolutionary political, social and economic reformist program, launched by new leader of Ba'athist Syria, Hafez al-Assad, soon after he came to power in so-called Corrective Revolution in 1970. The Corrective Movement program was also compared to Mikhail Gorbachev's future perestroika program. The main policies of the program were a move away from radicalism in changing Syrian society, a move away from the one-party system, increased recruitment of the population to the Ba'ath Party, and a limited degree of economic and political liberalization.

The Corrective Movement program was the new government's reaction to the results of the extremely radical and aggressive policies of its predecessor, Salah Jadid, and was marked by a number of political and economic relaxations and changes (especially in the first decade). Reforms eventually succeeded in eradicating some of the socialist excesses of the radical Ba'athists who preceded him and improved relations with the Sunni Arab merchant class. Program also led to the huge militarization of Syria and constitutional centralization of power in president's hands.

In the Soviet Union, a Union Republic (Russian: Сою́зная Респу́блика, romanized: Soyúznaya Respúblika) or unofficially a Republic of the USSR was a constituent federated political entity with a system of government called a Soviet republic, which was officially defined in the 1977 constitution as "a sovereign Soviet socialist state which has united with the other Soviet republics to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and whose sovereignty is limited by membership in the Union. As a result of its status as a sovereign state, the Union Republic de jure had the right to enter into relations with foreign states, conclude treaties with them and exchange diplomatic and consular representatives and participate in the activities of international organizations (including membership in international organizations). The Union Republics were perceived as national-based administrative units of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 by a treaty between the Soviet republics of Byelorussia, Russian SFSR (RSFSR), Transcaucasian Federation, and Ukraine, by which they became its constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union). For most of its history, the USSR was a one-party state led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Key functions of the USSR were highly centralized in Moscow until its final years, despite its nominal structure as a federation of republics; the light decentralization reforms during the era of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (voice-ness, as in freedom of speech) conducted by Mikhail Gorbachev as part of the Helsinki Accords are cited as one of the factors which led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 as a result of the Cold War and the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide.

The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union the following day.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Russian politician and statesman who served as President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism.

Yeltsin was born in Butka, Ural Oblast. Growing up in Kazan and Berezniki, he worked in construction after studying at the Ural State Technical University. After joining the Communist Party, he rose through its ranks, and in 1976, he became First Secretary of the party's Sverdlovsk Oblast committee. Yeltsin was initially a supporter of the perestroika reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He later criticized the reforms as being too moderate and called for a transition to a multi-party representative democracy. In 1987, he was the first person to resign from the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which established his popularity as an anti-establishment figure and after which he earned the reputation of the leader of the anti-communist movement. In 1990, he was elected chair of the Russian Supreme Soviet and in 1991 was elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), becoming the first popularly-elected head of state in Russian history. Yeltsin allied with various non-Russian nationalist leaders and was instrumental in the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of that year. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the RSFSR became the Russian Federation, an independent state. Through that transition, Yeltsin remained in office as president. He was later re-elected in the 1996 Russian presidential election, which critics assert was rigged.

The 1991 Soviet coup attempt, also known as the August Coup, was a failed attempt by hardliners of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to forcibly seize control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet president and General Secretary of the CPSU at the time. The coup leaders consisted of top military and civilian officials, including Vice President Gennady Yanayev, who together formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (Russian: ГКЧП, romanized: GKChP). They opposed Gorbachev's reform program, were angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states and fearful of the New Union Treaty, which was on the verge of being signed by the Soviet Union (USSR). The treaty was to decentralize much of the central Soviet government's power and distribute it among its fifteen republics; Boris Yeltsin's demand for more autonomy to the republics opened a window for the plotters to organize the coup.

The GKChP hardliners dispatched KGB agents who detained Gorbachev at his dacha but failed to detain the recently elected president of a newly reconstituted Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who had been both an ally and critic of Gorbachev. The GKChP was poorly organized and met with effective resistance by both Yeltsin and a civilian campaign of anti-authoritarian protesters, mainly in Moscow. The coup collapsed in two days, and Gorbachev returned to office while the plotters all lost their posts. Yeltsin subsequently became the dominant leader and Gorbachev lost much of his influence. The failed coup led to both the immediate collapse of the CPSU and the dissolution of the USSR four months later.

The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abbreviated as Politburo, was the de facto highest executive authority in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). While elected by and formally accountable to the Central Committee, in practice the Politburo operated as the ruling body of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union from its creation in 1919 until the party's dissolution in 1991. Full members and candidate (non-voting) members held among the most powerful positions in the Soviet hierarchy, often overlapping with top state roles. Its duties, typically carried out at weekly meetings, included formulating state policy, issuing directives, and ratifying appointments.

The Politburo was originally established as a small group of senior Bolsheviks shortly before the October Revolution of 1917, and was re-established in 1919 to decide on urgent matters during the Russian Civil War. It operated on the principles of democratic centralism, though in practice it increasingly centralized power in the hands of a few. Under Joseph Stalin, the party's General Secretary from 1922 to 1952, the Politburo evolved into an instrument of personal dictatorship. His domination of the body was such that its sessions were often perfunctory, and during the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938, even Politburo members were not immune to persecution. The body was renamed the Presidium between 1952 and 1966. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Politburo's authority became more collective under leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. During the Brezhnev era from 1964 to 1982, the Politburo grew in size and became increasingly bureaucratic in character. As General Secretary from 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform the Politburo's functions during perestroika, shifting power away from party structures and toward state institutions. The Politburo was officially disbanded upon the banning of the CPSU in late 1991.

Before the perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev that promoted a more liberal form of socialism, the formal ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Marxism–Leninism, a form of socialism consisting of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state that aimed to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union's ideological commitment to achieving communism included the national communist development of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries while engaging in anti-imperialism to defend the international proletariat, combat the predominant prevailing global system of capitalism and promote the goals of Bolshevism. The state ideology of the Soviet Union – and thus Marxism–Leninism – derived and developed from the theories, policies, and political praxis of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.