Failure of becoming a ‘political party’: Party elections and party unity

As we saw in Chapter 2, the hidden power diversity was widening before perestroika. In order to manage this problem, Gorbachev tried to streamline the party’s functions, and the party lost its traditional administrative functions, as we saw in Chapter 3. The subject of this chapter is to investigate how the party leadership succeeded or failed to find a new function for the party: that is, to make the Communist Party a ‘political party’.1