ABSTRACT
The new Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev appears to have drawn certain lessons from past experience. It has come to see that Soviet patriotism mobilizes the populace far more effectively than a threadbare Marxist-Leninist ideology. Gorbachev has also evidently recognized that given the dwindling cohesive force of Marxism-Leninism, further efforts by Moscow to use ideological means to bind the western Communists to the Soviet line are senseless and even counterproductive. He has thus made a virtue of necessity by giving flexibility to the internationalist strategy of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), seeking to adjust it to growing tendencies toward differentiation and pluralization in the Communist party system. The new version of the CPSU program eliminated the views of the 1961 document, where the “rightwing Socialists” still ranked as in Comintern times as the “most important ideological and political prop of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement.”
