ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the East European communist parties, mainly, who the communist party members are, how they are admitted to the party and how they lose their membership, and the structure and functions of the basic and intermediate party organs. The communist parties of Eastern Europe maintain a dictatorship in the name of the workers’ class, which itself has only minority representation in the party. When official data on the social composition of the East European communist party is published, the military personnel are usually hidden in the “others” category. A constant concern of the East European communist parties is to maintain or at least to claim a high percentage of industrial workers as party members. The Central Committees of all other East European communist parties hold plenums devoted to the issue of party membership and social-occupational composition, and issue similar instructions related to increasing the percentage of workers and women in the party.
