ABSTRACT

After the 28th Party Congress, Gorbachev more or less succeeded in depriving the CPSU of its administrative functions, but failed to transform the party into a ‘political party’, as we have seen in the previous chapters. Therefore, the party lost its raison d’être. A natural consequence was that party members began to leave the party, and this caused a problem to the party as an economic actor.1 Its huge property assets and massive incomes from nearly 20 million party members made the party an economic actor distinguished from any other organization in the Soviet Union.