ABSTRACT
Unlike many other parties considered in this book, the neocommunist parties of the former Soviet Union-parties that retained the communist label after the transition-never really “lost” power through electoral defeat. Rather, communist rule simply collapsed in 1991. Thus, the process of adaptation in the face of “defeat” is likely to be different for the neocommunist parties of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) than other formerly dominant authoritarian parties, including the parties of Central and Eastern Europe. Although there are many studies on what became of the successors to the communist parties (particularly the social democratized parties) in Eastern and Central European politics, relatively little work has focused on the neocommunist parties (Racz and Bukowski 1999; Bozóki and Ishiyama 2002a). Generally the neocommunist parties are viewed as “notable failures of party transformation” (Grzymala-Busse 1999, 2002). While there are some studies of individual parties (Ishiyama 1996; Urban and Solovei 1997; Sakwa 1998a; March 2001; Curry and Urban 2003), and a few which have examined such parties more comparatively (Ishiyama 1999; March 2002), no work of which I am aware has systematically examined the fates of the “unreconstructed” successor parties across European and Central Asian former Soviet states.
