Dissolution of the Soviet Union

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

Further information: List of communist parties, List of communist and anti-capitalist parties with parliamentary representation and Dissolution of the Soviet Union

A demonstration of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Moscow, December 2011.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and relaxed central control, in accordance with reform policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The Soviet Union did not intervene as Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary all abandoned Marxist-Leninist rule by 1990. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved.
At present, states controlled by Marxist-Leninist parties under a single-party system include the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. North Korea currently refers to its leading ideology as Juche, which is portrayed as a development of Marxism-Leninism. Communist parties, or their descendant parties, remain politically important in a number of other countries. The South African Communist Party is a partner in the African National Congress-led government. In India, communists lead the governments of three states, with a combined population of more than 115 million. In Nepal, communists hold a majority in the parliament.^[38] The Communist Party of Brazil is a part of the parliamentary coalition led by the ruling democratic socialist Workers' Party and is represented in the executive cabinet of Dilma Rousseff.
The People's Republic of China has reassessed many aspects of the Maoist legacy; it, along with Laos, Vietnam, and, to a lesser degree Cuba, has reduced state control of the economy in order to stimulate growth. Chinese economic reforms started in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping; since then, China has managed to bring down the poverty rate from 53% in the Mao era to just 6% in 2001.^[39] The People's Republic of China runs Special Economic Zones dedicated to market-oriented enterprise, free from central government control. Several other states ran by self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist parties have also attempted to implement market-based reforms, including Vietnam.
Theories within Marxism as to why communism in Central and Eastern Europe was not achieved after revolutions pointed to such elements as the pressure of external capitalist states, the relative backwardness of the societies in which the revolutions occurred, and the emergence of a bureaucratic stratum or class that arrested or diverted the transition process in its own interests. Marxist critics of the Soviet Union, most notably Trotsky, referred to the Soviet system, along with other states ran by Marxist-Leninist parties, as "degenerated" or "deformed workers' states", arguing that the Soviet system fell far short of Marx's communist ideal and he claimed the working class was politically dispossessed. The ruling stratum of the Soviet Union was, by Trotskyism, held to be a bureaucratic caste, but not a new ruling class, despite their political control.