The Comparative Study of Communist and Postcommunist States

Abstract

Communist states are a relatively recent phenomenon. When the First World War broke out in 1914 there were none at all. For many years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 there were only three, the USSR itself and two Asian outposts, Mongolia and Tuva; and as late as the end of the Second World War there were only five such states, located for the most part in Eastern Europe (Albania and Yugoslavia as well as the USSR). Since then communist regimes have come into existence elsewhere in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic), in Latin America (Cuba), and also in Asia (China, North Korea and most recently Laos and Kampuchea). As a result of these changes there were sixteen states which, in the 1980s, could reasonably be classified as communist. Far-reaching changes in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade meant that this was, in the early 1990s, a classification that was less easy to defend, and we have accordingly identified the states concerned as ‘communist and postcommunist’ in Table 1.1. All of these states remained profoundly influenced by Marxism-Leninism; some of them, however, had formed largely non-communist governments and were adopting economic and other policies that were likely to take them outside even a ‘postcommunist’ world in the later 1990s.