Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction — Communist Parties Revisited: Sociocultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 1956–1991

Chapter 1 — The Paradox of Party Discipline in the Khrushchev-Era Communist Party

Chapter 2 — "It Is Not Possible to Allow Past Mistakes to Come Again": Recruitment Policy in the CPCS in the 1970s and 1980s

Chapter 3 — Behind Closed Doors: The Erosion of SED Party Life in the 1980s

Chapter 4 — The Successive Dissolution of the "Uncivil Society": Tracking SED Members in Opinion Polls and Secret Police Reports, 1969–1989

Chapter 5 — On the Way to Party Pluralism?: The PZPR and the Reform of the Socialist Party System in 1988–1989

Chapter 6 — Communist Party Apparatuses as Steering Organizations: Paths of Development in East Central Europe

Chapter 7 — The Central Committee Department of Party Organs under Krushchev

Chapter 8 — True Believers Becoming Funded Experts? Personnel Profile and Political Power in the SEC Central Commitee's Sectoral Apparatus, 1946–89

Chapter 9 — Paternalism in Local Practice: The Logic of Repression, Ideological Hegemony, and the Everyday Management of Society in an SED Local Secretariat

Chapter 10 — The SED Bezirk Secretaries as Brokers of Territorial Interests in the GDR

Chapter 11 — The Idea of Social Unity and Its Influence on the Mechanisms of a Totalitarian Regime in the Years 1956–1980

Chapter 12 — Foreign Policymaking and Party-State Relations in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev Era

Chapter 13 — Erich Honecker—The "Leading Representative": A Generational Perspective

Chapter 14 — Inside the System: The CPSU Central Committee, Mikhail Gorbachev's Komanda, and the End of Communist Rule in Russia

Chapter 15 — The Ironies of Membership: The Ruling Communist Party in Comparative Perspective

Index