Much has been written about Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky. His development of the “Deep Battle” military theory in the late 1920s and 1930s, the attendant mechanisation of the Red Army and his role in the development of the Soviet military/industrial complex have been well-researched. The “Tukhachevsky Affair”, the discussion surrounding his execution in the military purge of 1937, continues to attract interest. However, a detailed analysis of his early life and Civil War command career has never been completed. This gap is filled by this thesis. Tukhachevsky’s early life is explored to provide background, but also to provide a biographical account and to illustrate who he was when he joined the Red Army and Bolshevik Party in 1918. The thesis demonstrates that he was not a communist at this stage. However, his command experiences during the Civil War, combining military tactics of continuous manoeuvre warfare with constant frontline mobilisations, political agitation and repression, allowed him to develop a theory of class warfare and saw his conversion to a belief in the efficacy of Marxist principles when applied to military methods. Tukhachevsky’s success in the Civil War is compared to his failure in the Polish-Soviet War and the basis for the latter is that his continuation of class warfare methods were unsuitable for the conflict in Poland. The success of Tukhachevsky’s class warfare methods is explained by their relevance to the situation and social fabric of Russia at the time. The retention of these principles to form the basis of the operational side of “Deep Battle” is argued, as is Tukhachevsky’s openness to innovation in weaponry and tactics gleaned during his Civil War command. Tukhachevsky’s role in the early Red Army formulation is detailed, as is his development of the concept of “unified command” involving the creation of Red Commanders. The Communist Party leadership’s use of Tukhachevsky as a “troubleshooter” to deal with prioritised areas during the Civil War, leading to his service on every major Front at crucial stages is highlighted, as are the connections he made on the Civil War battlefields, friendly and hostile. It is shown that during his Civil War commands he met with those with whom he would later work and that their collaboration and experimentation began almost immediately.

This thesis analyses the extent and forms of class relations in the Soviet Union. The theoretical approach adopted to the analysis 'of the Soviet class structure is based on a critique of the classical Marxist approach to class, as well as of common sociological approaches to class, particularly the Weberian conception of class. These issues are the concern of the Introduction, which outlines an alternative approach to class structure based on a conception of relations of production which differs from the classical Marxist approach, particularly in avoiding any reliance on the labour theory of value for defining relations of production and hence for demarcating class boundaries. Chapter One provides an outline of developments in the Soviet rural class structure in the 1920s, and by criticising common conceptions of such developments argues that the strategy of socialist transformation adopted in the policy of forced collectivisation was economically unnecessary and politically disastrous. The purpose of this Chapter is to throw the contemporary class structure of the Soviet Union into historical relief, by indicating the historical context out of which many contemporary features of the Soviet Union developed. It is hoped that this will indicate that many features of the contemporary social structure are historically specific, rather than being necessary features of a state socialist society. Following from this, the analysis of relations of production in the 1960s and 1970s is begun in Chapter Two, where the relations between different kinds of economic agents, particularly collective economic agents (economic units) are examined, using the approach developed in the Introduction to analyse the relations of production as relations between economic agents, which affect the relative economic capacities of agents. It is argued that, because such capacities are always subject to change through processes of struggle and negotiation, an important but hitherto rather neglected aspect of the relations ,of production concerns the policies of economic agents. Consequently, the manner in which agents at various levels in the economy calculate both their own internal state and the course of action which they adopt with respect to other agents is subjected to detailed scrutiny in this Chapter. Chapter Three analyses the legal and political conditions of the relations of production, since in the Soviet Union such economic relations are operative primarily between state agencies, or collective agencies whose relations to the state agencies are legally and politically regulated by the state. Consequently, the issue of the 'withering away of the state' with the decline of private property is considered, as well as various common Western conceptions of Soviet politics. Following on from this, the analysis of politics in terms of a series of 'arenas of struggle' is proposed, and in the light of this approach the capacities of the main central party and state agencies to regulate the economy (and hence to determine the relations of production by implementing effective economic plans) is reviewed. The conclusion from this review is that there are serious limits on the capacity of such central party and state agents to co-ordinate the division of labour, so that theories of an all-powerful totalitarian party or elite dominating Soviet politics and the economy are misguided. Nevertheless, it is argued that there is sufficient central control of the state agencies for one to be able to say that various state agencies do not pursue autonomous objectives. In other words, political relations between state agencies are not such as to preclude socialist planning of the overall economy. Chapter Four examines welfare and social policy as a means of assessing the importance of non-wage forms of income, and concludes that the overall effect of such forms of public expenditure is probably, as intended, to equalise incomes. This point is taken up again in Chapter Five, where the occupational structure and wage differentials are examined, prior to an overall assessment of the distribution of income, which concludes that a policy of income equalisation has been pursued fairly successfully over the past twenty-five years or so. While such a policy may now be running into difficulties of various kinds, in so far as it has been successfully pursued, it has meant that the connection between the distribution of income and the access of agents to the means of production has been partially undermined. Hence class relations have been seriously weakened in the Soviet Union, and it is concluded that they are non-existent within the state sector of the economy. However, this does not mean that there is no class structure in the Soviet Union since collective farm members are still in a different class position from state employees. There may also be capitalist relations in the so-called 'parallel economy' but their extent must be severely limited by the official prohibitions on such activities which means that, if resources are diverted from official purposes, this is largely done on an individual 'self-employed' basis. It is also argued that the 'intelligentsia' cannot be considered as a single, separate stratum from the state employed 'working class' or the collective farm members. Consequently, the official theory of the Soviet class structure must be considered to be seriously deficient.

One of the great opportunities afforded to the political scientist since the fall of the Soviet Union has been that of examining politics ‘on the ground’ in non-metropolitan areas. The current study addresses the development of regional and local political party organisations in post-communist Russia. Focusing on the six movements which won representation in the 1999 election to the State Duma, it uses three case study regions in the middle Volga - the Republic of Tatarstan and the provinces of Samara and Ul’yanovsk - to examine party activity at the regional and district levels. Based on extensive fieldwork in Russia, the investigation utilises a broad range of local sources and interviews in its analysis. However, in order to avoid the danger of simply providing an observational study of local politics, wide use is also made of national opinion survey and focus group data. The study begins by examining the context of party activity in Russia, giving a brief history of the party system and its institutional framework. Thereafter, examination is made of the role of parties in regional and local politics, based mainly on official electoral statistics from 1995-2001. This analysis begins by looking at the Russian Federation’s eighty-nine regions in a comparative context, before narrowing the focus to the three case study regions. Parties’ activities, and their interactions with the respective political systems in each region, are examined in detail. Thereafter, the functioning of parties at three levels - federal, regional and district - is examined, using both theoretical and empirical methods. The study goes on to examine the role played by members in Russia’s political parties, most specifically at a regional and local level, utilising survey and focus group material (undertaken specifically for this study) to case new light on the entry patterns, bases of activism, and attitudes of party members in the middle Volga. Furthermore, parties are examined in the context of the 1999-2001 electoral cycle. This analysis concludes that, in the federal elections, particularly that to the State Duma in December 1999, regional nuances dominated over the national campaign; but that party participation was limited in region-specific elections.

The dramatic phenomenon which appeared soon after Stalin's death in March 1953 in the Communist world was the strengthening of friendship and co-operation between the two largest socialist countries - the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The most important reason was that the Soviet leaders wanted to make use of the Chinese Communist Party to maintain their leading position in the socialist camp and the world Communist movement. For the Chinese, the main reason was economic rather than political. They wanted to obtain as much aid as possible from the Soviet side, while implementing their first five-year-plan (1953-1957). Only two and a half months after the death of Stalin, an important agreement was signed in Moscow for assistance to China in the construction and reconstruction of 141 industrial sites. By the end of 1953, China's share of the USSR's total external trade turnover amounted to 20 per cent, while the Soviet Union's share of China's trade was 55.6 per cent. From mid-1958 the Chinese method of building socialism began to take shape: the grouping of agricultural co-operatives into large People's Communes combining small-scale industry with agriculture, the Great Leap Forward. In the eyes of the Soviet leaders this was a great challenge not only to orthodox Marxist thinking, but also to the leading position of the CPSU. What is more, it was in 1958 that it first became apparent that China and the Soviet Union shared different views on a number of foreign policy issues which brought the conflict to a state of high tension. First it was the bombing of Jinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu) . Then came the Sino-Indian border clash. On 9 September, in spite of a Chinese request, the Soviet Foreign Ministry issued a `neutral' statement, providing the first public indication that relations were deteriorating rapidly. Khrushchev's China policy appeared to have two elements. 1) To increase the scale of Soviet economic aid to China, thus reassuring it of friendship while increasing Soviet penetration of its economy. 2) To oust Mao Zedong and anti-Soviet elements from the Chinese leadership. The period from 1960 to 1969 was characterised by the Sino-Soviet `cold war', beginning with polemics in ideology and expanding to economic, political and military confrontation. Until the end of 1962 both sides refrained from attacking each other directly. The Chinese directed their attacks against `revisionism' in general and the Yugoslavs in particular; the Russians directed their attacks against `dogmatism' in general and the Albanians in particular. The first major ideological confrontation took place at the Third Congress of the Romanian Workers' Party in Bucharest from 20-25 June 1960. Then on 16 July the Soviet government informed the Chinese government of its decision to withdraw all Soviet technicians working in China. This unilateral decision, which aroused greater resentment in China than any other action, struck a crushing blow at China's economy at a time when the country was suffering from the failure of the Great Leap and a series of natural disasters. The Chinese government replied with charges of revisionism. But as the economic links between the two countries deteriorated, the Chinese leaders eventually published their well-known nine comments, from 15 August 1963 to 14 July 1964, strongly criticising both Soviet internal and external policies. Sino-Sovient relations deteriorated after Khrushchev's fall in October 1964. There were at least two events contributing to this. One was a quarrel about taking `unity of action' to aid North Vietnam, suggested by the Soviet leaders. The other was a dispute about holding an international conference of all Communist parties in 1965. Party relations were broken, although no-one at the time thought that this break could continue for the next 23 years. 1966-1969 witnessed the high-tide of the `Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, and this put the PRC in full confrontation with the USSR for two decades. There is no doubt that the struggle against `Soviet revisionism' which dominated Mao's mind in his later years was one of his main motives for starting the Revolution. Kiu Shaoqi whom he regarded as China's Khrushchev and the representative of the revisionist line inside the Chinese Party, had to be denounced. Smashing revisionists at home meant smashing them abroad and therefore the necessity of ending the few remaining contacts between the Russians and their last Chinese informants. Simultaneously, the first frontier confrontations took place. The boundary question between the PRC and the USSR has occupied an important position in the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations. However, it only led to fighting when relations between the two countries deteriorated for other reasons. Armed clashes occurred on 2 and 15 March 1969, on the Island in the Wusulijang (River Ussuri) called Zhen Bao, just a few weeks before the Ninth Congress of the CCP. Mao concluded that the USSR was behaving like a young imperialist power on the offensive and found ample evidence in the behaviour of Brezhnev. The Soviet Union's policy towards China in the 1970s seemed to want to knock together an `Asian collective security system', aimed at isolating China; to build up its armed forces in the Far East to put pressure on China and Japan in order to compete with the United States in the Pacific Ocean; to use the `Cuba of Asia', Vietnam, as its agent, to seize the whole of Indochina and dominate Southeast Asia, edging the United States out of the continent. The USSR's invasion of Afghanistan seemed to be bent on controlling that country, but also on furthering its long-term strategic objective of expanding its power in South Asia and the Middle East. The Chinese response was inevitably hostile, to try to: a) reduce or eliminate the threat of a `two front war' involving China with more than one major enemy; b) more generally deflect any political and military pressure against the PRC by seeking to prevent `encirclement' by the PRC's enemies; c) form the broadest possible international united front against hegemonism; d) gain stable, diversified foreign trade partners and sources of advanced technology for the PRC, thereby enabling China to modernize its economy. Under Mao's guidance the theory of the Three Worlds was put into practice. China established diplomatic relations with many capitalist countries; and in the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a limited Chinese-American alliance against the Soviet Union. Mao's death and Deng Ziaoping's succession led to a fundamental change in China's internal economic policy and its accompanying ideology, and gradually also to a change in its attitude to the Soviet Union. With Gorbachev's succession in the Soviet Union in 1985 there were corresponding changes, making an eventual rapprochement possible. The evolution of Soviet policy towards China began on 24 March 1982 when Brezhnev made his speech in Tashkent, developed through 28 July 1986 when Gorbachev made his speech in Vladivostok, and culminated in May 1989 when Gorbachev came to Beijing to have the first Sino-Soviet summit. The process of normalization of Sino-Soviet relations was complex and full of difficulties. China identified the three major obstacles as both a barrier to positive change and as a genuine test. The year 1988 saw a breakthrough in eliminating the three obstacles as the Soviet Union promised to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and reduce its forces

The object of this study is to assess the extent to which the Turkic people of Kazakhstan and Sinkiang have been aligned politically and socially with the socialist societies of their respective countries. It is not intended to consider this question in the light of success or failure. There are several reasons for not doing so. It would be realistic to consider the question in this light only if a definite goel was to be achieved within a specified period of time. This was not the case in either Kazakhstan or Sinkiang. There was and is no definable period of time within which Communism is to be I I achieved. Equally important, Communism remains a hazy expression for a state of existence that yet has to be defined in a manner that is universally accepted. In this study the various political, cultural, religious and educational aspects of the Turkic people will be considered. The intention is to discover to what extent these traditions have been replaced by the social institutions of the socialist societies. This in turn should allow some insight into the advances made by both the Russian and Chinese Communists in their attempts to transform their respective Turkic people. At the same time the study deals with specific difficulties that the Governments had to overcome in the course of the transformation process. These include getting the Turkic people to participate in the various socialist institutions. From this there arise new questions and problems. The Islamic society of the Turkic people had not prepared the latter to participate in a modern, industrial society. They lacked the required educational background to be usefully employable in the bureaucracy on any but a superficial level. As a result non-Turkic cadres had to be used in many leading positions. This raised the question of great Russian and Han-Chinese chauvinism. Another problem was that of attacking the traditional Turkic way of life without alienating the Turkic people. The direct attack on Islam was complex. In general both Governments demonstrated a lack of understanding for the Islamic way of life. As a consequence they launched an attack on an Islamic orthodoxy that did not exist. Also, the Soviet policy of an outright attack forced the Soviet Government to define a new way of life for the Kazakh and other Muslim people. In China the need for this was avoided because of the less antagonistic attitude towards Islam. To a great extent this study compares the policies of the Soviet and Chinese Governments. This in itself raises some questions. The Russian revolution preceded the Chinese by nearly 32 years. This gave the Chinese a considerable advantage. They did not have to make the same mistakes that ha~ been made by the Soviet Union, particularly the collectivisation drive in Kazakhstan. But the Chinese not only benefitted from the Soviet mistakes. They'were able also to make use of the advanced experience of the Soviet Union in advancing their economic development programme. In addition the more industrially advanced Soviet Union could and did assist the Chinese in their industrialisation. From the discussion of the connection between the two countries their logically follows an assessment of the inter-state relationship. The intention is to discover to what extent the Turkic people influenced the Sino-Soviet relationship. But the economic question hardly can be excluded from the discussion. This in turn leads to the analysis of some of the historical)-political, ideological and economic causes of the Sino-Soviet rift.

Legitimacy is a key but a-changing concept in political science. It has evolved in parallel with the changing political realities throughout history. In the current political environment, legitimacy of a political order depends on its approval by people at the domestic level. However, this domestic approval has to be sustained by an international approval, an attribute underlined especially during the Cold War era. Latin American crises of legitimacy and the more recent East European crises of legitimacy provide concrete examples for this. Hungary, as one of the East European countries which underwent the post-communist systemic transformation faces a renewed crisis of legitimacy. The grounds of legitimation have changed in comparison with the grounds of legitimation of the ancien regime, especially under the Kádárist rule. This thesis analyses the Kádárist attempts at legitimation, and then focuses on the post-communist system in Hungary to compare it with the ancien regime in search of the answer to the question what has changed during the transformation. This study focuses on legitimacy with its domestic and international dynamics, taking into consideration the systemic, institutional and social changes in the post-communist era. It concludes that a combination of political, economic and social improvements will ensure the new system’s legitimate status in both domestic and international arenas.

The dissertation looks at the transformation of civil-military relations in Poland and Hungary, Russia and Ukraine between the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in July 1991 and the enlargement of NATO in March 1999. It presents new qualitative data based on approximately 120 elite interviews conducted by the author of politicians, military officers, defence analysts, and journalists in the countries in the study. In general, the focus is on the civilian side of the civil-military equation. Specifically, the work assesses the state of civil-military relations on the basis of three interconnected indicators: the making of security policy and defence reform as a test of civilian control, the role of civilians in the ministry of defence, and the strength of agencies of civilian oversight. It is argued that the differences observed in the state of civil-military relations among the states in the study can be explained by the interaction of three main factors. In Poland and Hungary, the external incentives to establish democratic control of the armed forces reform were positive, while in Russia and Ukraine the impact of external actors - of which NATO was by far the most significant - was negative or ambiguous. The attitude of the political and military elite in Poland and Hungary was more open to the adoption of new norms of civil-military relations than was that of the elite in Russia and Ukraine. And in Poland and Hungary the state of the polity and economy presented a less significant internal constraint on reform. The central finding of the dissertation is that in Poland and Hungary reformers tried - with mixed success - to adopt the forms of democratic civil-military relations as part of their drive to integrate with Western politico-military structures without seeking to understand the logic behind them. The result was a "politics of mimicry", a process of imperfect copying of liberal-democratic norms of civil-military relations which, nonetheless, culminated in these countries being admitted to NATO in 1999. In Ukraine and Russia, by contrast, in a time of profound budgetary exigency, the armed forces were left to solve their own problems absent much civilian control except that exercised infrequently and arbitrarily by the head of state.

This thesis' central aim is the application of a Wendtian-constructivist expansion of Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) on a specific case study: the South Caucasus. To that effect, three concepts of RSCT – amity/enmity, state incoherence, and great power penetration – are expanded and developed within the broader above-mentioned ontological-epistemological framework. Amity-enmity is elaborated into an integrated spectrum founded on varying ideational patterns of securitisation alongside objective characteristics, and encompassing conflict formations, security regimes and security communities. States are conceptualised as ideational-institutional-material "providers of security"; their incoherence is characterised over three tiers and two dimensions, leading to a distinction between vertical and horizontal inherent weakness, ostensible instability and failure. Great power penetration is dissected into its objective, subjective and intersubjective elements, resulting in a 1+3+1 typology of its recurring patterns: unipolar, multipolar-cooperative and multipolar-competitive, bounded by hegemony and disengagement. After the specification of a methodology incorporating both objective macro- and interpretive micro-perspectives, two working hypotheses are specified. Firstly, that state incoherence engenders high levels of regional enmity, and, secondly, that patterns of great power penetration primarily affect transitions of regional amity/enmity between conflict formations and security regimes. The framework is subsequently used to triangulate these hypotheses through an application of the theoretical framework on the post-Soviet Southern Caucasus. An initial macro-overview is subsequently provided of the Southern Caucasus as a regional security complex; the three expanded concepts are consequently investigated, in turn, from the discursive micro-perspective. The South Caucasus is categorised into a "revisionist conflict formation", the nature of its states' incoherence is characterised, and existing patterns of great power penetration are identified as competitive-multipolar. In the final chapter, the hypotheses are largely confirmed, and various scenarios as to the possible emergence of a regional security regime are investigated.

The development of a robust small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector has been widely seen as important to Russia’s socio-economic transformation. This has been clear from state policies and rhetoric that claim to support the development of entrepreneurship and publicly advocate its importance. Significantly however, this official support for the SME sector has been out of line with the patterns of entrepreneurial development on the ground. Entrepreneurs continue to face a host of obstacles in the spheres of legislation, tax, accessing credit, as well as administrative barriers; all of which have complicated the development of small and medium sized businesses. Given the direct role that individual entrepreneurs play in shaping the SME sector, an understanding of entrepreneurs themselves – their experiences, attitudes, values and beliefs – is required in order to understand the patterns and problems of entrepreneurial development. Yet notably, much of the existing literature has not attached a high degree of importance to the experiences of entrepreneurs in processes of development. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by exploring the patterns and problems of entrepreneurial development from the perspective of entrepreneurs themselves. It asks the question: how have behaviour, attitudes, values and socio-cultural context impacted on the development of entrepreneurship? Qualitative ethnographic research methods were used to explore the experiences of entrepreneurs and their responses to the challenges of the Russian business environment in four regions of Russia: Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Tver’ and Kaluga. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with entrepreneurs as well as state officials and leaders of business associations. Involving a variety of individuals who have played a role in shaping the entrepreneurial process provided insight into the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values towards entrepreneurship. This thesis found that the relationships that entrepreneurs form with other entrepreneurs, as well as with state officials and leaders of business associations are instrumental to understanding the patterns of behaviour of entrepreneurs and how these, in turn, shape entrepreneurial processes. It also finds that informal practices such as blat and personal networks are integral strategies used by entrepreneurs to navigate the challenges of doing business in Russia. At the same time, this thesis concludes that these behaviours of entrepreneurs, which often occur in collusion with state officials and leaders of business associations, have subverted the integrity of the formal system and have contributed to a pattern of entrepreneurial development which has suffocated the potential and prosperity of the SME sector. The entrepreneurial process in Russia has thus been a complex mixture of successes and frustrations and the experiences of entrepreneurs are key to understanding this process.

This thesis considers the development of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), from its foundation in 1993 to the Presidential election of 2008. The study begins with a discussion of the context of change for the CPRF in the post-Soviet world from the perspective of political transitions of other communist parties and their development in the post-Soviet world. The final years of the party’s predecessor, and that predecessor’s collapse contribute a sense of perspective to the party’s development and this is followed by a consideration of the need for ideological change in order to transform the party, the electorate’s support for the CPRF in recent parliamentary elections and the political views of members of a branch of the party with particular emphasis on the opinions of younger members: those who may be guiding the party’s development in the future. How does the transformation of the CPRF compare with that of other communist parties in the region? Organisational change, including the inheritance of political control and resources by former communist parties in some countries where they were in power, has greatly aided some parties in their return to government while the lack of such advantages has hindered others. The ban on the party in Russia adversely affected the unification of communists in Russia from 1991 to 1993 while the CPRF’s counterparts in other countries faced no such difficulties. The electoral successes of other communist and former-communist parties serve to highlight the increased problems the CPRF faces after the splits the party has undergone in recent years. Ideological change across the post-communist world has been very varied in terms of moves towards social democracy, towards nationalism or the retention of a more orthodox communism depending on the local circumstances in individual countries. How has the legacy of the CPSU influenced the formation and development of the successor party? The origins of the CPRF can be seen in the divisions that formed in the CPSU in its final years. The scale of ideological change in the final years of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union can be seen in the radical differences between the 1986 Party Programme and 1991 draft Programme. Documents from the era reveal a failure to understand the depth of the reaction against communism in Eastern Europe and what it could mean for the Soviet Union as well as concern about the effects of glasnost’ on support for the regime and the thinking behind attempts to use electoral change to increase the party’s legitimacy. These changes did not have the anticipated effect for the CPSU and resulted in the loss of party control over those elected and over electors with the formation of platforms in the CPSU and parties outside the CPSU leading the way to the demise of the party. When the ideology a party represents appears to have been comprehensively rejected, how does that party reposition itself in the political landscape in order to survive? With the election of a new leader prepared to lead the party in a new direction, the CPRF has recast itself as a nationalist party that sees communism as a Russian tradition. Zyuganov’s repositioning of the party has been characterised by the acceptance of democracy, which has arguably kept the CPRF in the public eye as the party has been represented in every Duma since 1993, and the search for means of uniting various political groups under a broad ‘patriotic’ banner in order to return the party to power at the head of a coalition. Zyuganov’s reworking of communist theory includes a heavy reliance on geopolitics to argue for the re-establishment of the Soviet Union and support for the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian culture as cornerstones of the patriotic cause. Which members of the Russian electorate now define themselves as communist? The party’s relationship with the electorate is examined through the results of public opinion surveys conducted just after the 1999 and 2003 Duma elections to see what views communist voters hold in common and whether it is possible to determine what political opinions can be said to predict a vote for the CPRF. A CPRF supporter could be predicted to be older and with more strongly held political views than the average Russian citizen. As many previous studies have found, age is clearly one of the most significant factors in predicting support for the CPRF but this factor is outweighed in these surveys by party identification and ideological conviction. If a voter identified with a political party and an ideology, there was a greater probability that that voter supported the CPRF than any other political party. Are members of the party able and willing to defend the change in direction of the party leadership? Interviews with members of the St Petersburg branch of the CPRF indicated that members were willing to accept the nationalist stance of the party as a temporary necessity to extend electoral support for the party. In view of the fact that party membership has fallen drastically in recent years, members were asked what was drawing them to join the CPRF or remain in the party when others had left. With an ageing and falling membership, the Komsomol is playing an important role by recruiting young people to the party. Members were asked for their views on the possibility of the party changing course and their attitudes to Zyuganov’s leadership. However, with support for the party from the electorate in decline, party members were divided about what they felt needed to change. This thesis concludes that the party remains popular with a minority of voters who were impoverished by the transition and that the current strategies of democratic participation and a nationalist stance have been accepted by the membership as the achievement of communism is seen as a very distant prospect. The party, however, still believes that communism is inevitable.