Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Yeltsin terminates CPSU and Russian Communist Party activity in the RSFSR
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The order that dismantled the party machine also told prosecutors not to punish anyone simply for having carried a party card.
Decree No. 169, signed at the Kremlin
On 6 November 1991, at the Moscow Kremlin, RSFSR president Boris Yeltsin signed Decree No. 169, “On the Activities of the CPSU and the Communist Party of the RSFSR.”
It terminated the activity of both organizations within the RSFSR and ordered their organizational structures dissolved. Central and regional executive authorities were told to implement it immediately and to transfer party property in Russia to the state.
The same document instructed state bodies and prosecutors not to persecute citizens merely because they had belonged to either party.
Its stated grounds were the August coup
The decree explicitly invoked the failed coup of 19–21 August 1991, accused the CPSU leadership of fusing party and state power, and cited alleged registration defects as legal grounds for acting.
It was not the first post-coup move against the party. Decrees issued in August had already suspended the Russian party, froze accounts and placed party property under state control.
The Soviet Union itself still formally existed on 6 November 1991.
Why “ban” is the wrong word
The operative language terminated activity and dissolved organizational structures rather than pronouncing a ban, and its reach did not hold. On 30 November 1992 Russia's Constitutional Court upheld dissolution of the parties' leadership structures but held that territorially organized primary party organizations could not constitutionally be dissolved wholesale.
The court also invalidated the property transfer insofar as the property was party-owned or its ownership was undetermined.
One relationship is routinely reversed in accounts of this decree: the CPSU was the union-level organization, and the Communist Party of the RSFSR was its Russian component, not its parent.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 3 sources not yet audited
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The decree’s legal reach was narrowed on 30 November 1992. Russia’s Constitutional Court upheld dissolution of the parties’ leadership structures but held that territorially organized primary party organizations could not constitutionally be dissolved wholesale. It also invalidated the property transfer insofar as property was party-owned or ownership was undetermined.