The Soviet Communist Party (1986) provides a concise and accessible description, analysis and assessment of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its place in the Soviet political system. It covers the Party’s structures, membership, personnel and functions, and relations with the state institutions, and discusses the Party’s role in leading other institutions and the press, and the part it plays in foreign relations. The book concludes with an examination of the CPSU in terms of a number of concepts that have been applied to it – as an elite, a class, a ‘totalitarian leader’s following’.