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The Neo-Communist Party of the Soviet Union (NCPSU, Russian: Неокоммунистическая партия Советского Союза, НКПСС) – a clandestine radical left group, which existed in the Soviet Union between September 1974 and January 1985. NCPSU is seen by modern researchers as one of the first organizations of the New Left in the USSR. However, Austrian researcher Hans Azenbaum, who studied the ideology of NCPSU, tends to view this party as the one focusing on the "third way", i.e. neither capitalism, nor real socialism. == History == The party was the result of a merger of two clandestine radical left groups: Party of New Communists (PNC) (Russian: Партия новых коммунистов (ПНК) and "Left School" (Russian: Левая школа), which have been formed simultaneously, but independently from each other in December 1972 - January 1973. Members of the two groups have established contact in September 1973; the possibility of a merger was broached in May 1974, but it was not until September 1974 that the groups had joined forces. After the merger the two groups ideologically enriched each other through bringing together the ideas of Trotskyism and the New Left (mainly Herbert Marcuse, Che Guevara and Régis Debray) by PNC and the ideas of French atheist existentialism (essentially, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) by the "Left School".〔 NCPSU members were planning to hold a founding congress in January 1977 (with July as a fallback). It had been expected that the congress would elect the party's governing body - Central Committee, discuss and adopt the Charter and the Programme of NCPSU. Prior to that "The Principles of Neo-communism" (Russian: Принципы неокоммунизма) - written by Alexander Tarasov in November 1973 and adapted in May–June 1974 at the request of the "Left School" for the newly created organization - were accepted by its members as a temporary theoretical document of NCPSU.〔 These plans were nevertheless disrupted by the failure of 1975 and the events of April 1977. The founding congress of NCPSU never took place. In September 1974, “the leading five” have become a temporary governing and coordinating body of NCPSU (pending the election of its Central Committee), including Alexander Tarasov (theory, general leadership); Natalia Magnat (theory, general leadership); Vasily Minorsky (activity within technical universities and colleges and counterculture circles); Olga Barash (activity within liberal arts universities and colleges and translating); Igor Dukhanov (communication with regional groups, provision of security). In 1977 Igor Dukhanov was replaced by S.Trubkin in “the leading five”. All decisions of “the leading five” outside of their areas of competence were made collectively by majority vote. In 1975 NCPSU was struck by a failure: KGB has identified and arrested several members of Moscow section of the party, including some leaders, but the extent of the failure has been limited only to former members of PNC: in spite of formal integration, the two groups were (de facto) still independent and connections between them were weak.〔 KGB investigators failed to prove any connection between former PNC members and the other half of NCPSU (former “Left School”), as well as their connections with regional groups. They also failed to get convincing proof of serious anti-Soviet activity (partially, because NCPSU archive, previously kept in the village of Valentinovka, Moscow Oblast, has been destroyed in January 1975). During the investigation, arrested members of NCPSU claimed that they mainly upheld the ideas of Marxism–Leninism, considered to be the official ideology of the USSR, while some evasion towards Trotskyism, anarchism and existentialism cannot be a crime, because in the USSR one cannot be tried for their views, but only for their actions. As a result, the NCPSU case was never brought to trial. Several “most dangerous” party members (from the KGB’s point of view) were confined - extrajudicially - in special psychiatric hospitals for periods ranging from six months to one year (''Also read'': Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union). The rest were excluded from their universities and from Komsomol.〔 Limited scale of 1975 failure proved that NCPSU was largely clandestine. The organization had a system of passwords and post boxes for connecting with regional groups; all NCPSU members had noms de guerre. Letters to regions were written with invisible ink.〔 After the failure of 1975, NCPSU activity was practically paralyzed. Unaffected party members (led by N. Magnat and O. Barash) managed to preserve NCPSU from complete breakdown through increased secrecy. Connection with regional groups was lost temporarily. During 1977-1980 NCPSU restored its activity.〔 In April 1977, NCPSU members once again became objects of KGB investigation, this time the one related to 1977 Moscow bombings – bomb explosions in Moscow Metro and on 25 October Street (now: Nikolskaya Street). These terrorist attacks claimed seven lives, while thirty-seven people were injured. The official version of events, made public in January 1979, claimed that the explosions were organized by an underground Armenian nationalist organization led by Stepan Zatikyan. But for NCPSU members this investigation resulted in detentions, interrogations and establishing a demonstrative surveillance. “Incriminated” NCPSU members were aware of undisguised monitoring by KGB up until 1982. In all, there were 32 members in NCPSU, mainly in Moscow and Moscow Oblast, but there were also groups in Kirov (2 members), Leningrad (2 members), in Ukraine (Dnepropetrovsk, 2 members), in Georgia (Tbilisi and Rustavi, 2 members), in Latvia (Riga, 1 member). Of these, 10 members failed in Moscow in 1975 and 2 more in Kirov in 1980.〔 There is also evidence of an attempt to establish an affiliated group in Kineshma (Ivanovo Oblast), but this attempt was not successful.〔 In 1984, analyzing the processes taking place in the USSR (following the deaths of Mikhail Suslov, Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, the party leaders have concluded that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regime was on the brink of collapse and that the country will soon enter a period of radical transformation. In the new circumstances a small clandestine organization would not be able to play any significant social role or have an impact on political processes in the country. This had become a topic of NCPSU discussion in the second half of 1984 leading to the party's self-dissolution in January 1985).〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Neo-Communist Party of the Soviet Union」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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