THE PARTY'S OVER

The 24^th August was a difficult day for the Communist Party.

The Communist Control Act (68 Stat. 775, 50 U.S.C. 841-844) is a piece of United States federal legislation, signed into law by Dwight Eisenhower on the 24^th August 1954, which outlawed the Communist Party of the United States and criminalized membership in, or support for the Party or "Communist-action" organizations and defined evidence to be considered by a jury in determining participation in the activities, planning, actions, objectives, or purposes of such organizations.

There was much controversy surrounding the Act. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and its Director, the famed J. Edgar Hoover, opposed the bill on the count that it would have forced the Communist movement underground. In addition, the Michigan Law Review argued that the politically charged Act was plagued by a number of constitutional problems which would have undermined its effectiveness. The Yale Law Journal lauded the Act as the “most direct statutory attack on internal communism yet undertaken [by 1955] by Congress,” but stressed the “haste and confusion of the Act’s passage” which led to many “vague and ambiguous provisions.”  The incongruity of its provisions, a grave constitutional defect, was in part attributed to obscure language. For example, the nature of the “rights, privileges, and immunities” to be terminated by the Act was never explicitly stated as relating to state or federal jurisdiction. Also, the Yale Law Journal underlined a number of instances during which a literal interpretation of key passages would have caused entire sections to fall because of the use of comprehensive, unspecific language. McAuliffe notes that, because of these complications, the Act was never “used as a major weapon in the legislative arsenal against Communism,” apart for two minor cases in the states of New York and New Jersey.

On the 24^th August 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Communist rule effectively ended when Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the CPSU and advised the Central Committee to dissolve. Shortly afterward, the Supreme Soviet suspended all Party activities on Soviet territory. On that same Day the Ukraine declared itself independent from the Soviet Union.