The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was the founding and ruling party of the Soviet Union, established on 1 January 1912 by Vladimir Lenin. The party was founded by the Bolsheviks, a communist faction of Russian politics, and the Bolsheviks seized power from the Russian Empire in 1917. The CPSU formed the ruling party of the USSR after the Russian Revolution, and Joseph Stalin seized power for himself after Lenin's death in 1924, defeating his rival Leon Trotsky. Stalin purged supporters of Lenin and Trotsky in the "Great Purge" from 1936 to 1938, including almost every Red Army general, all of the admirals of the Soviet Navy, and millions of Soviet peasants. The CPSU was Stalinist until 1956, when Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev de-Stalinized the USSR. In 1985, the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev decided to liberalize the economy like Deng Xiaoping had done in China, but the economy hit disastrously low levels, and Gorbachev was forced to resign on 25 December 1991 after a coup by CPSU hardliners was put down. Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia, and the CPSU ended with the disintegrating Soviet Union.
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