The new contours of Bolshevik politics determined the tactics available not only to the Left but to all factions that would emerge to challenge the CC majority after Lenin’s passing. Crucially, the decision to open the party’s doors to a new cohort of rank-and-file communists introduced a new variable to internal politics. The Lenin enrolment had transformed primary party organisations from isolated, demoralised groups of communists to mass institutions tightly woven into the fabric of factory life. Both oppositionists and the centre tried to manoeuvre this new dynamic to their advantage. The following pages will examine this process as it unfolded during the bitter factional struggles against the so-called New and United Oppositions, the last major challenges to the NEP consensus.

This chapter seeks to probe the generalizability of the findings outside the Greek context by examining the organizational development of extremist right-wing parties in Germany and Slovakia. Utilizing the analytical framework developed and tested in the previous chapters, this chapter investigates the organizational development of two relatively similar parties in two distinct settings, the German National Democratic Party of Germany and the Kotleba – People’s Party Our Slovakia. The postwar and postcommunist contexts in which the NPD and the LSNS have developed are different from the postauthoritarian setting in which the GD evolved. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that, despite these notable contextual differences, the organizational development of the NPD and LSNS is affected by endogenous and environmental factors similar to those analyzed in Greece. The first section of the chapter briefly describes the basic characteristics of the two parties, highlighting their similarities to and differences from the GD. The second section utilizes interviews with the party leadership, organizational data from official and party documents, and the secondary literature to sketch the organizational development of the German and Slovak parties. The last section examines in turn the endogenous, electoral, institutional and societal factors affecting the development of the two parties.

Why do local party organizations succeed in some settings but fail in others? The purpose of this chapter is to start providing explanations for the varied trajectories of subnational party organizations. This chapter looks at how endogenous factors affect local organizational development. The first part of this chapter seeks to utilize insights from the broader literature on political parties and the extant literature on far right parties to analyze how endogenous (party-specific) factors might account for variation in local organizational outcomes. It focuses on two characteristics of extremist right-wing parties that affect their development: they are charismatic and movement parties. The remainder of the chapter utilizes insights from dozens of interviews with Golden Dawn functionaries and thousands of party documents to trace how endogenous factors affected the trajectory of local party branches. The second section looks at factors that are specific to the national party and the third section examines whether organizational outcomes are endogenous to the local units themselves.

This chapter begins the examination of how environmental factors shape the local organizational development of extremist right-wing parties by looking into the way electoral dynamics shape organizational choices and outcomes. It first engages with the broader and extant literature examining the link between electoral and organizational factors. It uses this literature to generate hypotheses on how electoral incentives shape the organizational trajectories of local party branches. The first empirical section of the chapter focuses on how electoral considerations shaped the organizational choices the GD made. The second empirical section investigates how various electoral factors, such as electoral performance, district size or local incumbency, helped shape organizational outcomes.