This article presents some core structural–organizational principles of communist state administration and gives empirical examples of how they were — and are — expressed in practice. The administrative structures and institutional traditions of communist regimes constitute a family or type, where affnities to the original Soviet model are strong.

The administrative doctrines of unity of power, socialist legality, cadre management, and the so-called nomenclature model of administrative control were developed by the former Soviet Union, where the nomenclature system was instituted in 1922. With Soviet military and ideological expansion, the Soviet model then spread across the globe.

At its high point in the late 1980s, almost 30 Marxist-Leninist regimes existed on four of Earth’s five continents: Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, almost all of the states formerly occupied or mentored by it transitioned from communism. In the 21st century, five countries still count as largely communist in their administrative structure: China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and North Korea.