Political Power and the Soviet State: Western and Soviet Perspectives

Abstract

It is not so very long ago that there was an almost unquestioning acceptance among Western scholars that the concept of totalitarianism provided the single key to understanding the nature of the Soviet state. That view — perhaps in a modified version, that it is the best key available — still has its defenders, but it has increasingly been challenged ever since it first came under serious attack in the 1960s. In the Soviet Union itself the same decade saw the opening shots fired in a campaign to have power relations within the Soviet and other political systems discussed more realistically and less propagandistically than hitherto in the context of the development of a discipline of political science.2 It is only in recent years, however, that serious debate on the nature of political power and on the concepts of the state and the political system has been conducted in specialist Soviet journals and small-circulation books. One of the purposes of this chapter is to bring together such writings by Soviet scholars and the writings of Western political scientists on the nature of power relations within the Soviet system, partly on account of the intrinsic interest of both and also to see what relevance, if any, the Soviet discussions bear to Western arguments concerning the nature of the system.