The Party, Opposition and Interest Groups

A striking paradox of communist politics is the ceaseless flux of change beneath an appearance of changeless continuity in the forms and structures and in the communist theory of political power. In spite of a succession of constitutions and even more frequent amendments of the party's own statute, the general structure of Soviet political institutions and of political processes, as it exists in 1967, is not in its essential features unlike the order which emerged from the revolutionary events of 1917. There is now, as there was then, a single centralized and largely monolithic party which enjoys a monopoly of political power and controls the representative institutions, the mass organizations and the media of communications, and seeks to direct and mould all aspects of society, the economic and spiritual as well as the social and political. None the less, beneath this surface uniformity there have been profound shifts in the way the system has actually operated at successive stages of Soviet history. One could almost hazard a paraphrase of the old French saying: Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ga change! In fact it is appropriate to speak of a succession of Soviet political systems, from the Leninist, through the early and the mature Stalinist, to the Khrushchevian and post-Khrushchevian, each manifesting a distinctive style and substance of its own.1 When one takes into account the other communist states of Eastern Europe, one encounters an even richer diversity, as these systems, once modelled on the Soviet prototype, and stiU retaining the essentials of the old system, have in practice worked out many variations on the common theme

Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Soviet and Russian History

• A Zonal Analysis Model for Comparative Politics

  Open Access•James B Bruce, Robert W Clawson•World Politics•1977

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