Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes1

Those who specialize in the study of Soviet government and politics are beginning to feel and acknowledge the need for a more effective theoretical apparatus. The post-war years of expanded research in this field have been fruitful in empirical studies of Soviet political history and institutions, but the theoretical development has not kept pace; and now the lag is beginning to inhibit the further fruitful progress of empirical research itself. Instead of a gradually developing body of theory, we still have a mélange of “ten theories in search of reality,” as Daniel Bell has summed it up in the title of a recent article. The purpose of the present paper is not to propound an eleventh theory. It is only an exploratory effort, a consideration of a somewhat different approach to the problem than has been customary in the field of Soviet studies. In presenting it, I shall try to shed the blinkers of a Russian specialist and take a look at the whole political galaxy in which Russia is only the biggest star and probably no longer the brightest one. The best way out of the theoretical difficulty may lie in making the study of Soviet government and politics more comparative than it has generally been so far, thus bringing it into much closer working relations with political science as a whole and particularly with the slowly growing body of theory in comparative politics. As this statement implies, our work on Soviet government and politics has been characterized by a certain theoretical isolationism.