Commands – that is, political commands – in this sort of twentieth-century social formation were issued fundamentally by what has been called the party-state, of which the first element – the party – was actually the defining one (Kornai 1992, 34– 41). The state was larger and comprised many other components and processes. The political component was always linked directly to the party, although bureaucratic elements could be articulated with it. Hence, the formal frontiers between the party and state/society in general did not correspond exactly to what was legally formalized. The same can be said of families, in principle not directly connected to politics or the party, whose influence as a part of party relations could be very strong.

This was the core of a historically specific system of rule. What really matters here is how vertical, hierarchical and based on command the system came to be. This was neither what the Bolsheviks had envisaged nor what they had originally practised (an issue to which I will return below). Yet once the Soviet state was consolidated, the soviets – which had been the focus of the revolutionary process – were entirely subordinated to the party, which controlled all the state bureaucratic machinery. Whether staffed by former Czarist functionaries or by new party cadres, the system came to rest absolutely on hierarchical relations, namely command and compliance. In the newly established imaginary this was related to two ideas: the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘democratic centralism’.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, or simply Lenin ([1917] 1964), discussed the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in his The State and Revolution, which he ended, however, without examining the development of Soviet power and its prospects. While the bourgeois state was based on bourgeois class power and consisted in an instrument of exploitation for that ruling class, Lenin envisaged the proletarian state – the ‘dictatorship if the proletariat’ – as a state that would develop towards its own disappearance, its ‘withering away’. It would be so simple that even a ‘cook’ could manage it, which meant that bureaucracy could and would disappear too. Marx's ([1871] 1986) analysis of the Paris Commune – which was in fact influenced above all by anarchists – furnished the main foundations for Lenin's view of the future, the construction of socialism and the eventual emergence of communism, as well as that of the proletarian state and its disappearance.