How shall we understand the Soviet system and the ways time works on it? One of the purposes of this book is to wrestle with the question, How would we know a significant change in Soviet politics if we saw one? At a minimum, significant change means some alteration of a regime's basic stuff, whether defined as “the authoritative allocation of values” or “who gets what, when, and how.” For change in Soviet politics to be significant, it must touch on the sources and instruments of the state's power and authority.

A generation ago, the synthesis achieved by Merle Fainsod in his book How Russia Is Ruled commanded a degree of agreement among his colleagues that no scholar is able to muster today. Western writers on Soviet politics now run the gamut from those who believe that the Soviet Union has not changed since Stalin's day to those who see evolving in Russia a measure of pluralism or at least a certain diffusion of power away from the central leadership. Each one has his own formula, aimed at capturing the essence of the system: “participatory bureaucracy”, “institutional pluralism”, “pluralism of elites”, “directed society”, “authoritarian system with a dysfunctional totalitarian residue”, “welfare authoritarianism”, and one could mention many more. In recent years, instead of synthesis and common ground, there is growing acrimony. What accounts for the loss of the earlier consensus?

It springs not so much from disagreement about facts – all Western Sovietologists work much the same mine and refine what they can from the same low-grade ore – but rather from different ideas about political theory, particularly about power, which unfortunately are not usually stated explicitly.