The Soviet political system is made up of three major institutions: the Communist Party, the parliament, and the government. Whereas the first two have changed dramatically under perestroika, the government has continued to function in more traditional ways. Most worrying to reformists, the government–the Soviet Union's “executive branch”–has used its broad rulemaking authority to impede the transformation of Soviet politics and society. This essay examines the role of governmental rules in the Soviet political and legal system. It concludes, following the lead of Soviet reformists, that without a fundamental restructuring of government making authority, legal, political, and economic reform in the Soviet Union cannot be institutionalized.

This investigation sought to discover whether, and in what respects, Soviet advocates in the wake of perestroika are comparable with legal professions in the West. Taped interviews with ten advocates and various other legal specialists in Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 1988–89 centered on four major professional goals. The responses showed (1) that Soviet advocates felt that their colleges effectively control admission to the bar; (2) that they have little sense of occupational jurisdiction, except in relation to the newly established legal cooperatives; (3) that they behaved like members of a self-governing profession in that bar association chairmen and bureau managers were perceived as colleagues rather than bosses, while party and state intervention control was dismissed as insignificant; (4) although they feel their status has risen dramatically since Gorbachev, it is not clear that this owes much to their collective efforts or that they have developed a corporate ideology to defend their position. Overall, the evidence supports the view that professional aspirations and institutions comparable to those in the West are to be found among Soviet advocates. Whether this might be seen as the reassertion of civil society, and of pluralism, in Soviet society is a much debated but currently unanswerable question. Negative and positive indications on this matter emerged during the research, the latter being rather the more persuasive.

The Soviet militsiia (regular police) has evolved in the past 70 years from a feeble body seeking to ensure the survival of Soviet rule to a massive bureaucracy corrupted by nearly absolute power. As the Soviet militia has developed the focus of its activities, its ethos, professionalism, and its relationship to both the Party and KGB have changed in all periods, the militia has had political, economic, and social responsibilities, but the balance among the three has shifted depending on the conditions of the state.

The militia, like the Soviet state, is currently in crisis. It remains an instrument of the party that is losing its legitimacy among the population. Perestroika's objective of making institutions subordinate to the law is a sharp deviation from existing practice. But even if the militsiia responds to these new expectations, because of the demands of a centrally planned socialist state the regular police will remain we intrusive into the lives of the citizenry than are police in Western democratic societies.