Volume 26, Number 12 · July 19, 1979
Rewriting the Russian Rules
By Leonard Schapiro
How the Soviet Union Is Governed
by Jerry F. Hough, by Merle Fainsod
Harvard University Press, 679 pp., $18.50
The late Merle Fainsod's How Russia Is Ruled was first published in 1953. Ten years later it appeared in a second edition, which examined the changes which had occurred since Khrushchev had replaced Stalin. Professor Fainsod's work was a milestone in the study of the Soviet Union. It was probably the first analysis to appear of the Soviet system of government as it really is—not as it pretends to be in the formal documents, such as its laws and constitution, which formed the basis of that lamentable study of Soviet 'civilization' by Sidney and Beatrice Webb; or as a separate, Marxist world, where freedom, justice, or democracy had to be given special meanings or judged by separate criteria from those which have applied to political analysis for centuries. How Russia Is Ruled was squarely based on the assumption that the Soviet system is totalitarian, in the sense that total control is exercised at the top by the leaders of the Communist Party through the medium of party domination over all aspects of life.
Review, 2671 words
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