A01=Philip G. Roeder
Accountability
Agriculture
Andrei Gromyko
Anti-Party Group
Author_Philip G. Roeder
Authoritarianism
Autocracy
Bolsheviks
Bureaucrat
Case study
Category=JPFC
Category=JPHC
Category=NHD
Central Committee
Centrism
Chairman
Collective leadership
Collectivism
Communism
Communist state
Comparative politics
Defection
Desertion
Domestic policy
Economy of the Soviet Union
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Foreign policy
Georgy Malenkov
Gosplan
Heavy industry
Incumbent
Institution
Joseph Stalin
Konstantin Chernenko
Lavrentiy Beria
Legislature
Leninism
Leonid Brezhnev
Logrolling
Marxism-Leninism
Mikhail Gorbachev
Military doctrine
Military science
New Course
New institutionalism
Nikita Khrushchev
Obstacle
Oligarchy
Parliamentary system
Party secretary
Policy
Politburo
Political economy
Political science
Political system
Politician
Politics
Prerogative
Presidium
Regime
Republics of the Soviet Union
Russian Republic
Samuel P. Huntington
Soviet Armed Forces
Soviet Union
Stalinism
Tax
Thane Gustafson
The Political Process
Totalitarianism
Trade-off
Voting
Vyacheslav Molotov
Yuri Andropov
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Product details
- ISBN 9780691019420
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 10 Oct 1993
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Why did the Soviet system fail? How is it that a political order, born of revolution, perished from stagnation? What caused a seemingly stable polity to collapse? Philip Roeder finds the answer to these questions in the Bolshevik "constitution"--the fundamental rules of the Soviet system that evolved from revolutionary times into the post-Stalin era. These rules increasingly prevented the Communist party from responding to the immense social changes that it had itself set in motion: although the Soviet political system initially had vast resources for transforming society, its ability to transform itself became severely limited. In Roeder's view, the problem was not that Soviet leaders did not attempt to change, but that their attempts were so often defeated by institutional resistance to reform. The leaders' successful efforts to stabilize the political system reduced its adaptability, and as the need for reform continued to mount, stability became a fatal flaw.
Roeder's analysis of institutional constraints on political behavior represents a striking departure from the biographical approach common to other analyses of Soviet leadership, and provides a strong basis for comparison of the Soviet experience with constitutional transformation in other authoritarian polities.
Philip G. Roeder is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Soviet Political Dynamics: Development of the First Leninist Polity (Harper & Row).
