ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union a post-industrial society? How absurd-the country that Brezhnev left, unwittingly, to Gorbachev and Yeltsin had scarcely completed its drive to mature industrialism. And yet, paradoxically, it was in some ways the first professional society. If that society is defined as the rise to dominance of the professional elites and the displacement of their landed and capitalist rivals, then the bureaucratic state and command economy that Lenin and Stalin built between the 1917 Revolution and the Second World War must qualify as the pioneer of one extreme, admittedly pathological, species of professional society. For over seventy years before its ignominious collapse in 1991 it formed the far pillar of the great arch, the state-centralized version of postindustrial society.
