ABSTRACT
The challenge to the monolithism aspect of the totalitarian model which has been widely employed to explain various aspects of the Soviet political system raises many critical questions. The growth of Kremlinology, with its stress on the struggle for power among the top leadership within the Party, focused attention on factional cleavages within the political elite. If co-opted officials within the leadership cadres retain their specialist elite orientations and values, the representation of specialist attitudes and interests in the Central Committee is greater than interpreted and increases significantly over time. The emergence of the interest-group school of Soviet politics has had the desirable effect of casting serious doubt on the totalitarian school’s monolithic theory of Soviet politics by demonstrating that there is factional activity within the Soviet polity. The striking fact of much of the writing produced by the interest group school of Soviet politics is its basic oversimplification of the political process which borders on naiveté and simple determinism.
