ABSTRACT
Most Marxists have averred that politics after a communist takeover is relatively unimportant, as the superstructure and the economic base have been brought back into synchronization. Politics is thus largely reduced to the administration of the society's main task, economic development, plus an additional small increment devoted to elimination of class enemies and to foreign policy decision making. An analytic orientation that invites the observer to move beyond primitive Leninism, as concerns party political and administrative style, to broader causal arenas is imperative under such circumstances. Modernization is perhaps the most difficult of the three concept arenas to assess in terms of its influence on Chinese and Soviet politics. Soviet politics obviously springs from quite different historical and cultural sources, but the result, surprisingly, is a higher degree of similarity with Chinese politics than might be expected. Leninism and its antecedent, Machiavellianism, form the third cluster of variables determining politics in China and the Soviet Union.
