ABSTRACT
'Soviet government,' an allegedly superior solution to the universal political problems of power and leadership, was for seventy years the formal foundation of the USSR's political system. The term 'soviet politics' was, however, an oxymoron. The soviets were intended to eliminate the fig leaf politics that allegedly hid bourgeois domination in the capitalist world. Both Leninist theory and the literature on authoritarianism and transitions to democracy provide theoretical frameworks to structure an investigation. Theoretical and conceptual clarity, as Giovanni Sartori and others have argued, is a sine qua non of comparative politics. Most contemporary theories of democratization focus on the politics of the democratization process and suggest that the transition should be viewed as an open and open-ended game. The personification of Soviet politics encouraged both voters and analysts to forget that the interwoven incentive structures of a modern political democracy depend on the creation of a party-state.
