ABSTRACT
Administrative policy in a communist setting is both an enormously demanding and an extremely complex business, for it must deal with a far broader, and more obviously contradictory, array of considerations than those that face the bourgeois states of the West. The intellectual justification for party-led central planning is not merely aesthetic; proponents of the method of governance contend that it will move society toward the materialization of utopia more rapidly and effectively than any less ambitious policy. Western scholars often find it difficult to imagine, much less understand, the so-called decision-making environment of the communist policymaker, which means that studies of administrative action in communist nations are frequently disappointing. The most significant shortcomings of Soviet administration appear to be due to the less developed and less uniformly developed nature of its economy and the absence of universally held sociocultural attitudes that support hard work, efficiency, and professionalism.
