ABSTRACT
The greatest surprise of the end of the twentieth century has been the suddenness and completeness of the Soviet system's collapse. No one predicted the form, and still less the time, of the Soviet collapse–although a number of observers, particularly East European dissidents, saw that the system was so fatally flawed that someday it would end rather than evolve into a more perfected form of existence. The Communist Party thus came to substitute both for the proletariat and for the logic of history; and this substitution furnished the basic institution of the Soviet system–the Party-state. The special categories necessary for grasping the peculiarities of the Soviet phenomenon must be sought in the Soviet experience itself. The generalizations about totalitarianism that were current in the late Stalin era, and were quite apposite at that time, are no longer adequate to characterize the whole seventy-four-year course of Soviet history.
