ABSTRACT
The organization and institutionalization of competing groups deepened polarization between them, reinforced the tripartite regime split, and established a structure of strategic political contest approximating a moderates' dilemma. The organization of competing groups inside the regime in 1989 with divergent and increasingly antithetical programs for the reformation of state and society signaled the transformation of the rifts at the top of the regime into a full-fledged Soviet regime split comparable to those instrumental in pacted transitions. In the Soviet mono-organizational partocratic state there was no civil society to resurrect or any organized opposition. These began to grow only during perestroika under a state that had registered historically unprecedented success in atomizing its society, depriving it of self-organized autonomous political space, and replacing these with a bureaucratized political arena in which any discussion of issues occurred in terms sanctioned by the party-state.
