ABSTRACT
Succession of political leadership provides an occasion for reflection on and analysis of the past, and for a tentative assessment of the future. It has been demonstrated in a large number of academic studies in comparative politics that leadership succession brings in its wake significant changes in public policy. This has been shown to be the case not only in countries where leadership succession is determined by free and open competitive elections, but also in authoritarian states (Bunce, 1981). Although perhaps counterintuitive, it was found that in Soviet-type communist ('totalitarian') states new leaders had less ability to implement new policies than did their counterparts in liberal democracies, despite their seemingly 'total' power. This was due to the different methods of succession between political systems. In liberal democracies new leaders, gaining power through the ballot box, are able to-indeed, expected to-choose a new government and to institute new policy initiatives. New policy initiatives, especially any radical reforms, usually take place in the early period of a new leader's tenure in office-referred to in popular discourse as the 'honeymoon period'. In the former Soviet Union, new leaders were chosen by the existing ruling elite, not on the basis of regular elections, but rather upon the death of the previous incumbent leader.1 New policy initiatives would only come about slowly, once the new leader had managed over time to successfully accumulate power through personnel renewal, bringing into the top echelon of the party/state apparatus people that he could trust (Breslauer, 1982).2 At least this was the case after Stalin's death in 1953 through to the 1980s when Gorbachev came to power. The system became rigid, and was resistant to radical change due in part to the constraints on personnel turnover, leading to what became known as the 'stability of cadres' or what Gorbachev termed the 'period of stagnation' in Russian politics.3
