ABSTRACT
The issue of continuity and change in ideology and political culture although seemingly at some remove from the everyday world of political decision making, is of critical importance for the success or failure of the project on which Mikhail Gorbachev has embarked in the second half of the 1980s. Gorbachev observed that “the theoretical concepts of socialism” had remained “in many respects at the level of the 1930s-1940s,” when the tasks facing society were entirely different from those it faced today. The change to glasnost’ is one of the most striking features of the contemporary Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s adoption of the term democratization in common use in the Soviet Union, raises still broader issues. Soviet politicians, theorists, and propagandists have indeed been anathematizing the concept ever since it entered their consciousness in 1968, when it was adopted by leading Party intellectuals in Czechoslovakia.
