ABSTRACT
Faced with the task of assessing China’s likely role in the closing years of this century and on into the next millennium, one is reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous reference to the Soviet Union as ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Yet, at least in retrospect, the Stalinist system seems relatively easy to understand.1 The Communist Party controlled virtually every aspect of society, and Stalin controlled the Party. Party domination was exercised over almost every facet of political, economic and cultural life. Ethnic minorities, while given broad de jure powers to run their own affairs and even secede from the Union, were in fact tightly controlled by the central Party apparatus through a combination of tactics ranging from cooptation to severe repression. Revolutionary rhetoric and some erratic decisions notwithstanding, foreign policy was generally guided by traditional notions of power politics serving the perceived national interest.
