ABSTRACT
Each of the four major leaders of the Soviet period prior to Iurii Andropov put his own stamp on the Soviet political system. Each one, by the manner in which he built his power and authority, by the policies he launched and the people he raised up about him, has defined his own era. A number of thoughtful studies have attempted to show that such a stress on the "machine politics" of Soviet leadership was always an exaggeration to begin with and has become less and less valid with time. They argue that the range of deployable resources in Soviet politics was never so narrow as Brzezinski and Huntington portrayed it, and that it has expanded since. The fullest expression of what were presumably Andropov's own views came in the article published under his name in Kommunist in February 1983, on the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx's death.
