ABSTRACT
The word ‘legitimacy’ has been interpreted and conceptualized in many different ways, involving a variety of problems and being discussed in different political contexts. If one starts the discussion with Sternberger’s general definition of legitimacy as ‘the foundation of such governmental power as is exercised both with a consciousness on the government’s part that it has the right to govern and with some recognition by the governed of that right’ (D.Sternberger 1968:244), then legitimation in communist states can be seen as the process of articulating the validity of the elite’s authority to govern and its efforts to acquire and to secure that validity in the mind both of itself and of the ruled. Elite self-legitimation and legitimation at the mass level are two distinct but related aspects of the legitimation process. The focus on the ruling elite makes sense in Soviet-type societies which were characterized by a centralized and hierarchically organized political structure with the Communist Party occupying a leading position in political, economic and social institutions.
