ABSTRACT
Conventional thinking with regard to economic and political reforms in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union is “trapped” in a mindset which does not allow innovative ideas for social arrangements to be seriously considered. Sovietologists, for example, while they continue to re-examine what went wrong and why nobody was able to predict the undoing of the Soviet system, do not really address the underlying problems of the discipline.1 What is left out of this conversation amongst Sovietologists is perhaps more important than what is included-an examination of how the economic structure of socialism generated the political system of socialism.
