ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin's postrevolutionary synthesis of revolutionary rhetoric, traditional values, and totalitarian methods, his amalgam of socialism, nationalism, and bureaucracy, remains the basis of the Soviet political system. The logic of the revolutionary process manifested in all these historical situations suggests that a similar final step is due to take place sooner or later in Soviet Russia. In general, no revolutionary society has rested indefinitely in the grip of its counterrevolutionary sequel. For Russia itself the first opportunity for the moderate revolutionary revival was the death of Stalin. While politically the Russian historical legacy impedes reform, economically the same legacy makes reform imperative. The prospects for a reform that would consummate the moderate revolutionary revival in Russia are further limited by historical circumstances. While the Soviet economy in the sectors noted suffers from revolutionary prematurity, in the industrial sector it suffers from the political anachronism of the Russian tradition of centralism, reinstituted in an extreme form in the Stalinist command economy.
