ABSTRACT
The striking institutional changes in the USSR and Russia after 1985 cannot be properly understood, unless one views them against the background of traditional political culture and, specifically, in light of the earlier experiences of political representation in Russian society. A sobor is a symbolic representative of the Church as a whole and, like it, is seen and expected to act as a mystically united entity. The crisis of the Soviet political culture and the breakdown of the Soviet state cannot be analysed separately from the history of the institutional reforms in the USSR during perestroika. The Soviet Union collapsed because the mechanisms of social integration that had hitherto secured the predominance of the centripetal over the centrifugal tendencies stopped working, indicating, to be sure, a deep crisis of the Soviet political culture. The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the failure of the attempt at institutional innovation made by previous leaders.
