ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the Soviet-Russian instance may “fit” less well with democratic transition theory than some parts of emergent Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Poland. Latin America and southern Europe had it simpler in the sense that their however-flawed market economies gave shape to “ordering principles of the socio-economic system” that were not challenged in the political transition. The elements of the transition scenario that emerged in the later Mikhail Gorbachev period were more the kind that herald the failure of the liberalization project than the sort that mark the road toward democracy. Totalitarianism was consequently redefined from a description of the actual political system to a tendency that Leninist parties aspired to but were necessarily unable to realize in practice. A corporatism that emerges from the predominantly interunit dynamics, a kinder and gentler variety, is labeled “societal”; one that is born of the state’s intervention is “state” corporatism, the tougher type.
