ABSTRACT
‘Political forces’ was a key concept used in our account of the emergence of the Stalinist political system. In this concluding summary over the first bloc of three chapters, which has comprised our presentation of the emergence of the Soviet system as a whole, we shall return to that concept, to use it as an instrument with which to integrate the three perspectives outlined in the respective chapters. Our approach shall in a sense be ‘dialectic’, i.e. we shall focus on the interplay between, on the one hand, such forces that were set in motion by certain actions taken by the Bolshevik leadership and, on the other, such policy measures that were in turn chosen by the leadership in order to deal with the former responses. In so doing, we shall recall the perspective of viewing policy as a series of ad hoc actions which only er post would be rationalized as elements of a premeditated long term strategy.
