ABSTRACT
Soviet bureaucracy has excited comment and criticism from 1918 onwards. Max Weber and Karl Kautsky drew attention to it in 1918 to be quickly followed by successive left oppositional groups within the Communist Party itself. The culmination of this line of internal criticism was Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed . Criticism of Soviet bureaucracy and bureaucratism has also been a persistent element in official Soviet comment on the Soviet political system at least since 1920. * None of these critics described the Soviet system as purely bureaucratic. This more comprehensive definition is to be found only in the writings of neo-Trotskyists and some Western political scientists. This chapter will be concerned both with modern attempts at analysing the Soviet system in terms of bureaucracy, and the limits of that approach, and with the phenomenon of Soviet bureaucracy. It will also include a discussion of some other post-totalitarian models for the analysis of Soviet politics.
