ABSTRACT
As the twentieth century ended, it was difficult to remember how, for so much of the century, no country seemed so successfully to centralize political, social and economic control in the state as Soviet Russia. It had developed to a high degree, even before 1939, the dominance of a single party of devotees, the central direction of economy, the eradication of other foci of loyalty and the machinery of a police Terror. But it was a special case in more than its completeness. Whatever the illusions of monolithic doctrinal identity, the vagaries of its behaviour, the moral relativism of its official theory, the corruption of its rulers by power, the theoretical and moral justification of the Soviet state system was a belief in social progress which stemmed ultimately from the Enlightenment. However brutal their methods, and however blind Russian rulers may sometimes have been to the evil they did, or to the disjunction between their principles and their practice, they could never abandon the myths of rationality and progress as the Nazis were to do.
