Institutions and Political Culture in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

The Soviet Union after the death of Stalin moved from totalitarianism to authoritarian rule. Even under Brezhnev the system was fairly stable, though it suffered from the immobile Soviet elites who liked to denounce the ‘social-democratization’ of other socialist countries, especially Hungary and Poland, but proved to be themselves ‘social-democratized’ (cf. Brown 2009) and did not dare to react with force against the new movements, as did China in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Beijing.