What were the operational advantages and disadvantages of the Soviet one-party, one-ideology order?
The Soviet Union has been described as a ‘mono-organizational’ society. In such a ‘mono-organisational society’[1], the regime is primarily concerned not with regulating activities, as would be the case in a ‘rational-legal’[2] order, but with directing them. The main business of government is not to improve the framework of rules within which autonomously motivated individuals and groups can best operate, but to determine the social activity of individuals and groups by setting their tasks. In such a situation it is the role of the party to operate a ‘goal-rational’ order. This does not mean that the ‘goal’, whether it be winning the civil war, appeasing the peasantry, consolidating the five year plans, are part and parcel of a uni-linear ‘ideology’ but are all components within the same framework – all policies susceptible to the political language of ‘building socialism’. Here the operation in hand is to direct the ‘goal-rational’ system. Here it will be important to understand the
