Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics. (book reviews)

Accounts of the political system of the USSR have alternated between emphasizing its routinized, bureaucratic character and considering it anarchic, potentially unstable, and prone to personal dictatorship. In the late 1970s, Western analysts became increasingly aware of the substantial decline in the regime's performance, because the enfeebled party leadership was increasingly hostage to the great bureaucracies that the regime had created.

In Red Sunset, Philip Roeder renews this line of argument. He finds that the regime grew stagnant because of the strength of the political ties ...

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