Ideology and Power Politics

...it must at the same time ensure the ideological unity of the Communist "camp" and its own authority as its center...

...Moreover, there are vast parts of this ideological structure, such as the scholastic refinements of "dialectical materialism" or the labor theory of value, which in their nature are so remote from the practical matters to be decided that their intepretation cannot possibly affect policy decisions...

...The answer, I believe, is to be found by going hack to the original Marxian meaning of the term "Ideology"—as a distorted reflection of social reality in the consciousness of men, used as an instrument of struggle...

...They believe in violence, revolutionary and military, as one of the weapons of policy, but they do not believe in the inevitability of world war...

...Stalin's insistence on making the "leading role of the Soviet Union" an article of the international creed expressed not just the idiosyncrasies of a power-mad tyrant but his perception of one side of the dilemma—the risk that a recognition of the sovereign equality of other Communist states might loosen the solidarity of the "camp" in its dealings with the non-Communist world, and weaken the ideological authority of the Russian party leaders with ultimate repercussions on their position in the Soviet Union itself...

...yet because appeal to blind faith is not officially permitted, justification is needed in "rational" terms...

...Lenin, having barely seized power in Russia and looking forward to an early spreading of Communist revolution, could talk airily enough about the sovereign equality and fraternal solidarity of sovereign "socialist" states...

...In fact, an interpretation of the experience which overlooks that the Soviets have, for reasons of national self-interest, kept to the "self-enforcing" agreement on the demarcation line would be as seriously one-sided as one which overlooks that they have, for reasons of ideology or party interest, broken every agreement on "percentages" and free elections...

...After all, the peoples of Eastern Europe are still paying for the illusion of Western statesmen that the Soviet Union was a state like any other, pursuing its power interests without regard to ideology...

...but he added that the economic and administrative functions of the state •bureaucracy would henceforth be steadily reduced by decentralization and devolution, thus strengthening the organs of regional self government and of national autonomy within the various republics...

...But though aggravated by the impact of the temporary reconciliation with Yugoslavia and the near-revolutionary changes in Poland, the pressure for reform exists in Russia itself...

...But empirical "Realpolitik" without ideological preconceptions can exist as little as "empirical science" without categories and hypotheses based on theoretical speculation...

...What matters in our context is the different meaning attached by the Western and Communist leaders, in concluding these agreements, to the concept of "spheres of influence," and the consequences of this "misunderstanding...

...This central ideological difference, and not merely the psychological difference between Hitler and the Soviet leaders, explains why the latter are convinced that history is on their side and have no need to risk the existence of their regime in an attempt to hasten its final triumph...

...the post-war situation with its alignment of the Communist and Western powers in two openly hostile politico-military blocs merely gave plausibility to a world image which was inherent in Leninism from the beginning, but attracted little attention in the non-Communist world while the Communist "camp" was just an isolated fortress with scattered outposts...

...IN THE EARLY PERIOD of Stalin's rule, this was done by the forced collectivization of the Russian countryside...

...Nor has the doctrine disappeared with the post-Stalin recognition of the importance of the uncommitted, ex-colonial nations and of the tactical value of incorporating them in a "peace zone...

...To them, there could be no securely "friendly" government except a government run by a Communist party under their discipline...

...Again during World War II, Communists in the resistance movements and in the free Western countries were advised to practice the same combination of social moderation with the occupation of key positions as in China in the twenties and in Spain in the thirties, while military and political cooperation between "Soviet China" and Chiang Kai-shek was urged in the same spirit with considerable success...

...and above all in the difference between the traditional and the Communist concepts of "spheres of influence" as illuminated by the different interpretations of the Yalta agreements...

...By forcing Gomulka to condemn the Yugoslav heresy, to defend the execution of Nagy as an "internal Hungarian affair," and to consent to the publication of a Polish edition of a new policy-making international magazine edited by a Russian, Khrushchev has come close to the objective required by the logic of his one-party regime: the restoration of Soviet authority in international Communism as a precondition for unity in both foreign policy and ideological principles, based on some of the very doctrines he rashly threw overboard in 1953/6...

...yet in his recent Reith lectures as before, he insists that the specific ideological distortion of the Soviet leaders' image of the world, so far from being magically cured by such a return to diplomacy, has to be taken into account in judging which kind of agreements are possible and which are not...

...By the spring and summer of 1917, Khrushchev showed his awareness of the practical side of the problem: his dismantling of the economic ministries, breaking up the central economic bureaucracy and strengthening the power of the regional party secretaries, was another such revolutionary shake-up...

...he wanted no sovereign Communist allies, only satellites, and he got them in post-war Eastern Europe...

...Not only is it impossible for any group of practical politicians to base their decisions on an unvarying book of rules...

...All these are the foreign policy methods of a state sui generis—a one-party state enabled by its ideology to make use of a disciplined international movement organized for the struggle for power...

...The term "paranoia" is not used here, of course, in an attempt to explain the phenomenon in question as due to psychotic processes in either the leaders or the mass following of totalitarian parties, but merely to describe by a convenient psychological analogy the ideological mechanism of projection which ascribes the regime's drive for unlimited power to an imagined all-enemy...

...Stalin, having determined after the failure of short-term revolutionary hopes to concentarte on "socialism in a single country," came to regard international Communism as a mere tool of Soviet power, and to believe that revolutionary victories without the backing of Soviet arms were neither possible nor desirable...

...The Communist version of these basic beliefs is superior to the Nazi version in one vital respect...

...hence the fact that the wartime allies, in drawing a military line of demarcation from North to South across the center of Europe, should have tried to agree about their post-war spheres of influence is by itself proof of realistic foresight rather than of a morally reprehensible cynicism...

...But as opposed to this partial failure, there was the success of full acceptance of the new dispensation by the Chinese Communists as well as the satellites, and the setting up of a new, elaborate international liaison machinery within the secretariat of the Soviet Communist Central Committee as the effective bearer of the renewed claim to international authority...

...On the face of it, this seems to reduce the role of ideology to that of ingenious trickery, obscuring rather than reflecting the underlying social realities...

...This is not, of course, a conditio sine qua non, as is shown by the examples of Russo-Turkish cooperation after the First World War, of the Stalin-Hitler pact and perhaps also by present Soviet cooperation with Egypt...

...His successors disavowed him because his Yugoslav policy had failed, and because they perceived the other side of the dilemma—that rigid insistence on Soviet hegemony might break up the unity of the "camp" even more quickly, and might in particular lead to open conflict with China...

...hence also the indignant protests of the Western powers that the Soviets had broken the agreements on free elections and democratic development, and the equally indignant Soviet retort that they were only installing "friendly governments" as agreed, that theirs was the truly "democratic" system, and that they had kept scrupulously to the essential agreement on the military demarcation line...

...The second step, also taken by Stalin in 1937, at the height of the great blood purge, consisted in proclaiming the doctrine that the "class struggle" in the Soviet Union was getting more acute as the "construction of socialism" advanced, because the "enemies" were getting more desperate...

...they merely had planned to make the satellite regimes more viable by reducing Soviet economic exploitation and detailed administrative interference while maintaining full policy control...

...But while to President Roosevelt and Mr...

...We may designate them as the elements of "chiliasm," of collective paranoia, and of the representative fiction...

...The independent victories of the Yugoslav Communists at the end of the war and of the Chinese Communists in 1949 nevertheless posed the problem he had sought to avoid and thus required a revision of policy and ideology...

...Stalin's final ideological pronouncement, contained in his last pamphlet on "Economic Problems of Socialism," consisted in mapping out a program for further revolutionary transformation of Soviet society, with the taking over of kolkhoz property by the state as its central element...

...Nobody in the Western world has argued more powerfully against the "moralizing" approach to foreign policy and for a return to the give and take of diplomacy based on real interests than George Kennan...

...The essential point is that in the nature of totalitarianism, any independent force—both inside and outside the state—is regarded as ultimately hostile: the concept of "two camps" and that of "unlimited aims" are two sides of the same phenomenon...

...Their new program with its ideological justification for maintaining bloc-free independence received its final form in anticipation of that attack, and there is no need to ascribe the renewed public clash which followed its publication to the mysterious machinations of Khrushchev's alleged inner-party rivals or to any other hypothetical factors: the clash became inevitable because continued Yugoslav independence could only be justified with arguments which, once admitted as legitimate by the Soviets, would have entitled every satellite party to follow the "revisionist" road of Imre Nagy towards autonomy and neutrality—or, in Bolshevik language, to "treason...

...in the manner in which they sought to create additional "guarantees" for the reliability of those allies by the use of local Communist parties wherever this was possible...

...We shall moreover expect ideological changes and disputes within the Communist "camp" to offer us clues to the conflicts and crises—the "contradictions"—which are inseparable from the evolution of this, as of any other, type of society...

...but it is less generally realized that they are only the reverse side of Soviet determination to "strengthen" such temporary alliances if possible by the use of party ties...

...Secondly, in a world where nationalism remains one of the strongest forces, its internationalist doctrine is bound to come into conflict with the interests of a major Communist power, or with the desire of smaller Communist states for autonomy...

...Each also claims to represent the true will of the people—the volonte generale—independent of whether the people actually support it, and argues that any sacrifice may be demanded from the individual and the group for the good of the people and the defeat of its devilish enemies...

...Because the appeal of Communism is directed to all mankind, it can be linked with the further doctrine of the "inevitable victory" of the rising forces of socialism over an imperialist enemy disintegrating under the impact of its own internal contradictions...

...The appearance or disappearance of one of these "ideological variables" may be a valuable indicator of the kind of pressures which are being exerted on the regime by the growth of Soviet society, and of the manner in which the leaders are trying to maintain control—now by partly giving in to these pressures and seeking to canalize them, now by a sharp frontal counter-attack...

...by deliberately neglecting the ideological aspect, we have lost sight of all the real difficulties and contradictions which remain inherent in the situation...

...That Great Powers are in a position to exert a measure of influence over their smaller neighbours, and that they use this influence in one way or another to increase as far as possible their security against attack by other Great Powers, is an experience general in the politics of sovereign states and unlikely to be superseded by any amount of declamation about "equality of rights...

...THE RESULT OF THESE inherent weaknesses of Communist ideology is that the doctrines dealing with the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the party's role as a `vanguard" embodying the "true" class consciousness, "democratic centralism," "proletarian-internationalism" and the "leading role of the Soviet Union" become focal points of ideological crises and targets of "revisionist" attack whenever events reveal the underlying contradictions in a particularly striking way...

...The principle of "proletarian internationalism"—i.e...

...To admit that in Hungary the workers rose against a Communist government would call into question the basic identification between the ruling party and the working class—the fiction of the "dictatorship of the proletariat...

...In the above "commonsense" account, not only the facts of the final phase are wrong...

...in the Spanish case the Communists, aided by the Republicans' dependence on Soviet supplies, ended in virtual control of the Republic on the eve of its final collapse...

...it follows that progress is no monopoly of Communist states, and that alliances have no ultimate ideological meaning...

...The Yugoslays can reject the doctrine because they admit the possibility of "roads to socialism" other than Communist party dictatorship—"reformist" roads for advanced industrial countries with parliamentary traditions, "national revolutionary" roads for ex-colonial countries...

...unity in foreign policy—had been recognized by all participants, including for the first time in many years the Yugoslays, before the conference started...

...Clearly it would be folly to expect that we could predict Soviet policy merely from an exegetic study of the Marxist-Leninist canon...

...In the end, the Yugoslovs refused both, while the Polish Communists accepted only with mental reservations, insisting in practice on their right to decide themselves on the application of the "common principles" in their country...

...Churchill these spheres of influence meant what they had traditionally meant in the relations of sovereign states—a gradual shading over from the influence of one power or group of powers to that of the others, which might even be loosely (and somewhat lightheartedly) described in terms of "percentages of influence," ranging from 50/50 to 90/10, they meant something completely different to the Soviets in the framework of their ideology—the ideology of the single-party state...

...it remains one of the basic ideas of the Moscow twelveparty declaration of last November, and one of the fundamental subjects of ideological disagreement between the Soviets and the Yugoslav Communists...

...This was the ideological justification of the purge itself and the veiled indication that it amounted to yet another revolution from above, though Stalin refrained this time from trying to define the "enemies" in social terms...

...To let Yugoslav propaganda for "workers' management" pass unchallenged would confirm the implication that Soviet factories, having no workers' councils with similar rights, are managed not in the interests of the workers but of of the privileged bureaucracy...

...But that is all...

...At the same time, he quietly took steps to strengthen the control of the central party secretariat—his own seat of power—over the republican and regional party organs, thus following the old Leninist principle that the fiction of national autonomy in the Soviets must be balanced by the fact of centralized discipline within the ruling party...

...The partial failure, therefore, did not indicate that the Soviets would be content with less than they had demanded, but that the conflict continued...

...Because the appeal of racialism is in its nature restricted to a small portion of humanity, the Nazi's goal of world domination could not possibly have been attained without a series of wars, preferably surprise attacks launched against isolated opponents...

...Hence the consistent Soviet effort, beginning even before the end of the European war, to impose total control by Communist parties in every country on their side of the demarcation line—an effort that was abandoned only in Finland and Eastern Austria but was finally successful everywhere else...

...But within this unchanging framework, considerable variations in detail have taken place in the history of the Soviet Union...

...In fact, what was going on was both a mass liquidation of the bearers of the party's older revolutionary tradition, considered unsuited to the tasks of a bureaucratic state party, and of the most confident and independent-minded elements of the new privileged bureaucracy, culminating in the transformation of the party's social and ideological composition by the mass incorporation of the surviving frightened bureaucrats...

...there is any amount of historical evidence that the rules have been altered again and again ex post to suit the practical decisions...

...In the one case in which, not full sovereignty, but at least effective internal autonomy was in fact granted—the case of Poland—this happened against the wish of the Soviet leaders as a result of open local defiance in a critical international situation...

...That, too, is reflected in the variables of the official ideology...

...II If we now turn to inter-state and inter-party relations within the Communist camp, we seem at first sight to have entered an area where ideology is adapted quite unceremoniously to the changing requirements of practical politics...

...Any clear formulation of the question will show that the two extreme answers which seem prima facie conceivable—that the ideology provides a ready-made "book of rules" to be looked up in any situation, or that response to reality takes place without any reference to ideology—are both meaningless nonsense...

...Whether in industry or agriculture, in the control of literature or in relations with the satellite states, the basic needs of the regime have remained the same—but they can no longer be assured in the same way...

...Among the most revealing of these variables are Soviet doctrines about the economic role of the state, and about the "class struggle" within Soviet society...

...THE PECULIAR FORMS taken by Soviet suspicion of their wartime allies are too well known to need elaboration here...

...the prosperous peasants—the "kulaks"—took the place of the former landowners and capitalists as the "enemy class" that had to be liquidated...

...The question is, of course, legitimate where this doctrine impinges on actual Soviet foreign policy, given the undoubted facts that actual Soviet aims, and the risks incurred in their pursuit, are limited at any given moment, that the Soviets are perfectly capable of concluding "temporary" alliances with "bourgeois," "imperialist," or even "fascist" states, and that most other alliances in this impermanent world are proving to be "temporary" as well, for quite non-ideological reasons...

...By this, Khrushchev gave the master clue to the puzzle of the purpose of the speech: it was a "peace offering" to the leading strata of the regime, in party machine, army and management alike, a response to their pressure for greater personal security...

...But by this concession, Khrushchev reopened the problem which Stalin's practice and his doctrine had been intended to solve— that of preserving and justifying the party dictatorship by periodic major shake-ups of society...

...no "sphere of influence" but a sphere of Communist rule...

...THE FIRST MAJOR BREACH in these Stalinist ideological innovations was made by Khrushchev in his "secret speech" at the 20th Congress...

...to say that the other East European participants in the Moscow 12-party meeting of last November, or for that matter the participants from Outer Mongolia and North Korea, represented "governments of sovereign countries" would be to mistake the fancies of Communist propaganda for political facts...

...Summing up the achievement in 1937, Stalin wrote in his "Short Course" of party history that collectivization had been a second revolution, but a revolution carried out from above, by state power, "with the help of the masses," not just by the masses from below...

...In fact, the Soviet campaign against the international danger of "revisionist" disruption was steadily stepped up—and copiously illustrated by the warning example of Nagy—in the months which preceded the new break with Yugoslavia and the execution of the former Hungarian premier, parallel with the efforts to undermine the autonomy of Gomulka's Polish leadership and to break their resistance to a revival of the Cominform under a new name...

...We shall expect, then, that Communist ideology will have an effective influence on the policy decisions of the Soviet leaders when, and only when, it expresses the needs of self-preservation of the party regime...

...and that it can only be achieved by an irreconcilable struggle against a single, omnipresent and multiform enemy —whether "Monopoly Capitalism" or "World Jewry"—of whom every particular opponent of the totalitarian power is but a manifestation...

...We know today that the Yugoslav leaders were warned by Khrushchev at the time that if they persisted in their refusal to join the "camp"—i.e., to make their support of Soviet policy a matter of unconditional discipline instead of free and revocable choice—they would be attacked...

...It is precisely this continuous need for the pretense of rational argument—the awkward heritage of Communism's origin in revolutionary Western democracy—which has led to the far greater elaboration of its ideology compared to that of "irrationalist" right-wing totalitarianism, and gives its constant interpretation a so much greater importance in preserving the cohesion of the party regime...

...diplomatic support for the Nationalist advance to the North was supplemented by the agreement on the Chinese Communist Party's affiliation to the Kuomintang, enabling them to occupy influential political and military positions—an attempt no less serious for its ultimate total failure in 1927...

...Because the Soviet Union is both a Great Power and a Single-Party-State tied to an international ideology, it cannot be content either to oppress and exploit other Communist states or to come to terms with them on a basis of expediency...

...In other words, the "two camps" doctrine is the Communist version of what we have called the element of "collective paranoia" in totalitarian ideology—its need for a single, all-embracing enemy who is assumed to pull the wires of every resistance to the party's power...

...To keep silent when the Poles proudly report the improvement of their agricultural yields since the dissolution of most of their collective farms would encourage Soviet peasants to dream of similar reforms...

...Assuming, then, that the Soviet leaders' ideology is relevant to their conduct, the real problem remains to discover which are the actual operative elements in it, and in what way they affect policy decisions...

...II Let us now apply this approach to the doctrine of the "two camps" in world affairs...

...But by going to Peking and Belgrade and admitting the "mistakes" of Stalin's "Great Russian Chauvinism" (as well as the "mistakes" of his internal terrorist regime), they precipitated the very crisis of authority which he had feared...

...The real purpose of that conference was to use the spectacular successes of the Soviet Union as a military and economic power in order to restore the damaged, but still indispensable ideological authority of its leaders in international Communism...

...But wherever Communist parties were tolerated by the partner, Soviet foreign policy has assigned them a vital role...

...but, so the argument would run, the stubborn old man had lost the necessary flexibility, precipitated a needless quarrel with the Yugoslays and generally prevented the necessary adjustment while he lived...

...Earlier, we mentioned some of the basic tenets which seem inseparably bound up with the preservation and justification of a Communist one-party regime...

...But the Communist version of totalitarian ideology also suffers from some weaknesses and contradictions from which the Nazi and Fascist versions are free...

...In the thirties, a variant of the same "dual policy" was developed in the combination of Soviet support for the League and "collective security" with the Popular Front policies in France and Spain, in which the economic and social demands of the Communists were soft-pedalled for the sake of influencing government foreign policy...

...In the twenties, Stalin's Chinese policy was openly run in double harness...

...A large section of Western opinion has concluded from this experience that agreements with the Soviets are useless in principle, because "you cannot trust them...

...A ready-made book of rules for any and every situation, an unvarying road-map to the goal of Communism which the Soviet leaders must predictably follow cannot possibly exist, both because the situations to be met by them are not sufficiently predictable, and because no government that behaved in so calculable a manner could conceivably retain power...

...First he repeated, in his solemn speech on the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, his rejection of Stalin's doctrine of the ever-sharpening class struggle and the ever-new enemies, thus indicating his wish to avoid a return to Stalin's terroristic methods even while following his social recipe of permanent revolution...

...The fruitful approach, in our view, consists neither in ignoring Communist ideology as an irrelevant disguise, nor in accepting it at its face value and treating it as a subject for exegesis, but in using it as an indicator of those specific drives and problems that spring from the specific structure of Soviet society—an enciphered continuous self-disclosure whose cipher can be broken by sociological analysis...

...In the first place, its vision of the Millennium has much more definitely utopian features—the classless society, the end of exploitation of man by man, the withering away of the state—which make awkward yardsticks for the real achievements of Communist states...

...IV Ultimately, the need to fight "revisionism" in Eastern Europe, even at the price of renewed difficulties with both Yugoslavia and Poland, arises from the need to strengthen the ideological defenses of the party regime in Russia itself...

...Apart from his factual disclosures about Stalin's crimes, he denounced Stalin's doctrine of sharpening of the class struggle with the advance of Socialist construction as dangerous nonsense, calculated to lead to the mutual slaughter of loyal Communists after the real class enemy had long been liquidated...

...The underlying reality is that a revolutionary party dictatorship, once it has carried out its original program and by this has contributed to the emergence of a new privileged class, is bound to disappear sooner or later—to fall victim to a "Thermidor"unless it prevents the new upper class from consolidating its position by periodically shaking up the social structure again and again in a "permanent revolution from above...

...Thus the same purpose of maintaining the social dynamism of the party dictatorship and justifying its necessity, which Stalin achieved by exalting the economic role of the state, is pursued by Khrushchev by means of the reverse device of claiming that the state's economic functions have begun to "wither away...

...if continued dictatorship is to be justified, new goals of social transformation must be set and new "enemies" discovered...

...yet these are the very doctrines which the regime cannot renounce because they are the basic rationalizations of its own desire for self-preservation...

...The Soviets still assert that while there can be different roads to Communist power, and different ways of using it in detail, there is no way of achieving socialism except by the "dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by its vanguard...

...Thirdly, by rejecting the "Fuehrer principle" and claiming to be "democratic," Communist ideology makes the realities of party dictatorship and centralistic discipline more difficult to justify...

...I am not here concerned with the political controversy on whether this division, as first laid down in the wartime agreements at Teheran and Yalta, was inevitable in the light of the military situation as seen at the time, or whether the Western statesmen committed an avoidable mistake of disastrous dimensions...

...Reviving this formula for the first time since it was buried by Stalin, Khrushchev explained that the military and police apparatus of the state would have to be maintained while a hostile capitalist world existed outside...

...His heirs, however, hastened to correct his mistakes and to put interCommunist relations back on a basis of sovereign equality and diplomatic give-and-take, not only for China and Yugoslavia but, after some trial and error, for all Communist states—or did they...

...The ideological groundwork was thus laid for assigning to the state a function of continuous economic transformation from above, not just a once for-all revolutionary function...

...How, then, are we to distinguish those elements of Soviet ideology which are truly operative politically from those which are merely traditional scholastic ballast, linked to them by the historical accident of the authorship of the Founding Fathers...

...I should suggest that the difference manifested itself in the peculiar suspicion with which the Soviets treated their "imperialist" allies even at the height of the war, and particularly sought to isolate them from their own population...

...it follows that tactical agreements with semisocialist neutrals are not different in kind from the wartime alliance with the Western "imperialists," or the pre-war pact with Hitler— maneuvers which are useful in dividing the forces of the "class enemy" but remain subordinate to the fundamental division of the world into the Communists versus The Rest...

...I propose as a hypothesis that the operative parts of the ideology are those which are indispensable for maintaining and justifying this state of affairs: "Marxism-Leninism" matters in as much as it expresses, in an ideologically distorted form, the logic of one-party-rule...

...Each totalitarian regime justifies its power and its crimes by the certainty that its final victory will bring about the Millennium—whether defined as the final triumph of Communism or of the Master Race...

...of a plurality of truly autonomous Communist movements, to be buried once for all...

...The ideological expression of this problem, according to classical Leninist doctrine, is that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" should gradually "wither away" after it has succeeded in destroying the old ruling classes...

...Confronted with the same constellation of interests and pressures, the liberal statesman will in many cases choose a different course of action from the conservative—and the totalitarian Communist's choice will often be different from that of either...

...no satisfactory percentage short of 100...

...By the fiction of democracy and rationality, the morale of the party cadres has been made dependent on the appearance of ideological consistency...

...There are a few interconnected ideological features which are common to all the totalitarian regimes of our century—whether of the nationalist-fascist or of the Communist variety...

...To put up with the freedom of artistic, literary and philosophical discussion in Poland and Yugoslavia would strengthen the demands of Soviet writers and scholars for similar freedom...

...Yet in fact, the need for a change in the argument reflects a change in the underlying social situation—the resistance against a return to naked terrorism, the growing desire for a lessening of state pressure and a greater scope for local activity...

...The fundamental, distinctive social reality of the Soviet Union is that it is ruled by the bureaucracy of a single, centralized and disciplined party, which wields a monopoly of political, economic and spiritual power and permits no independent groupings of any kind...

...The crucial example to illustrate the role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy, however, remains the history of the post-war division of Europe...

...They may be used in inner-party arguments to justify what has been decided on other grounds...

...now both subordination to Soviet leadership and the need for doctrinal unity—a joint struggle against "revisionism" on the basis of common principles— were to be accepted and the heresy of "polycentrism," i.e...

...Yet there is no need to base future policy on either of two one-sided views, equally refuted by ex perience...

...This has not, of course, been invented by Zhdanov...

...How far are the political decisions of the Soviet leaders influenced by their belief in an official ideology—and how far are they empirical responses to objective conflcts of interest, to real situations of power, which are only expressed in ideological terms for purposes or justification...

...Then, he proceeded to develop his own alternative justification for maintaining the party dictatorship—which consists in boldly identifying the strengthening of party control with the "withering away of the state" predicted by Lenin...

...NOTE: The above is a revised version of an article which appeared originally in Problems of Communism...

...EVEN KHRUSHCHEV and his associates, however, never intended to grant effective sovereign equality to the Communist satellite regimes of Eastern Europe which in contrast to Yugoslavia and China had come about exclusively by the pressure of Soviet power...

...It would thus be wrong to conclude this account without trying to indicate, however sketchily, how ideological changes can be used as aids in interpreting this process...