A primer on political science is a revealing thing to hold up to the light, because it must tell the beginner where power lies. That is its subject. Fundamentals of Political Science was written for exactly that beginner — "those who are beginning to study Marxism-Leninism," in the words of its own opening page — and it sets out, lucidly and at length, to explain the state, class rule, democracy, the party, and the world political process. It is competent, orderly, and frequently accurate about the societies it does not have to live in. On the one society it exists to justify, it goes silent at precisely the point where a science of political power would have to begin. That silence is the most interesting thing in the book, and this introduction is chiefly about it.
Start with the object itself. The volume was prepared, its title page states, "by a group of authors headed by A. N. Yakovlev" and including S. I. Beglov, N. B. Bikkenin, K. N. Brutents, F. F. Petrenko, V. V. Zagladin and others, translated by David Fidlon and issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow. These are not academics working in isolation under constraint. They are the constraint. Zagladin was a deputy head of the International Department of the Central Committee; Brutents worked in the same department; Bikkenin belonged to the ideological apparatus and would later edit Kommunist, the Party's theoretical journal. The senior name is the one that carries the sharpest irony. A. N. Yakovlev, then among the most powerful figures in the CPSU's propaganda machinery, is the same Aleksandr Yakovlev who a decade later returned from a long ambassadorial posting to become Mikhail Gorbachev's closest ideological lieutenant — the intellectual architect of glasnost and perestroika, the man who did more than any other single official to dismantle the very ideological monopoly this book was written to defend. In 1975 he headed the team that told Soviet beginners the Party's leading role was the guarantee of everything. Within fifteen years he was arguing that it was the obstacle to everything. The book is a fossil of the apparatus in its unquestioned prime, signed by a man who lived long enough to disown it.
The date is worth fixing, because it is genuinely the date it looks like. Progress translations often lag their Russian originals by years, and several volumes in this series carry a jacket date that badly overstates their real vintage. Not this one. The latest events cited are the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet of 16 June 1974 and the world capitalist recession that "broke out in 1974 and is still continuing." The reference points are the 24th Party Congress of 1971, the fiftieth anniversary of the USSR in December 1972, and Brezhnev's speech marking it. There is no 25th Congress (February 1976) and no hint of the 1977 "Brezhnev" Constitution. So this is a text of 1974–75, and it argues from the high plateau of the Brezhnev era — the doctrine of "developed socialism," the theory that the USSR had passed beyond the transitional period into a stable, mature socialist society building communism at its own pace. Nothing in the book reads as retrospective. It is the confident self-portrait of a system that believed it had solved the problems of its own construction and had only to administer the results.
It helps to ask what such a book was for. This was a commissioned export primer, translated into the language of international circulation and aimed at students beginning Marxism-Leninism at home and sympathisers abroad — and its governing doctrine, "developed socialism," did specific political work in 1975. Under Khrushchev the Party Programme of 1961 had promised the material foundations of full communism "in the main" by 1980; the Brezhnev leadership quietly retired that deadline and put in its place the far more comfortable proposition that the USSR had already reached a stable, "mature" or "developed" stage of socialism — an achieved condition to be perfected and administered rather than a horizon to be raced toward. The book is the pedagogy of that settlement. Its recurring note is not revolutionary striving but consolidation: the economy managed, the nations merged, the class struggle at home essentially concluded, the state transformed into the peaceable "state of the whole people." A doctrine that declares the fundamental social questions already answered is, among other things, a doctrine that relieves its readers of the need to ask them. That is the political function of the theory this primer teaches, and it is inseparable from the analytical blindness examined below.
The doctrinal spine is orthodox and should be stated precisely, because the reflexive failure only shows up against an exact account of what the book claims. The Marxist-Leninist theory of the state runs as follows, and the primer transmits it faithfully: the state is not a neutral arbiter standing above society but an instrument of class rule, "an apparatus of coercion and an apparatus of administration with which it protects and upholds the existing order," equipped with "the army, courts and prisons." Every state is the organised power of one class over others. On this the book is entirely sound, and it is real Marx.
From this follows the theory of transition. The proletarian revolution smashes the bourgeois state and erects "a qualitatively new type of state—the dictatorship of the proletariat." The book is careful and correct about what this term does and does not mean in the classical texts: it is class rule by the majority, exercised in various forms — the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviets, the post-war People's Democracies — and its task is both to suppress the resistance of the dispossessed exploiters and to organise the building of the new society. So far this is a defensible reading of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Then comes the specifically Soviet innovation, and here the book states the doctrine that the rest of this introduction must test. Once the exploiting classes are gone and socialism has won "finally and irrevocably," the dictatorship of the proletariat "gradually develops into a socialist state of the entire people." The formula recurs like a refrain: the state that "arose as the dictatorship of the proletariat, became the state of the whole people, the political organisation of the people in which the leading role is played by the working class." This is the theoretical centrepiece of Brezhnev-era political science — the announcement that the Soviet state no longer represents a class dictatorship at all, having become the common instrument of a socially unified people.
Two further doctrines complete the frame. First, the withering away of the state: the book faithfully preserves the classical Marxist promise that under full communism the state as a special apparatus of coercion becomes unnecessary and dissolves into "communist social self-government." Second — and this is the load-bearing pillar of the whole structure — the leading role of the Communist Party. "Without a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Party to guide it," the book declares, "the working class cannot accomplish a socialist revolution and build socialist society." The Party is the vanguard, the teacher, the organiser; socialist democracy means "the participation of the masses in the administration of the state" under that guidance. The state belongs to the whole people; the Party leads the whole people; the two propositions are asserted side by side and never allowed to collide.
A science of political power is judged by its willingness to locate power — to say who actually decides, by what mechanism, and how the decision could be reversed. On any society but its own, this book does exactly that, and does it well. It dissects the "petty details of the suffrage" through which capitalist democracy excludes the poor; it names property qualifications, residence rules, and literacy tests, state by American state, that keep working people off the electoral rolls. It quotes Lenin sharply on how bourgeois democracy hides "restriction after restriction upon democracy" behind formal equality. This is genuine political analysis, and much of it is true.
Turn the same instrument on the USSR and it goes blind. The book's account of Soviet democracy rests on participation figures: "In June 1974, 99.98 per cent of the voters took part in the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet." It offers this as "convincing proof of the broad democratic rights exercised by Soviet people." But a near-unanimous turnout is evidence of nothing about the distribution of power unless the voters had a choice, and the book never once mentions the decisive fact of Soviet elections: that each seat carried a single candidate, nominated through Party-controlled channels, running unopposed. A political science that spends three paragraphs anatomising residence requirements in California and not one sentence on the single-candidate ballot at home is not analysing power. It is looking away from it on cue.
The same evasion governs the treatment of the apparatus. The book knows perfectly well that the selection and placement of leading personnel is where Soviet power is really exercised — it says so, describing how Party committees handle "the selection, placement and training of top personnel for the economy" and "promote to administrative positions people possessing the necessary political and managerial qualities." This is a plain-language description of the nomenklatura (the Party's confidential roster of appointments, the mechanism by which the apparatus staffed every position of consequence in the state and economy). The book describes the machine and withholds the word, and having described it, draws no conclusion from it. Where bureaucracy is admitted at all, it appears only as a defect of individuals: the 24th Congress "called for decisive actions against callous officials, bureaucrats and boors," people to be "exposed" one by one. Bureaucracy is a problem of bad manners, never a stratum, never a structure, never a distribution of power. The category that would let the book see itself is simply absent from its vocabulary.
Most revealing of all is what the book can theorise. It offers a genuine sociological account of why capitalist societies contain several workers' parties: "The existence of several political parties (and trade union organisations) of the working class is above all a result of its heterogeneous social composition," compounded by the way "the monopoly bourgeoisie bribes the small upper layer of the working class." So political pluralism has causes; it reflects the real complexity and stratification of a class. But the Soviet single party is never subjected to the same analysis. It is not explained; it is assumed — the natural and self-evident expression of a society that has achieved unity. The one-party state is the premise the political science is built to protect, and a premise cannot be examined by the science it founds.
This is where "the leading role of the Communist Party" does its real work. It is presented as an answer — the answer to how a classless people governs itself. In fact it is the device that forecloses the question. Ask who rules in the "state of the whole people," and the doctrine replies: the whole people, led by the working class, led by its vanguard, the Party. Each term hands the question to the next, and the last term — the Party apparatus — is exempted from any further asking. The book's own logic, applied consistently, points straight at that apparatus as the site of power; the book's own doctrine forbids it to look there. That is the reflexive failure of the whole genre, and in a primer whose declared subject is political power it is not a marginal blind spot. It is the hole where the centre should be.
None of this needed to wait for hindsight. The Marxist tradition the book claims had answered these arguments before they were made, and the sharpest answers come from the two authors the book most wants on its side and most cannot afford to read closely.
The first is Lenin. The book quotes him constantly and selectively. It cites The State and Revolution (1917) for the Party's mission of "leading the whole people to socialism," and it endorses "the withering away of the state" as a distant goal. But it silently drops the two constraints that give Lenin's theory its teeth. Lenin's proletarian state was to begin withering immediately — the more democratic it became, the less of a state it would be; here, on the contrary, "the development of Soviet society is accompanied by the strengthening of its political organisation, the Soviet state," the exact inversion of Lenin's expectation, presented without embarrassment. And Lenin's state was to be kept in the hands of the masses by a specific institutional mechanism: every official elected, paid a worker's wage, and subject to recall at any time. The book even quotes the principle — "All officials, all leading bodies, and all institutions of the Party are subject to election, are responsible to their constituents" — and preserves the recall clause too; but it confines the whole principle to inner-Party elections and never extends it to the state, whose officials answer to no comparable right of recall. The recallable official, the ceiling on official salaries, the armed people in place of a standing bureaucracy — the whole apparatus by which Lenin proposed to stop the state escaping popular control — has vanished from a book that invokes his name on almost every page. Lenin had warned, in the passage Trotsky would later throw back at the bureaucracy, against exactly the danger of state organs turning "from servants of society to lords over society." The primer describes that transformation as an accomplished and benign fact and calls it the state of the whole people.
The second and more devastating reply is Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), written when the doctrines this book repeats were new. The primer praises the 1936 Constitution as the document in which "the victory of socialism ... was reflected"; Trotsky devoted a chapter, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution," to that same document, and it reads as a point-by-point demolition of the argument this 1975 primer would still be making forty years later. On the elections the book celebrates, Trotsky wrote that the Soviet citizen "will have the right to choose their 'representatives' only from among candidates whom the central and local leaders present to them under the flag of the party," so that "politics is thus once for all declared the monopoly of an uncontrolled bureaucracy." On the very argument the primer makes about parties — that a unified society naturally has one — Trotsky had already answered Stalin's version of it: a society "incomparably more heterogeneous and complicated" than any class could furnish "adequate nourishing soil for several parties," and the one-party monopoly reflected not social unity but the political expropriation of the working class by the apparatus that ruled in its name. Where the primer sees the withering state, Trotsky saw its opposite — a swollen bureaucracy consuming an ever-larger share of the national product and defending its privileges; where the primer sees the state of the whole people, Trotsky saw a privileged stratum that had risen precisely by "freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian vanguard." One need not accept every line of Trotsky's analysis — the degenerated-workers'-state thesis was and remains contested within the Marxist tradition — to see that he had named, in 1936, the exact reality the 1975 primer is organised not to name. The book's category of the "state of the whole people" is the theoretical seal placed over the thing Trotsky called the Soviet Thermidor: the political rule of the bureaucracy.
It is worth adding, in fairness to the standard this series holds itself to, that the book's polemic against Trotskyism is conducted in the usual manner — by characterisation without citation. Trotsky is charged with "asserting that the victory of the proletarian revolution in the West was an essential condition for the victory of socialism in the USSR," a compressed and tendentious gloss on the theory of permanent revolution that the book condemns by name and never actually states, and never quotes. The reader is given the verdict and denied the evidence. That, too, is a way of foreclosing a question.
A reader told that everything here is worthless would learn nothing, and it would be false. Where the book transmits the classical materials rather than the apologetics built on them, it is often genuinely good, and a beginner could do worse than read it for those passages alone. Its exposition of historical materialism — the base and superstructure, the succession of socio-economic formations, the derivation of politics from class interest — is clear, economical and substantially accurate; the account of the state as an instrument of class rule is real Marxism, competently taught. Its critique of the formal character of bourgeois democracy is not propaganda but a serious point, and the Lenin it quotes on the "petty details of the suffrage" is Lenin at his most acute: universal suffrage can coexist with the systematic exclusion of the poor from real political life, and the twentieth century supplied ample confirmation. The book is right that there is no "democracy in general," that democracy always has a class content, and that formal equality before the law can mask deep material inequality of political power. The tragedy — and the reflexive comedy — of the volume is that it possesses every one of the analytical tools required to see its own society clearly, and is forbidden by its function to turn a single one of them inward.
This is not a peculiarity of one book but the house style of an entire shelf, and Fundamentals of Political Science should be read alongside its siblings in this series: V. Afanasyev's Scientific Communism (1967), V. Chkhikvadze's The Soviet Form of Popular Government (1972), Machulsky and Topornin's Socialism and Democracy (1974), and the companion Fundamentals volumes on political economy and scientific socialism. They share a division of intellectual labour and a common limit. Each can dissect the class content of a foreign state with real rigour, and each falls silent, in the same place and with the same doctrinal formula, when the analysis approaches home. Put them side by side and the pattern is unmistakable: a mature, self-confident political science, fluent in the anatomy of power everywhere except in the one country whose power it was commissioned to explain. The leading role of the Party was the answer these books were built to give. It was also the question they were built not to ask.