The Myth of the Strong Soviet State

Abstract

Studies of state-society relations continue to assume that the Soviet Union was the quintessential "strong" state, able to dominate a weak society at every stage of the policy process. Evidence gleanedjvm the former Soviet defense industg hauevec reveals that the Soviet state, at least since the Brezhnev era, had diflculty implementing some of its highest priority objectives. while the Soviet state may have possessed considerable despotic p w e c its infi.arnuturalpower was lacking in many areas. Soviet authorities never managed to construct policy levers that could consistently influence defense industrial managers to behave in the ways they desired