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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
In July I was in the Soviet Union for two weeks as one of eight American political scientists who were guests of the Soviet Political Science Association. This meeting was a follow-up to one held two years earlier in which six Soviets had met with an American group in Williamsburg, Virginia. We learned a lot from our Soviet colleagues in that session, since two years into the Gorbachev glasnost era they felt free to argue strongly among themselves about the social and political roots of Stalinism, and to explain how Gorbachev was chosen by a Politburo still dominated formally by the Old Guard, people who would a few years later be referred to in discussions with Americans as “the previous regime.”
It is appropriate to speak of parliamentarianism in the Soviet Union. For, as I shall briefly try to show, what is evolving in Moscow is a Presidential-Congressional system, a government which if it can be institutionalized, constitutionalized, along the lines it is developing, will resemble the American. It is, of course, far away from that stage as yet.
* These meetings were arranged by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) as part of the activities of the U.S.-USSR Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Council of Learned Societies and the USSR Academy of Sciences, and were funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
1. He arranged for us to stay at the most sumptuous hotel I have ever been in, Oktiabrskaia, the hotel of the Central Committee. Some of us were assigned to four-room suites. Service was excellent. The food was plentiful and served immediately. Nothing remotely like it exists elsewhere in the country, except in one new hotel for wealthy western business people.
2. Two years ago, when visiting Washington, Raisa Gorbachev noticed Andropov in a group picture in Pamela Harriman's home. She paused, looked long at it, and, pointing to Andropov, said, “We owe him everything.”