"Who rules in Eastern Europe?" became a fundamental question for western
researchers and other observers after communist regimes were established
in the region, and it gained further importance as state socialism
expanded into Central Europe after the Second World War. A political
order which, according to Leninist theory of the state and to subsequent
Stalinist political practice, was primarily a highly centralised and
repressive power organisation, directed, as if it were natural,
researchers attention towards the highest echelon of office holders in
party and state. Extreme centralisation of power in these regimes was
consequently linked to an elitist approach to analysing them from a
distant viewpoint. It is one of the many paradoxes of state socialism,
that a social and political order which presumptuously claimed to be the
final destination of historical development and to be based on
deterministic laws of social evolution, which claimed an egalitarian
nature and denied the significance of the individual, was per- ceived
through the idiosyncrasies, rivalries and personal traits of its rulers.
The largest part of these societies remained in grey obscurity,
onlyoccasion- ally revealing bits of valid information about a social
life distant from the centres of power. It is debatable whether this
top-headedness of western re- search into communist societies created a
completely distorted picture of re- ality, however, it certainly
contributed to an overestimation of the stability of these regimes, an
underestimation of their factual diversity and a misjudge- ment of the
extent of conflicts and cleavages dividing them.
