Contemporary Soviet Government.

There are already so many books on Soviet government that the submission of a new one requires an explanation. This is intended to be a textbook with a difference. The difference consists of it being written in a somewhat lop-sided manner in order to redress the balance of existing Western textbooks on Soviet government. It gives particular attention to Soviet political and legal theory. I do this because I believe that the Soviet theory of 'socialist democracy' is more than window dressing and that an understanding of this theory is necessary for a full appraisal of the Soviet political system. I believe that many of the current textbooks on Soviet politics are deficient in their discussion of the theoretical basis of Soviet politics. While most textbooks in use today give some attention to classical Marxism and early Leninism they seldom give much attention to contemporary Soviet political theory. Throughout my book I have sought to discuss the practice of Soviet government against the theory of Soviet government. I believe that it is more important to relate Soviet practice to Soviet theory than it is to criticize both from an alien standpoint of Western liberalism.
This book might be regarded as a Marxist account of Soviet politics but it is intended to be more than this. It represents an attempt at combining a Marxist approach to Soviet politics with the normal methods of Western political science. The framework of the analysis is essentially in the Western tradition but the main line of explanation is Marxist. This comes out in my early historical chapters as well as in my assessment of the nature of the Soviet state and of Soviet politics since the death of Stalin.
The origin of the book was a lecture course first presented to second year political science students at the University of Melbourne in 1959. In preparing a lecture course of upwards of twenty lectures on Soviet government I sought to avoid straight out repetition of material which I felt was treated adequately in existing textbooks. For this reason I avoided detailed discussion of the history of the revolution, the history of the CPSU, the Stalin period, the history of Soviet foreign policy, classical Marxism and early Leninism. I expected students to cover these topics on the basis of existing text books and periodical material.