Stalinism and the Mono-Organizational Society

The Soviet Union may be termed a mono-organizational society, since nearly all social activities are run by hierarchies of appointed officials under the direction of a single overall command. Stalinism was tyranny exercised under the conditions of a mono-organizational society, or the mono-organizational society as run by a tyrant. Despite the vast scope of the mono-organizational system there are important areas of human action in the USSR which the system seeks only to regulate without, however, directly managing them. The fully fledged mono-organizational society, in fact, crystallized simultaneously with the establishment of Stalin's dictatorship. There is no justification for assuming that, even without the Bolsheviks' coming to power, Russia would necessarily have been the country to pioneer the mono-organizational society. For the oligarchical structure of power both made for and rested on a relatively dispersed and pluralistic pattern of decision-making and a level of sub-system autonomy that was incompatible with a mono-organizational system.