until his resignation on 26 December 1991 after the creation of a Common-
wealth of Independent States (CIS) which embraced 11 of the 15 former
Soviet republics, was a classic demonstration of the argument that a repressive
regime cannot relax slightly: there is no half-way house between effective
totalitarianismand genuine freedom. His commitment to the communist
party did not waver even after the attemptedcoup d’e ́tatagainst him in
August 1991. It will never be clear how much of the change in the last years of
the Soviet Union was really to his credit, because many argue that any leader,
faced with the economic and foreign policy situation of 1985, would have had
to act in much the same way. What is clear is that he was never in control either
of political forces or of strategy during those last years. His demise came
because actual conditions worsened to the point that Soviet citizens were
looking back on theBrezhnevera as ‘the golden years’, because he could not
persuade people desperate for some improvement in their material welfare to
accept the sacrifices necessary to achieve success for his reforms and, perhaps
above all, because he was loyal to the party which the mass of the population
had come to fear. However, that party never accepted that he was essentially
faithful to them, and he has had no part to play in the renewed political success
of the mildly reformed Communist Party in opposition.
Government
The term ‘government’ is a general one used to describe both the body that has
authority in a given unit—whether national, regional or local—and the whole
constitutional system. There are many different forms of government, such as
democracy, autocracy anddictatorship. The first systematic study and
classification of the methods of government was probably that undertaken
byAristotle, and since that time political scientists have been involved in
distinguishing the different features of government and politics. The word
plays a variety of roles in political language; the simple distinction between ‘the
government’ and ‘government’ in a sentence like ‘Government/the govern-
ment discriminates against gays’ is a good example. One version implicates a
current ruling group, the other asserts that any ruling group will discriminate.
In fact, to refer to ‘the government’ is only a common feature of English and
English-derived political systems—in American English, for example, the
word would be‘administration’, and no precise translation is easily available
for European polities. In the latter, the ‘government’ would be no more than
the political ministry; the more general sense of government is subsumed
under the concept of ‘The State’, itself hardly used in Anglo-American
analysis. The origin of the usage which, like so much in political theory stems
from classical Greek political thought, has to do with steering a ship, so is not,
Government