It has been repeatedly pointed out that much of the legitimacy that the Soviet regime enjoyed was connected with the modest growth in the standards of living that have been a feature of Soviet society, especially after World War II and during the early portion of the Brezhnev period. The insignificant cost of housing, food and other basic necessities--whenever available and whatever low quality--guaranteed full employment and some possibilities for social mobility. In this sense it can be argued that the Soviet economy was largely responsive to political direction in the Stalin and post-Stalin periods up to 1985. However on a deeper level the Soviet system was about to become undone because it was based on a developmental model that appears to have been outmoded (Colton, "What Ails the Soviet System, pp. 13-19).
Notwithstanding all the horror associated with Stalinist industrialization; such as the creation of a large working class out of a sea of peasants, the occasionally artificial bloating of the educated and professional classes to staff a constantly growing bureaucratic apparatus and the institutionalization of a sophisticated system of privileges associated with the party apparatus and the military, to some extent the ideological promises of communism seemed to have been fulfilled (Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in the Soviet Union, pp. 51-103) In fact, it would be impossible to explain the stability and legitimacy of the Soviet system independent of this historical context whose main preconditions were the mobilization of immense and previously underutilized human resources.
It would also seem that the Soviet Union during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods up to 1985 was largely a somewhat unstable dictatorship constantly in need to recreate the basis of its own legitimacy. To be sure Bolshevik Party rule did begin as a dictatorship pledged to bring about a classless society. In the 1930s, however, in ...