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This book analyses the central feature of communist societies in Eastern Europe: their complete subordination to a bureaucratic apparatus and effectively controls every aspect of social life. The evolution of bureaucracy in the East, its impact upon society and its complex networks of social control form the focus of this important study.

The "sovereign bureaucracy" is the central feature of the socialist systems of the East. Maria Hirszowicz traces its origins in Russia, its development under Stalin, and its changing forms in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe today. The book is further evidence of Western scholarship's gain from the exodus of talented scholars from the East, particularly from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Maria Hirszowicz

Maria Hirszowicz has spent the greater part of her life in Poland, first as a committed member of the Communist Party and later as a sympathetic but skeptical onlooker. Until 1968 she held various posts in the University of Warsaw and Lodz and from 1965 to 1968 she was Head of the Sociology of Organization section at Warsaw University.

Dr. Hirszowicz left Poland in 1968 and is now Lecturer in Industrial Sociology at the University of Reading. She is also author of “Industrial Sociology: An Introduction” (1982).