ABSTRACT
All substantial questions about Soviet politics must be classified in ideological terms. This is done with concepts and categories that suggest abstract and purely theoretical expositions. But in reality the most explosive political questions involving the very foundations of the entire Soviet socialist system or existing conditions are frequently discussed in ideological code. One such discussion has been going on since 1981 and concerns the peculiarity and quality of contradictions in the socialist system as it actually exists. The reader less conversant with Marxist-Leninist ideology ought to know in advance that a distinction is made between "antagonistic" and "nonantagonistic" contradictions. Antagonistic contradictions are attributed to the capitalist system as motor forces of revolutionary change. Nonantagonistic contradictions contain, as it were, the kinetic energy of socioeconomic progress and as such are to be encouraged methodically in socialist society.
