And when Mikhail S. Gorbachev sought to save Soviet Communism by reforming it with the policies of glasnost and perestroika, he relied on the people's continuing belief in the permanence of the Soviet structure.
Not far from the cobbled streets of the hilly Old Town is a business center, where boxy Soviet structures have been supplanted by stylish buildings of a Scandinavian cast.
In need of a drink to contemplate the genius of the boy's sales strategy, I pass the Carpet Museum, a massive Soviet structure that looks like something from ancient Greece.
Mr. Sigal's life ran parallel to the lives of the millions of people in motion across the region — unsettled by the dismantling of the Soviet structure that had once given them meaning, fleeing wars, adopting new cities and seeking economic opportunity.
Quality and efficiency were not key elements in the Soviet structure.
The system employed 274 physicians (6 years of training) and 837 nurses (2 years of training) and feldshers (3 years of training, akin to a physician's assistant) The NK health system retains most of its Soviet structure.
Soviet society itself was structured top-down, and collective responsibility was most often an excuse to shirk accountability and do nothing at all.
Soviet Communism was a system structured for failure that had left a group of governments and citizens in need of political and cultural tools, as well as knowledge of markets and the institutions they require to function.
Sensing early that the system was doomed, he broke with the Soviet power structure in 1987, publicly criticised Mr Gorbachev, was disgraced and fired.
One nationalist journalist who has recently enjoyed a kind of renaissance is Aleksandr Prokhanov, who was so close to the old Soviet power structures that he was known as "the nightingale of the General Staff".
Kosygin recognized the seriousness of the problems facing the Soviet economic structure more than did Brezhnev and attempted to implement reforms in 1965 and 1968, but the Brezhnev leadership stopped them.
