How do Soviet politicans rise to power? How are conflicting political interests brought together as policies are developed? Historians and political scientists have long been absorbed by these questions, yet none has systematically examined the crucial role played by patron-client relations. In Patronage and Politics in the USSR Professor John Willerton offers major new insights into the patronage networks that have dominated elite mobility, regime formation and governance in the Soviet Union for the past twenty-five years. Using the career details of over two thousand national and regional officials, John Willerton traces the patron-client relations underlying recruitment, mobility and policy-making.