The materials of the Soviet Interview Project, launched in 1979, offer a baseline against which to project the rapid and fundamental changes taking place in the USSR today. The essays presented here draw from the various SIP subprojects' evidence of the internal condition of the CPSU party during the "era of stagnation" and its role, influence, and impact on the operation of legal and economic institutions and state bureaucracies. As the interviews with emigres reveal, the power and prestige of the party in the pre-perestroika years was far weakers that Western analysis generally supposed, and its eclipse, if not inevitable or expected, was manifestly possible.