The vigorous debate about Soviet ideology that took place in the 1960s was followed by a reaction in which many of the participants who were not Marxists abandoned a discussion in terms of ideology for one in terms of political culture. The impulse was given not so much by the difficulties of pinning down a highly volatile concept: this was a time when people were beginning to seek explanations for the evident differences between societies ruled by communist parties. Accustomed to a discourse in which ideology as presented as one of the factors that linked those societies, commentators on the communist scene, not unnaturally, looked to culture as a factor of differentation.