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Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev: An Analytical Study

Robert M. Cutler

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This article surveys existing concepts of dissent and opposition and clarifies their implications for the definition of the Soviet political system. It defines the Soviet political system to comprise elite, regime, and community sectors; specifies the political roles composing each sector; and considers intersectoral relationships as the structure of the Soviet political system. Three major structural changes, defined in terms of such interrelationships and specified in terms of the actual policies themselves, subsume the policies introduced during the Khrushchev period. These policies (and the structural changes they signify) are continually related to their effects on various modalities of political dissent, thereby showing how particular structural changes gave rise to particular dissident issues within particular political sectors. Its key predictions for the post-Brezhnev era were borne out by events. There are 67 explanatory and bibliographical notes incorporating sources and studies in English and French, as well as two Tables. Outline:
  1. The Analytical Framework
  2. The Transformations in Soviet Political Structure under Khrushchev
  3. Conclusion
  4. Prospect: Soviet Politics and the Future of Soviet Dissent
Suggested citation for this webpage:
Robert M. Cutler, "Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev: An Analytical Study" [full text of article in Comparative Politics, 13, no. 1 (October 1980): 15–35], available at <http://www.robertcutler.org/download/html/ar80cpx.html>, accessed 25 April 2024.

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It is well known that many political reforms were introduced in the U.S.S.R. between 1953 and 1964. It is sometimes forgotten that Soviet dissent antedates the Brezhnev–Kosygin era and in fact burst forth after Stalin's death. To explain in a systematic fashion the dynamic of reform and dissent under Khrushchev is the goal of this article.

1. The Analytical Framework

1.1. Dissent and opposition

To write that there has been controversy over the definition of "dissent" and "opposition" would be an understatement. A brief review of the meanings attached to these concepts, with particular reference to Marxist-Leninist systems, is therefore worthwhile.

Ghita Ionescu once suggested that opposition in "sovereign oppositionless states" was reduced to "inferior forms" because it was not institutionalized. He called those forms "political checks" and "political dissent"—the former "originating from the conflicts of interest" and the latter "originating from the conflicts of values."[1] Studying opposition in East Europe, H. Gordon Skilling developed a fourfold typology: (1) "integral opposition" involved a total rejection of the political system; (2) "factional opposition" referred to elite infighting; (3) "fundamental opposition" entailed a stand against certain basic policies of the regime and signalled partial rejection of the political system; and (4) "specific opposition" concerned loyal, legitimacy-supportive disagreement with particular policies.[2]

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Frederick Barghoorn defined opposition in the Soviet Union as "the persistent—and from the official point of view—objectionable advocacy of policies differing from or contrary to those which the dominant group in the supreme CPSU control and decision making bodies … adopt,"[3] and discerned three forms of it: (1) "factional," connoting internecine battles among the highest policymakers; (2) "sectoral," meaning loyal interest group politicking; and (3) "subversive," referring to activity that promotes the radical change in, or abolition of, the established order.[4] This last form of opposition appears for Barghoorn to be equivalent to dissent, which he has called "the deliberate and purposive behavior, manifested in the articulation, orally or in writing of opinions critical of, or protesting against, established ideological, cultural, and political norms and arrangements, and the authorities who maintain the existing regime and enforce its rules and policies."[5]

Rudolf Tökés has noted that both Skilling's and Barghoorn's definitions are presented as landmarks on a "seamless continuum" from "harmless and loyal disagreements about the regime's policies ('specific' and 'sectoral' opposition) … to the end of the spectrum labelled 'integral' and 'subversive' opposition."[6] Tökés does not suggest that the "continuum" may itself be multidimensional; he proceeds, however, to remark:

What neither [Skilling nor Barghoorn] appears to consider is the basic epistemological difference between "within-system" and "system-rejective" kinds of opposition. The first is aimed at effecting changes in the system and the second at change of the system. The difference between the two is in fact a difference between reform and revolution as methods of effecting a political change.[7]

Trying to distinguish opposition from dissent, Tökés once suggested that those in opposition "must have the 'will to power' and must be prepared to act," whereas dissenters "have no direct designs on power."[8] Later, however, he recognized that opposition is a more encompassing category, in fact subsuming dissent.[9] Dissent, Tökés concluded, could be "viewed as a type of within-system opposition loyal to some aspects of the status quo … and critical of others," that is, "as a form of interest articulation with a normative content."[10] He also took the peculiar, but peculiarly operationalizable, view that even system-rejective ideologies in the Soviet Union are not oppositional because a "lack of resources prevents them from qualifying as revolutionary in any practical sense."[11]

There are two problems with Tökés's conceptualization of dissent: first, it is not clearly different from Skilling's notion of fundamental opposition, although it is more rigorous; and second, it risks becoming a universally inclusive category; nevertheless, Tökés's summary of Soviet dissent is the best analytical description available. Dissent, he writes, is "a culturally conditioned political reform movement seeking to ameliorate and ultimately to eliminate the

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perceived illegitimacy of the posttotalitarian Communist-party leadership's authoritarian rule into authoritative domination through (1) structural, administrative, and political reforms; (2) ideological purification ant cultural modernization; and (3) the replacement of scientifically unverifiable normative referents with empirical (nonideological) criteria as political guidelines and developmental success indicators."[12] Tökés has further determined, through content analysis of samizdat documents, that all dissident currents

have a set of shared interests in advocating reforms in the areas of political democracy, nationality rights, socialist equality [read: legality] and human rights. These are supplemented by and, in certain instances, subordinated to demands by specific groups focusing on "constituency-specific" grievances such as religious persecution, violations of artistic freedoms, and critical arguments about economic problems and the quality of life in the USSR.[13]

Tökés's definition of dissent accords very well with Connor's view of dissent as "both product and symptom of the confrontation of two phenomena in the contemporary Soviet system—on the one hand, the structural complexity of a society at a rather high level of development; and, on the other, the persistence of a centralist-command mode of integrating the increasingly differentiated segments of that society."[14] But let us give this insight additional rigor.

1.2. Political sectors

Let us posit three sectors in the Soviet political system: the elite, the regime, and the community.[15] Each sector is a set of roles; collectively, the three sectors exhaust the Soviet political system. However, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, for individuals who occupy more than one role may occupy them in different sectors. The first task is to specify which roles comprise each sector.

The regime sector is both the most difficult to specify and the most crucial to the analysis thus, it is probably best to begin there. Two ideas from Gaetano Mosca pertain. The first is the distinction between upper and lower levels of the elite: "Below the highest stratum of the ruling class there is always … another that is more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country [and without which] any sort of social organization would be impossible." The second is that this lower-level elite is a bridge between the core decision makers and the rest of society.[16] Mosca's lower-level elite is the regime sector. To make this assertion both credible and applicable, we must examine its implications for the analysis of the Soviet political system.

John A. Armstrong, in his study of the Ukrainian bureaucratic elite, identifies obkomburo members as the "middle-level elite" of the union republic. That would seem to end our search for the all-union lower-level elite; but Armstrong limits his sample to party generalists, the apparatchiki.[17] That may have made sense twenty years ago, but we cannot stop there today. Any study of

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the Soviet system that is based on the bureaucratic model must account, as Hough has written, not only for policy execution but also for policy formulation.[18] The specification of the regime sector must not be limited to policy-execution roles, as might be inferred from Mosca.

In practice, the political roles that compose the regime sector may be determined by positional analysis. Although Gwen Moore Bellisfield's sociometric approach[19] cannot be applied experimentally to the Soviet case, it suggests the analytical separation of the core decision makers—the "power elite"—from the various specialized groups—the different "issue elites." That distinction in turn permits the positional specification of the regime sector of the Soviet political system. The specialist issue elites fill the policy-formulating roles in the regime sector, and the all-union lower-level power elite is the policy-executing complement. These two sets of roles may, but need not, overlap in the same persons.

Let us now specify positionally the political roles that compose the regime scoter, taking the lower-level power elite first. The basic all-union lower-level executive unit is the oblast; the primary executive body of the oblast is the obkomburo, the object of Armstrong's study. Philip D. Stewart's research on the Stalingrad oblast between 1954 and 1962 tells us not only who the obkomburo members are but also what their relative potential influence is at obkom plenums. Ranking consistently high in relative potential influence were: the first secretaries of the obkom, of the gorkom, and of the komsomol; the chairmen of the obispolkom, of the trade union council, ant of the sovnarkhoz (this last now anachronistic); the obkom secretaries for agriculture, for ideology, for cadres, and for industry; the editor of the regional edition of Pravda; and the chief of the oblast KGB. Slightly lower in influence were the various obispolkom vice-chairmen, followed by the directors of the various local heavy_industry concerns. At the bottom were the first secretaries of the various raikoms and the chairman of the gorispolkom. The ensemble of these roles provides the positional specification of the policy-executing component of the regime sector.[20]

Previous research on Soviet "interest groups" simplifies the task of specifying positionally the policy-formulating component of the regime sector. It will suffice here to validate the seven occupational categories that Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths include in their survey: the party apparatchiki, the security police, the military, the industrial managers, the economists, the writers, and the jurists.[21] The security police and the industrial managers are already represented in theca obkomburos in policy-executing roles. Milton Lodge's independent study concerns every Skilling-Griffiths group (except for the apparatchiki generalists, a special case), which does not have such corporate representation in the obkomburos.[22] This confirms the validity of the categories in the Skilling-Griffiths survey. Therefore, Lodge's groups are the

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sets of specialists that we should add to the obkomburo members in order to complete the positional inventory of the "Soviet regime."[23]

Specifying positionally the elite and community sectors is now quite easy. The elite sector corresponds to Mosca's notion of the "upper level elite": it comprises the Central Committee of the CPSU, including its Secretariat. The community sector comprises all political roles not subsumed under the definition of the elite and regime sectors.

The ensemble of relationships among these three sectors are a structure.[24] Under the totalitarian conditions associated with Stalin, intersectoral relationships were characterized by pervasive controls downward through the sectoral hierarchy and by absence of spontaneity upward. After Stalin's death, that totalitarian model became inadequate to describe accurately the structure of the Soviet political system. A number of reforms were introduced between 1953 and 1964, many but not all of them by Khrushchev in his successful attempt to gain power and eventually unsuccessful attempt to retain it. If those reforms can be described in terms of the relationships among the elite, regime, and community sectors, then the effects of those reforms on the structure of the Soviet political system can be specified analytically.

Three structural transformations may in fact be discerned: (1) decreases in the elite's coercion both of the community, mediated by the regime, and of the regime directly; (2) attempts by the elite, mediated by the regime, to induce the community to conform both with norms of participation and obligation and with norms of cultural identity, all newly prescribed and having political implications; and (3) a differentiation of roles within both the elite and the regime sectors, leading to a multiplication of the number of political actors occupying roles in them. Each of these transformations comprises a set of policies initiated over a continuous interval of time, and the three intervals are mutually exclusive. Taken together, furthermore, these three time periods collectively exhaust the 1953–64 era. We may therefore periodize Khrushchev's tenure at the head of the Party according to them.

2. The Transformations in Soviet Political Structure under Khrushchev

2.1. Decrease in coercion

This structural transformation, which may be assigned the dates 1953–56 for analytical purposes, had basically two manifestations: the unchaining of the artistic temperament and the subordination of State Security to the Party. The former question involved how much rein the elite would permit to the creative intelligentsia, whose roles are subsumed under the regime and community sectors.[25] The latter move was played out exclusively within the elite, but other sectors also experienced its effects. The literary Thaw came in two qualitatively distinct waves, one in 1953 and one in 1956; between them fell developments regarding the political police. It is instructive to analyze these events chronologically.

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In retrospect, the initial permissiveness concerning artistic expression appears a concomitant of Malenkov's ascendance, because this entailed the decline of Zhdanov's cultural hegemony. Although Zhdanov died in 1948, he "continued to be praised and the anniversary of his death was celebrated in the ensuing years …. In 1953," however, "the anniversaries of Zhdanov's death, and of his cultural decrees, in August and September, were ignored by Pravda for the first time."[26] Currents of artistic freedom had begun to percolate through the unions of the creative intelligentsia earlier, but it was not until October 1953 that the first phase of the Thaw was really under way, A year later, at the Second Congress of the Writers' Union in December 1954, the definition of "socialist realism" was modified to suggest that the Zhdanovist doctrines, if not renounced, would at least be less dogmatically applied.

In response to the demands of rank-and-file (i.e., community-sector) writers, their leaders (members of the regime sector) thus sanctioned a degree of artistic freedom.[27] Since the highest political authorities were still preoccupied with the fluid situation of intra-elite rivalry that followed Stalin's death, the writers' demands "to write about life in human terms" seemed hardly threatening. So the liberalization proceeded with only literary purport, concerning only "the substitution of human beings for automata and human conflicts and dilemmas for the mindless opposition of Soviet heroism and bourgeois tyranny."[28]

The death of Beria, like a sacrifice, consecrated a covenant among Stalin's heirs to the effect that none of them should use violence as a political resource against the others (in contrast to practices in Stalin's heyday).[29] This taming of State Security was followed by a campaign to restore socialist legality, signalling "the end both of mass terrorism and of prosecutions of officials for honest failures."[30] In analytical terms, therefore, it meant (1) an incipient decrease in the coercion of the community sector by the regime and (2) a further decrease in the coercion of the regime sector by the elite.

What were the results of this structural transformation? Relaxed controls from the top down promoted spontaneity from the bottom up. When issues of socialist legality were raised within the community sector by outright prisoners' revolts, the authorities responded with amnesties and case reviews that eventually almost liquidated the camp empire of the MVD.[31] Administrative, bureaucratic, and procedural reforms, not the least of which was the abolition of summary courts called troikas, "transformed the mood and temper" of Soviet citizens.[32] These reforms in regime-community relations were initiated by the elite in response to demands by members of the community sector, who were encouraged to participate "creatively" in their implementation.[33] This encouragement intensified the demands for further reforms.

Those reforms had effects in the artistic sphere as well. In the late summer of 1956 came the second phase of the Thaw, now concerning "social and, within limits, political criticism."[34] After Khrushchev's speech at the Twentieth Party

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Congress, some writers went so far as to advocate institutional changes in the organization of party/state control over the theater, arguing that the idea that " it is possible to attain success in art by instructions, orders, decrees, and resolutions" derived from Stalin's personality cult.[35]

The Party did not respond directly to such demands, but it did expand further the range of permissible literary and artistic themes, in response (1) to continued pressure from below after 1953 and (2) to a recognition that Soviet culture had to be reformed.[36]

To summarize, the main effect of the general decrease in coercion throughout the Soviet political system was the eruption of socialist legality and artistic freedoms as issues around which dissent, as defined, aggregated. Two other issues, propelled into the political arena by the general decrease in coercion, became full-fledged focal points for the aggregation of dissent only under conditions created by the second structural transformation in the political system. These issues were nationality rights and religious autonomy. It is worthwhile to indicate briefly some factors contributing to their incipience during the period 1953–56.

Symptoms of virulent nationalism appeared after Stalin's death even within the precincts of the Party, as a result of the appointment of members of native ethnic groups to secrctaryships in a number of non-Russian republics and oblasts. These appointments are associated with Beria's attempts to gain support within the Party and were rescinded only after Khrushchev had consolidated his own power.[37] The religious movement had been allowed some latitude under Stalin, but it came under increasing restrictions after his death. Moreover, the ranks of its adherents seemed to increase after the Twentieth Congress in 1956 as some Party members, disillusioned by Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin, turned from the icon of the state to that of the church.

2.2 Enforcement of conformity

Decreased coercion led to demands that threatened the legitimacy of the political system. In particular, the hierarchical nature of controls seemed under attack from below. In these conditions the authorities sought to inculcate, in the community sector, values designed to reinforce the legitimacy of the system's erstwhile structure. At the same time, Khrushchev sought to secure his own position as primus inter pares by harnessing, with his populism, that same loyalty of the community. These operations were not unrelated. They had two facets: first, the regulation of culture within the community sector; and second, the expansion and regulation of political participation of the community sector. In both cases, the elite's instrument for realizing its goal was the regime sector.

The attempt to regulate the cultural norms of the community took the form of three campaigns: the New Soviet Man campaign, an associated Russification campaign highlighted by the educational reforms of 1958–1959, and a series of antireligious drives. The first two together exacerbated the community− and

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regime-sector nationalism already recrudescent thanks to Beria's nationality policy with respect to lower-level Party appointments in non-Russian republics. The Russification campaign also fomented Russian nationalism, bolstering the growing sentiment against restrictions on the Russian Orthodox church. In particular, Russian nationalism fueled demands that the separation of the church and the Soviet state be observed, as established on paper, in consonance with socialist legality. In this way the issues around which dissent aggregated began in practice to become interrelated. The task of containing the protest became correspondingly more difficult.[38]

The second facet of the attempt to reinforce the legitimacy of the political system, and that of the elite's position in it, coincided with a manifestation of Khrushchev's populism. It comprised initiatives for the routinization of legal procedures and for the expansion of participation in them; as such, it was not without contradictions. The intent was, on the one hand, to institutionalize the functions of the judiciary in the regime sector and, on the other hand, to promote increased participation in judicial affairs by the members of the community. Both these initiatives were animated by "new socialist legality," but they differed in their aims, in their effects, and in the reactions they elicited

The routinizing aspect of the judicial reforms is embodied in twelve texts—a sort of codification of socialist legality—dated December 25, 1958.[39] The popularizing aspect is fairly wall expressed in A.N. Shelepin's speech of February 4, 1959, to the Twenty-first Party Congress, where he emphasized the role of the comrades' courts and of the druzhinniki (a volunteer militia for the control of drunkenness, hooliganism, and the like).[40] These attempts at popularization were on the whole opposed by Soviet lawyers and judges, who considered them extrasystemic controls deleterious to socialist legality. At the same time, higher-ranking lawyers and judges and professors of law as well—all occupying roles in the regime sector—fought in the name of socialist legality to increase their own influence in the formulation of legal codes.[41] That the initiatives for popularization were implemented as successfully as they were attests both to Khrushchev's narodnichestvo (populism) and to his political primacy.

The various campaigns in the name of socialist legality added fuel to two old fires: one stoked by non-Russian nationalists who wanted their union republics to exercise the constitutional right of secession from the U.S.S.R.,[42] the other by the new and old religionists who publicized the violations of law committed in the antireligious campaigns. Khrushchev's creation of the regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy) promoted Russian and non-Russian nationalism, and the resulting "localism" (mestnichestvo) eventually wrecked the economic reform. In ways such as this, the effects of reforms initiated by the political leadership fell at cross-purposes with their own intentions. As that occurred, the concerns of persons who found themselves to be dissidents became more and

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more clearly interdependent. Bociurkiw, for example, has vividly described the evolution of that interdependence in the case of Russian nationalist demands for the observance of the formal separation of church and state:

The decline in the capacity of the regime to terrorize the public into blind obedience to arbitrary commands, the progressive erosion of the official ideology, and the greater sensitivity of the Soviet leadership to foreign criticism, as well as the slow emergence of a domestic public opinion—all this was bound to affect the attitudes and expectations of at least the younger elements of the clergy and believers whose past had not been compromised either by "counter-revolutionary" associations or by embarrassing "deals" with the Stalinist authorities. It was from these strata, as well u from the older opponents of Soviet church policy released from concentration camps during the fifties, that movement of protest emerged within the Russian Orthodox Church and the Evangelical Christian Baptists which ultimately challenged the established notion of church-state relations in the USSR.[43]

2.3. Differentiation of roles

From the late 1950s on, and especially rapidly in the early 1960s, the number of roles increased significantly within both the elite and the regime sectors. The multiplication of roles in the elite sector resulted from (1) the co-optation of technical experts into the highest councils as political decision makers and (2) organizational reforms initiated by Khrushchev, such as the creation of high-level bureaus and special committees. The internal differentiation of the regime sector resulted from (1) the co-optation of technical experts into advisory roles in political decision making and (2) organizational reforms initiated by Khrushchev, such as the bifurcation of the Party into industrial and agricultural branches.

The systematic co-optation of technical experts into political decision-making occurred within elite and regime sectors alike. It was perhaps most noticeable with respect to issues of economic organization and resource allocation. The lines of debate regarding resource allocation were at the time primarily functional (e.g., the interests of the military and heavy industry bureaucracies vs. those of consumer goods and light industry bureaucracies); later, however, the geographic cleavages (e.g., Siberia vs. the European U.S.S.R.) became evident.[44] Experts in other policy areas were also co-opted into policy-setting roles in their respective fields.[45]

The influence of the technical intelligentsia qua occupants of elite roles was not limited to making policy decisions. Nor was their influence qua occupants of regime roles limited to advising the decision makers. Professional groups also had occasion to dissent, qua occupants of regime roles, by fighting against the implementation of policy after it had been formulated.[46] Their power in this regard has grown as the regime-sector predominance of Party-generalist ap-

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paratchiki, having no special area of technical competence (e.g., economic, engineering, or agricultural training), has declined.[47]

Organizational reforms under Khrushchev were many. Often simply designs by which he hoped to consolidate his control of the Party apparatus, they nevertheless produced a differentiation of roles in both the elite and regime sectors. With respect to the former, Khrushchev began by creating the Bureau of the Central Committee for the RFSFR in 1956 after the adjournment of the Twentieth Party Congress. A more significant reform, however, was his 1962 scheme for restructuring the central apparatus. This project "called for the creation of a rather complicated superstructure of special 'boards' and 'commissions' which would watch over the work of the various departments of the central apparatus." Ostensibly only two such bureaus of the Central Committee were to be established (one for agriculture and one for industry, in correspondence with the generalized Party bifurcation), but in the end six such boards were created.[48] Of these only the Ideological Commission, headed by Il'ichev, and the Party-State Control Committee, headed by Shelepin, were given much publicity.[49]

Of Khrushchev's major reforms that multiplied roles in the regime sector, two were organizational and one was related to recruitment. The two organizational reforms were the economic decentralization in 1957, which resulted in the creation of the sovnarkhoz system, and the bifurcation in 1962, which split the Party at many levels into agricultural and industrial sectors.[50] The recruitment reform was the policy of "renovation" (obnovlenie) of the elected bodies of the Party, initiated in 1961. Although the aim of this last reform was to get new blood into the apparatus, especially at the lower levels, one side effect was to multiply the number of positions, and that of persons holding them. Moreover, it seems that many lower-ranking Party secretaries escaped the operation of this rule, simply by finding new positions in different organizations,[51] such as Khrushchev's new district-level Party commissions.[52]

The two issues of dissent catalyzed by the ensemble of these developments were developmental rationality and political democracy. Claims for developmental rationality—i.e., for the "rational" allocation of resources to promote economic development—turned into codes for the advocacy of particular resource allocation or economic reorganization issues.

By diminishing or removing the penalties for economic heterodoxy [starting in the mid-1950s], the party leadership invited opinion group activity. This activity has been slow in developing but, by the mid-1960s, economists generally felt free to participate in economic debates within poorly specified boundaries of ideological legitimacy.[53]

This relative freedom of debate also spread to other policy areas, including criminology, sociology, and foreign relations.[54]

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Claims for political democracy during this period were not identical with those of the democratic movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under Khrushchev, such advocacy was limited to those segments of the elite and regime sectors in which policy specialists challenged the Party generalists' monopoly on decision-making. Such claims nevertheless shared with the later democratic movement a protest against the monistic justification of unrestricted power in the hands of self-appointed agents.

Claims for political democracy during this period were not identical with those of the democratic movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under Khrushchev, such advocacy was limited to those segments of the elite and regime sectors in which policy specialists challenged the Party generalists' monopoly on decision-making. Such claims nevertheless shared with the later democratic movement a protest against the monistic justification of unrestricted power in the hands of self-appointed agents.

3. Conclusion

3.1. Political analysis of Soviet dissent

As a result of decreases in the elite's coercion of the regime and in the regime's coercion of the community between 1953 and 1956, artistic freedoms and socialist legality erupted as issue areas, largely within the community sector. Some of those sentiments were aggregated in various institutional forums and were amplified there by members of the regime sector who occupied leading roles in those institutions.

In response to this development, the elite instituted policies (1956–1960/61) designed to instill values, among the members of the community, that would induce them to uphold the legitimacy of the system and of its erstwhile structure. Khrushchev identified himself with some of those reforms in order to promote his own personal legitimacy among the community. During this period, however, the community's response to those very policies reinforced the dissident trends. In particular, campaigns on behalf of "new socialist legality" exacerbated and broadened protests within the community sector. The issue areas of nationality rights and religious autonomy erupted, further expanding the range of dissident interests.

The elite thereupon began (1959/60–1964) to reform its own relations with the regime sector and even tried to alter the nature of the regime. This was attempted by introducing policies—some of which, again, Khrushchev sponsored personally in order to aggrandize his power—that would internally differentiate the elite and the regime sectors, increasing the number of roles within them. The main results of those developments for Soviet dissent were that (l) developmental rationality increased in salience as a dissident issue area within the regime sector and (2) in that sector there surfaced a bargaining ethos—especially in questions of resource allocation—that facilitated the diffusion of political authority.

These interactive events are represented statically in Table 1. Its format does not capture all the subtleties discussed above; nor does that discussion even capture all the historic idiosyncrasies of the development of Soviet dissent between 1953 and 1964. The distinction, for instance, between specialist policymakers and specialist policy-advisors is not so clear in reality as it is in theory. Likewise, it is impossible to attribute with certainty demands for

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Table 1. Structural Transformations of the Soviet Political System and Their Associated Issue-Areas of Dissent, 1953–1964.
 
Period1953–19561956–1960/611959/60–1964
Structural transformationDecrease in elite's coercion of regime and of community through regimeElite attempt to integrate community into regime and inculcate regime norms among communityInternal differentiation of the elite and regime
Policies composing the transformationSubordination of State Security
 
Literary "Thaw"
"New Soviet Man" campaign
 
Russification policies, especially in educational sphere
 
Anti-religious drives
 
"New Socialist Legality" reforms, including creation of community-level volunteer forces
Co-optation (and sometimes creation) of trained technical cadres for purpose of using specialized knowledge in policy making
 
Organizational reforms, including Party bifurcation and creation of high-level committees and of sovnarkhozy
Resulting shared-interest issuesSocialist legality / human rightsNationality rightsPolitical democracy
Resulting constituency-specific issuesArtistic freedomsReligious autonomyDevelopmental rationality

 
political democracy to such specialists. Further, such issues as nationality rights certainly antedate Stalin's death. These details are sacrificed to analytical parsimony in the hope that insights more generally applicable may be gained, though also in the belief that history is not falsified by their omission.

Table 2 sacrifices further detail and substance to parsimony and schematization. Compared to Table 1, it is a more dynamic, but also cruder, representation of the evolution of Soviet dissent between 1953 and 1964. Table 2 provides "snapshots" of the flow of information (upward) and coercion (downward) between hierarchically adjacent sectors. Some of the assignments can be disputed, and some are to a degree "judgment calls"; regardless, Table 2 summarizes much of the preceding discussion into an analytical Gestalt. Moreover, it begins to suggest the interactive nature of dissent. In particular, it suggests the inference that any particular transformation in the political structure actually affects the whole range of dissident issues. If that is so, then the transformations are not mutually independent, since the policies composing each of them respond to changes in the articulation of dissent. The schema is, however, rather abstract. It is therefore appropriate to relate this theoretical representation back to the reality from which it was constructed. In the process, some conclusions may be drawn.

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Table 2. Dynamic Portrait of the Evolution of Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev.
 
 SHARED-INTEREST ISSUESCONSTITUENCY-SPECIFIC ISSUES
Year Socialist legality / human rights Nationality rights Political democracyArtistic freedomsReligious autonomy Developmental rationality
1953
 STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION I (1953–1956)
1956++−/0+
 STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION II (1956–1959/60)
1960+/0(+)0/+(+)0
 STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION III (1960/61–1964)
19640/−+/0(+)(+)0/+

Legend to Table 2
+Uncontrolled articulation
(+)Controlled or contained articulation
0Standoff between articulation and control
0/−Standoff moving from 0 to −
Absence of articulation

We began by assuming, for heuristic purposes, that the totalitarian model accurately represented the Soviet political system under Stalin. Then:

1. Spontaneous articulation of interests upward from the community to the regime and from the regime to the elite became possible under conditions of the first transformation in this political system.

The sentiments expressed generally originated in the community sector, rather than in the regime sector. In some cases, however, those communications were intercepted by the regime sector, which filtered and amplified them. In the language of functionalist systems theory:

2. Institutions that originally were intended to facilitate the flow of "coercion" down from the elite, through the regime, to the community—institutions thus having a measure of legitimacy for the elite—functioned to aggregate certain types of dissent and propel it further up the sectoral hierarchy to the elite's attention. Such institutions were characteristically home to specific occupational groups.

Dissident political demands that received this kind of airing catalyzed their adherents into sustained political activity. For example, the writers—to use Almond's terminology—had access, as an institutional group, to political resources that enabled them to function as an associational group more successfully than other groups could. Supporters of demands for nationality rights constituted one of those other groups: once Khrushchev had removed the ethnically conscious local Party secretaries whom Beria had promoted, advo-

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cates of nationality rights had no politically legitimate nor any institutionally secure forum from which to articulate their demands.

With the second transformation of the political system, community-sector dissent ceased meeting mere passive obstruction and began to encounter purposeful resistance and conscious coercion from the regime sector, through those same institutions. That, for instance, is precisely how state organs to control the church affected the dissident issue of religious autonomy, which had begun to percolate through them. We might, then, conclude that:

3. Dissident activity in those institutions is easier for the authorities to control than activity outside those institutions.

It is worth noting, however, that community-sector participation in legitimated institutions[55] can also be intentionally expanded by decisions made on high. That is what happened with respect to some socialist legality issues (e.g., the druzhinniki), and it happened despite the misgivings of a fair number of occupants of regime-sector roles in those institutions (judges and procurators who believed the reforms hampered them).

With the third transformation, dissent articulated by the community sector became less potent while that expressed from the regime sector appeared to reach a modus vivendi with the controls exercised downward by the elite. The contrast between the evolution of artistic freedom and religious autonomy issues, on the one hand, and developmental rationality, on the other, exemplifies this trend. To generalize:

4. The issue areas aggregated in those institutions tend, under conditions of coercion exercised from above, to lose what shared-interest quality they have and to become more constituency-specific.

That process can transmute the very nature of the demands, as when the nationality rights issue, during the 1950s, ceased being explicitly "political" and became instead "cultural." And when cultural dissent among Great Russians found the form of demands for religious autonomy, the existence of legitimate political institutions governing relations between the Soviet state and the Orthodox church breached the union between those constiuency-specific demands and other, shared-interest "freedom-to-practice" demands. Thus:

5. That process of aggregation, which narrows the scope of the dissent expressed, tends to cut off from access to legitimate political resources those tendencies of dissident articulation that are based on shared interests among members of the community sector.

For after the elite had "attempted to silence the voices of discontent by relaxing antireligious pressures on 'legal' churchmen," it could proceed "to tighten legal restrictions on religious activities, especially [on those of] the less institutional, more elusive sectarians."[56]

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3.2. Soviet dissent and political analysis

Work by Herbert Kelman suggests that the patterns of political dissent analyzed here are manifestations, in one system, of more universal processes. He has described six different "patterns of personal involvement in the national system," defined by three system-level requirements for political integration (conformity, consolidation, and mobilization) and two individual-level sources of attachment or loyalty to the system (sentimental and instrumental. The three "system-level requirements" that Kelman describes bear strong kinship to the three structural transformations in the Soviet political system specified in this article. Moreover, shared-interest dissident issues—prevalent within the community sector—seem to reflect miscarriages of what Kelman calls "sentimental system-attachment," whereas constituency-specific issues—predominant in regime-sector dissent—tend to be animated by incomplete "instrumental system-attachment." In this perspective, each of the six issues finding dissident articulation represents a response to the failure of one of the three dimensions of systems integration, animated by one of the two modalities of individual attachment to the system.[57]

Kelman's remarks strengthen the conclusion that Soviet dissent is symptomatic of a political bind of the Soviet system: more specifically, a double bind of the regime sector. If Connor has written that "[Soviet] political culture links the bureaucratic elite and the 'masses' more closely than it links the dissidents to either,"[58] this is at least as true of the regime sector as of the dissidents. Like its Tsarist forebear, Soviet political culture leaves little independence to the regime sector, which has gained real importance only since 1953. Yet hardly is the regime sector born when thrust upon it are the obligations of mediating between an elite and a community, which traditionally communicate little if at all in the format that it, the regime, discovers it has the responsibility to facilitate.

Regime-community relations were permitted a measure of autonomy so that the community might consider the system in general, the post-1953 elite in particular, and even Khrushchev personally, politically legitimate in Stalin's absence. To accomplish this end, the attitude that the regime sector was legitimate in and of itself had first to be cultivated among the community. Yet while this was and is not possible unless the regime responds to the community's claims, which it is, moreover, unaccustomed to address directly, still the regime was, and continues to be, regarded instrumentally by the elite, which thereby not only restricts the regime' s ability to address those claims constructively but also opposes the claims of the regime itself qua bureaucracy.

The categories used in this article describe well the types of dissent found in Marxist-Leninist systems generally. However, since the discussion here—and the definition of dissent in particular—is specific to those systems, generalizations beyond them must be made with caution. A study, using the framework outlined here, of Spanish dissent from 1968 to the present or, more ambitiously, of Yugoslav dissent over the past third of a century could help to clarify the

[ page 30 ]

limitations of this approach by suggesting a conceptualization of dissent that does not identify it axiomatically with interest articulation.

For that purpose it would be worthwhile to use explicitly the information-coercion framework of David Apter, which has been implicit in this discussion of the transformations of totalitarianism. Apter's notion that different functional groups provide different qualities of information is useful, and his ideas concerning the various ways in which those various groups participate politically appear particularly applicable. For instance, in the case of the present study, it is clear that what he calls "interest groups" tended in general to animate dissident issues associated with the first structural transformation; "populist groups," those with the second; and "professional groups," those with the third. A few thoughts on East Europe, however, make it evident that this pattern is not universal even among Marxist-Leninist systems. But since dissent in such systems (if not in all systems) is unavoidably normative, and since the framework developed in this study is explicitly structural, the potential for an operational synthesis, in the context of Apter's structural-normative theory, with special attention to the question of participation in dissent, appears quite promising. The immediate requirement of such a project is further case studies of the present sort, so that a comparative middle-range theory might be elaborated that could mediate between the "community" of empirical reality and the "elite" of Apterian grand theory.[59]

4. Prospect: Soviet Politics and the Future of Soviet Dissent

Between 1964 and the present, Soviet political structure has changed in the following ways: (1) controls have been decisively tightened on community-sector dissent; (2) the attempt to integrate the community into the regime[60] has continued with somewhat mixed results; and (3) the internal differentiation of the elite and regime sectors has continued. The results have been: (1) the semilegitimate dissident issue areas of artistic freedom, socialist legality, and religious autonomy have ceased to be viable, their partisans having been forced into silence or exile, or into (2) the illegitimate issue areas of political democracy and human rights, with whose supporters they have discovered increasingly common cause; and (3) nationality rights advocates, finding themselves in a similar situation, have discovered a legitimate outlet in the issue area of developmental rationality. Rakowska-Harmstone has analyzed the elements leading to this last, most salient outcome:

  1.  the formation of indigenous modem elites who seek sources of legitimacy in their own unique national heritage and in establishing ties with the people of their national group;

[ page 31 ]

  1.  the existence of the federal system, which affords a political-administrative apparatus through which these minority elites can pursue their national-group interests and objectives; and
  2.  the continued political, economic, and cultural hegemony enjoyed by the Great Russian majority and the national chauvinism manifested by this group vis-à-vis the minority nationalities.[61]

Both because of the refocusing of nationalist demands onto the regime sector and because of impending changes in the leadership of the CPSU, the question of elite-regime relations is more immediate than that of regime-community relations. Indeed, the former by and large determine the constraints under which the latter evolve. The question becomes: What are the likely attitudes of the future elite towards elite-regime and regime-community relations?

Those attitudes are constrained by the following structural considerations:

  1.  The internal differentiation of the elite and regime sectors will not be reversed. As a result, the issue of developmental rationality—intersectoral as well as interregional—will continue to be debated, and specialists in other policy-related legitimacy-supportive fields will also continue to participate in policy formulation. That this by itself will motivate them to become overt partisans of political democracy is, however, questionable.
  2.  It is fairly certain that overall controls on the community sector will not be tightened. This does not exclude crackdowns in certain limited domains, such as judicial and artistic issues. It is possible that those restrictions will be lifted in the short run (during the Brezhnev succession but before the broader generational turnover) only to be re-imposed in the long run.
  3.  The integration of the community into the regime seems likely to provide the most contention within Soviet society. Its concomitant dissident issues, nationality rights and religious autonomy, will likely animate and exacerbate that contention not only in the European U.S.S.R. but also in Soviet central Asia.[62]

The structural constraints on elite-regime relations are thus less equivocal than on regime-community relations. Elite-regime relations are more likely to be stable both during the Brezhnev succession and during the generational turnover that succession will initiate. The stability in elite-regime relations will clarify any ambiguity the transition might involve for regime-community relations. Only after becoming secure in such stability might a new leadership consider encouraging the regime sector to address constructively all the concerns of the community.[63] If the new elite would wish to integrate the community into the regime as fully as possible, the only efficacious move would be to reinforce popular channels of participation and to increase the regime's responsiveness to them. In spite of the enhanced strength of the regime sector vis-à-vis the elite (and, within the latter, of the Central Committee vis-à-vis the Politburo),[64] such a development would probably not imperil the leading role of the

[ page 32 ]

Politburo in the Party. The leading role of the Party in society, on the other hand, could then be threatened by the evolution of regime-community relations in Soviet central Asia.

The attitudes of regime-sector role occupants are important and may even tip the balance; they are not, however, homogeneous.[65] If behavioral patterns observed in Western polities are also valid in the Soviet Union, then we can predict (1) with some certainty that the receptivity to community-level participation will increase as generational turnover proceeds in the CPSU apparat below the Central Committee level,[66] and (2) with even greater certainty that such receptivity will be enhanced if new recruits to key regime-sector roles have training not in engineering or other technical specialties but in the social sciences and humanities.[67] The latter development seems perhaps less likely, but observers of Soviet politics learn to anticipate the unexpected. The attitudes of such key personnel as obkom first secretaries, concerning responsiveness to participation in different issue areas, depends at least in part upon the decisions of the future elite concerning pre− and post–recruitment criteria for advancement within the CPSU.

Notes

[Note 1]. Ghita lonescu, The Politics of the European Communist States (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), pp. 2–5, esp. p. 3.

[Note 2]. H. Gordon Skilling, "Opposition in Communist East Europe," in Robert A. Dahl, ed. Regimes and Oppositions (New Haven, [Conn.], 1973), esp. pp. 92–94.

[Note 3]. Frederick C. Barghoorn, "Soviet Political Doctrine and the Problem of Opposition," Bucknell Review, 12 (May 1964), 4–5. "CPSU" is a standard abbreviation for Communist Party of the Soviet Union and is used as such in the present article.

[Note 4]. Barghoorn, "Factional, Sectoral and Subversive Opposition in Soviet Politics," in Dahl, pp. 27–87.

[Note 5]. Barghoorn, "The General Pattern of Soviet Dissent," paper prepared for the Conference on Dissent in the Soviet Union, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 22–23 October 1971 (Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University: [New York, 1972]), p. 1.

[Note 6]. Rudolf L. Tökés, "Varieties of Soviet Dissent: An Overview," in Tökés, ed. Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, and People (Baltimore, [Md.], 1975), p. 17.

[Note 7]. Ibid., pp. 17–18. Cf. Leonard Schapiro, "Introduction," in Schapiro, ed., Political Opposition in One-Party States (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 2–10.

[Note 8]. Tökés, "Dissent: The Politics for Change in the USSR," in Henry W. Morton and Tökés, eds., Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s (New York, 1974), p. 10. Emphasis in the original.

[Note 9]. Tökés, "Varieties of Soviet Dissent," p. 17.

[Note 10]. Ibid., pp.18–19.

[Note 11]. Ibid., p.18.

[Note 12]. Tökés, "Dissent: The Politics for Change," p. 10.

[Note 13]. Tökés, "Varieties of Soviet Dissent," p. 14 Emphasis in the original.

[Note 14]. Walter D. Connor, "Dissent in a Complex Society: The Soviet Case," Problems of Communism, 22 (March–April 1973), 40.

[ page 33 ]

[Note 15]. Following David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, 1965}, chaps. 11–13. The analysis in this article also has resonances with chaps. 14–21 passim.

[Note 16]. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. by Hannah D. Kahn, edited and revised with an introduction by Arthur Livingston (New York, 1939), p. 404. Cf. Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York, 1966), p. 154: "The strategic 'middle level' … is that level of communication that is 'vertically' close enough to the large mass of consumers, citizens, or common soldiers to forestall any continuing and effective direct communication between them and the 'highest echelons'; and it must be far enough above the level of the large numbers of rank and file to permit effective 'horizontal' communication and organization among a sufficiently large portion of the men or units on its own level."

[Note 17]. Nevertheless, the universe Armstrong analyzes is that of delegates to the Ukrainian Party Congresses, because "while they include some persons of little political importance, … information on their compositions is much more complete. " It is, however, evident from his Tables 1 and 2 that those Party Congresses include members of union-republic organizations, of the army, and of educational institutions. Since these three establishments are not represented at the obkom level, we should supplement obkomburo membership with union-republic Party Congress attendance in our specification of the all-union lower-level executive elite; but it turns out that these three categories of delegates to union-republic Party Congresses are included in our breakdown of the policy-formulating component of the regime sector. See John A. Armstrong, The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite: A Case Study of the Ukrainian Apparatus (New York, 1959), pp. 4, 13–15.

[Note 18]. Jerry F. Hough, "The Bureaucratic Model and the Nature of the Soviet Political System," Journal of Comparative Administration, 5 (April 1973), 144–48.

[Note 19]. Gwen Moore Bellisfield, "Preliminary Notes on the Influence Structure of American Leaders" (1973, mimeo.), cited in Robert D. Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, [N.J.], 1976), pp. 17–18. For a similar technique, see Allen H. Barton, Bogdan Denitch and Charles Kadushin, eds. Opinion-Making Elites in Yugoslavia (New York, 1973).

[Note 20] . Philip D. Stewart, Political Power in the Soviet Union: A Study of Decision Making in Stalingrad (Indianapolis, [Ind.], 1968), chap. 9.

[Note 21]. Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds. Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1971).

[Note 22]. Milton Lodge, Soviet Elite Attitudes since Stalin (Columbus,[ Ohio], 1969).

[Note 23]. The various chapters in Skilling and Griffiths provide positional specifications.

[Note 24]. Jean Piaget, Le structuralisme, 4th ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970).

[Note 25]. On the "creative intelligentsia," see Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard B. Dobson, "The Intellectual as Critic and Rebel With Special Reference to the United States and the Soviet Union," Daedalus, 101 (Summer 1972), 137–38.

[Note 26]. Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR: The Struggle for Stalin's Succession, 1945–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 94, 246.

[Note 27]. For details, see Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946–1959 (Cambridge, [Mass.], 1962), pp. 113–14, 126.

[Note 28]. Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev's Russia (Baltimore, [Md.], 1958), chap. 4, provides an excellent overview of the period. Quotations are at p. 102.

[Note 29]. On the situation in the Presidium immediately after Beria's death, see Conquest, p. 228; and Boris. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite, edited by Janet D. Zagoria (New York, 1965), pp. 130–87 passim.

[Note 30]. Richard Lowenthal, "On 'Established' Communist Party Regimes," Studies in Comparative Communism, 7 (Winter 1964), 343.

[Note 31]. Aleksandr I. So1zhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, 7 vols. in 3 (New York, 1973–76), III, 279–329, 437–42.

[Note 32]. A short list of other reforms can be found in Alexander Werth, The Khrushchev Phase (London: Robert Hale, 1961}, pp. 45–46. Quotation at p. 45. An excellent analytical treatment of these changes appears in A.K.R. Kiralfy, "Recent Legal Changes in the USSR," Soviet Studies, 9 (July 1957), 1–19, esp. 11–16; this same author treats those events from an historical perspective in "Campaign for Legality in the USSR," International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 6 (October 1957), 625–42.

[Note 33]. Leon Lipson, "Law and Society," in Allen Kassof, ed. Prospects for Soviet Society (New York, 1968), pp. 104–06.

[ page 34 ]

[Note 34]. Crankshaw, p. 102.

[Note 35]. See Swayze, pp. 145–47.

[Note 36]. The latter of these elements contributed to the impetus behind the New Soviet Man campaign. For a discussion of other political implications, see ibid., pp. 153–54, 161, 184–86.

[Note 37]. On Beria's nationality policy, See Conquest, pp. 213–18; John H. Miller, "Cadres Policy and Nationality Areas: Recruitment of CPSU First and Second Secretaries in Non-Russian Republics of the USSR," Soviet Studies, 29 (January 1977), 3–36 passim; F. F. [sic], "The Fall of Beria and the Nationalities Question in the USSR," World Today, 9 (November l953), 494–95; and H. Carrère d'Encausse and A. Bennigsen, "Pouvoir apparent et pouvoir réel dans les républiques musulmanes de l'URSS," Problèmes soviétiques, 1 (April 1958), 57–73.

[Note 38]. See Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, "Church-State Relations in the USSR," Survey, no. 66 (January 1968), 4–32, esp. 26–31, for details; also Bociurkiw, "The Shaping of Soviet Religious Policy," Problems of Communism, 22 {May–June 1973), 37–51 passim.

[Note 39]. See John Gorgone, "Soviet Jurists in the Legislative Arena: The Reform of Criminal Procedure," Soviet Union, 3, no. 1 (1976), 1–35.

[Note 40]. Pravda, 5 February 1959, pp. 7–8. There is a brief discussion in Werth, pp. 48–50.

[Note 41]. Harold J. Berman, "The Struggle of Soviet Jurists against a Return to Stalinist Terror," Slavic Review, 22 (June 1963), 314–20; Donald D. Barry and Berman, "The Jurists," in Skilling and Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, esp. pp. 316–330.

[Note 42]. Myroslav Styranka, "Active Forces of Resistance in the USSR," Ukrainian Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1970), 12–23, esp. 22–23.

[Note 43]. Bociurkiw, "Church-State Relations in the USSR," p. 27.

[Note 44]. See, for instance, Leslie Dienes, "Issues in Soviet Energy Policy and Conflicts over Fuel Costs in Regional Development," Soviet Studies, 23 (July 1971}, 26–58.

[Note 45]. For one early study, see Barry, "The Specialist in Soviet Policy-Making: The Adoption of a Law," Soviet Studies, 16 (October 1964), 152–65. More recently and more generally, see Richard B. Remnek, ed. Social Scientists and Policy Making in the USSR (New York, 1977).

[Note 46]. See, inter alia, Joel J. Schwartz and William R. Keech, "Group Influence and the Policy Process in the Soviet Union," American Political Science Review, 62 (September 1968), 840–51; and Stewart, "Soviet Interest Groups and the Policy Process," World Politics, 22 (October 1969), 29–50.

[Note 47]. Robert E. Blackwell, Jr., "Elite Recruitment and Functional Change: An Analysis of the Soviet Obkom Elite, 1950-1968," Journal of Politics, 34 (February 1972), 124–52; Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., "Toward A Reconceptualization of Political Change in the Soviet Union: The Political Leadership System," Comparative Politics, 1 (January 1968), 228–44.

[Note 48]. Darrell P. Hammer, "Brezhnev and the Communist Party," Soviet Union, 2, no. 1 (1975), 4.

[Note 49]. The latter is analyzed by Grey Hodnett, "Khrushchev and Party-State Control," in Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin, eds. Politics in the Soviet Union (New York, 1966), pp. l13–64.

[Note 50]. See Armstrong, "Party Bifurcation and Elite Interest," Soviet Studies, 17 (April 1966), 417–30.

[Note 51]. Hammer, 2–3.

[Note 52]. Discussed by Paul Cocks, "The Rationalization of Party Control," in Chalmers Johnson, ed. Change in Communist Systems (Stanford, [Calif.], 1970), pp. 167–78, esp. pp. 170–72.

[Note 53]. Richard W. Judy, "The Economists," in Skilling and Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, p. 249.

[Note 54]. On criminology, see Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy: Specialists in Policy-Making (New York, 1978), esp. chaps. 2–3; on sociology, George Fischer, "The New Sociology in the Soviet Union," in Alex Simirenko, ed., Soviet Sociology: Historical Antecedents and Current Appraisals (Chicago, l966), pp. 275–92; on foreign relations, William Zimmerman, "International Relations in the Soviet Union: The Emergence of a Discipline," Journal of Politics, 31 (February 1969), 52–70.

[Note 55]. See the distinction between "community political culture" and "regime political culture' in Kenneth Jowitt, "An Organizational Approach to the Study of Political Culture in Marxist-Leninist Systems," American Political Science Review, 68 (December 1974), 1173.

[Note 56]. Bociurkiw, "Church-State Relations in the USSR," 31, 25.

[ page 35 ]

[Note 57]. Herbert C. Kelman, "Patterns of Personal Involvement in the National System: A Social-Psychological Analysis of Political Legitimacy," in James N. Rosenau, ed. International Politics and Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (New York, 1969), pp. 276–88, esp. p. 280, Table 1.

[Note 58]. Connor, "Dissent in a Complex Society," 50.

[Note 59]. See David E. Apter, Choice and the Politics of Allocation (New Haven, [Conn.], 1971), esp. chap. 4.

[Note 60]. The meaning of this phrase coincides with Jowitt's definition of community building: "attempts at creating new political meanings which are shared by elites and publics and which possess an informal, institutional, and expressive character." Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944–1965 (Berkeley, [Calif.], 1971), p. 74, n. 1.

[Note 61]. Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, "The Dialectics of Nationalism in the USSR," Problems of Communism, 23 (May–June 1974), 10.

[Note 62]. For a survey of some of the problems the political system faces in this region, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, L'Empire éclaté (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), pp. 233–70.

[Note 63]. See, however, Connor, "Generations and Politics in the USSR," Problems of Communism, 24 (September–October 1975), 20–31, esp. 24–26, for the view that Soviet political culture inculcates political inefficacy and impotence among its citizenry.

[Note 64]. Hough goes so far as to suggest that "unwritten constitutional restraints of the type found in Great Britain are slowly beginning to develop in the Soviet Union." Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, [Mass.], 1979), p. 555.

[Note 65]. See Stewart, "Diversity and Adaptation in Soviet Political Culture: The Attitudes of the Soviet Political Elite," in Jane P. Shapiro and Peter J. Potichnyj, eds. Change and Adaptation in Soviet and East European Politics (New York, 1976), pp. 18–39.

[Note 66]. See Putnam, "The Political Attitudes of Senior Civil Servants in Britain, Germany, and Italy," British Journal of Political Science, 3 (July 1973), 257–90.

[Note 67]. See Putnam, "Elite Transformation in Advanced Industrial Societies: An Empirical Assessment of the Theory of Technocracy," Comparative Political Studies, 10 (October 1977), 383–412.

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