Soviet politics and after: Old and New Concepts

World Politics

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 1992, Pages 66-98

  Odom, William E ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84933491877     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: 10863338     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2010519     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Rigby, “Traditional, Market, and Organizational Societies and the USSR,” World Politics 16 (July 1964). This excellent essay still offers useful ways of looking at Soviet politics.
2. Meyer, “The USSR, Incorporated,” in Donald W. Treedgold, ed., The Development of the USSR: An Exchange of Views (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964). Meyer elaborates the concept more fully in The Soviet Political System (New York: Random House, 1965).
3. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). Linden's excellent monograph, The Soviet Party-State (New York: Praeger, 1983), strikes me as somewhat at odds with his effort to develop his “conflict” model. Rather, his insightful treatment of the ideological foundations of the system places him closer to the totalitarian model
4. Skilling and Griffiths, eds., Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
5. For a critique of its limitations, see Odom, “A Dissenting View on the Group Approach to Soviet Politics,” World Politics 28 (July 1976).
6. Skilling, “Interest Groups and Communist Politics Revisited,” World Politics 36 (October 1983), 24–27.
7. Moore, Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 36.
8. See the discussion in the Russian Review 45 (October 1986), 357-416; and 46 (October 1987), 379–431.
9. Huntington discusses these three features, which are necessary for a model to be “accepted and useful.” See Huntington, “Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many,” Political Science Quarterly 89 (March 1974), 7.
10. The literature on the totalitarian model is growing, and the variety of arguments is large. I am sidestepping most of the debate by taking only the Friedrich-Brzezinski variant. The concept has too many authors and too much history to list them all briefly and elaborate them fairly. Proponents who offer strong, commonsense analysis include Juan J. Linz, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 3:1745-411; Moore (fn. 7), 36ff.; and Pierre Hassner, “Communist Totalitarianism: The Translantic Vagaries of a Concept,” Washington Quarterly 6 (Fall 1985). Although this selection does injustice to a large number of other scholars, it at least captures important highlights.
11. See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Jerry Hough, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 174–178.
12. For a debate on this topic, see Dale R. Herspring and Ivan Volgyes, eds., Civil-Military Relations in Communist Systems (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), chaps. 1–3.
13. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
14. Tucker, “The Dictator and Totalitarianism,” World Politics 17 (July 1965).
15. Essentially this is the starting assumption for “social historians” such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, J. Arch Getty, and Roberta T. Manning. See the discussions in the Russian Review (fn. 8). These scholars use the dichotomy “from above”/“from below” to study the Stalin period in a way that ridicules the totalitarian model. To a large degree, they have adopted a straw man as an alternative in their effort to make a straw man of the totalitarian model.
16. Merle Fainsod offers abundant empirical evidence of this local political voluntarism. See Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). Getty (fn. 11) lets a similar impression emerge from his evidence, though his thesis may seem to say otherwise.
17. For a case study of this kind of bureaucratic diffusion of power and its periodic recentralization, see Odom, The Soviet Volunteers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
18. Hammer, The Politics of Oligarchy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986), 238.
19. Hough, “Gorbachev Consolidating Power,” Problems of Communism 36 (July-August 1987), 21.
20. Hough (fn. 11), 277–278, 544.
21. Ibid., 556–576.
22. See Hough, Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1980).
23. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), 3.
24. See, e.g., Stephen F. Cohen, “Gorbachev the Great,” New York Times, March 11, 1991, p. A15.
25. Skilling is the exception. He flatly judged the prospects for such an outcome to be very small.
26. See Colton, The Dilemmas of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986), 32.
27. For this line of analysis, see Odom “How Far Can Soviet Reform Go?” Problems of Communism 34 (November-December 1987).
28. Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 64–71.
29. For firsthand reports on this kind of behavior, see Konstantin Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). See also Jeffry Klugman, The New Soviet Elite (New York: Praeger, 1989). His analysis of interview data shows how ambitious Soviet citizens, before 1985, saw the nature of opportunity and the requirements for getting ahead. They understood the role of the Party, the ideology, and the state monopoly of the economy, and they quickly learned how to make connections, to join cliques, and to climb various bureaucratic ladders. They were not particularly fearful of being purged, but they greatly feared being cast into poverty by exclusion from political circles.
30. Z. K. Brzezinski, ed., Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
31. By “middle-range” theories, I mean what Robert K. Merton defined as “theories of the middle range: theories that lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance during day-to-day research and all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behavior, social organization, and social change.” See Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 39.
32. Ibid., 253–255.
33. Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
34. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
35. See Arye L. Hillman and Adi Schnytzer, “Illegal Economic Activities and Purges in a Soviet-Type Economy: A Rent-Seeking Perspective,” International Review of Law and Economics 6 (1986).
36. Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18–23.
37. See, e.g., Major General N. Tabunov, “Dialektik klassogo i obshchechelovetskogo,” Kommunist vooruzhennikh, sil 8 (1989). Tabunov struggled to discover a “dialectic” between class and humankind interests that salvages the international class struggle.
38. Pravda, August 6, 1988.
39. See Dawn Mann, “First Secretaries of Krai and Oblast Party Committees,” RL Report mthe USSR 1, no. 41 (October 13, 1989). For the turnover in the senior military ranks, see Linda Brewer, “The Soviet Military Elite under Gorbachev” (Unpublished paper, the Air Force Intelligence Agency, August 22, 1989). Virtually the entire high command of the military down to the army and division levels was changed in a couple of years. Of a total of 155 krai and oblast party secretaries, Mann finds all but 23 changed. The change in central committee membership in Gorbachev's first years was greater than at any other time since 1961.
40. Vera Tolz offers the first effort to analyze the proliferation of new parties. She concludes that “it is more likely that outbreaks of popular discontent will occur than that there will be gradual transformation of the country into a democratic, multiparty state”; see Tolz, The USSR's Emerging Multiparty System (New York: Praeger, 1990), 93.
41. Boris Kagarlitsky offers an eyewitness account of efforts to organize political movements on an all-Union basis, the obstacles they faced, and the contrasting organizational strength of those in some republics. See Kagarlitsky, Farewell Perestroika: A Soviet Chronicle (New York: Verso, 1990).
42. See Izvestiia, October 9, 1990, for a report on glavlit (the censorship bureau) and its list of topics to be censored.
43. Throughout his personal chronicle of political developments, Kagarlitsky (fn. 45) offers examples of officially guided media attention and deliberate neglect of various political groups to shape both domestic and foreign perceptions. For considerable detail on the politics of media controls, see an unpublished paper by Bradley Peniston, “Gorbachev, Glasnost, and glavlit: The Persistence of Controls in the Soviet Media” (New Haven: SEES, Yale University, April 15, 1991).
44. For elaboration of “contestation,” see Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
45. For essays that demonstrate how serious this error has been, see Henry Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., eds., The Impoverished Empire (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1990)
46. This case is vigorously advanced by A. Kireyev, “Konversiia v sovetskom izmerenii,” Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn 4 (1990).
47. John Tedstrom reports this figure for 1988 and also a continuing increase in 1989. It was probably larger in 1990 and 1991. See Tedstrom, “The Soviet Cooperative Movement: An Update,” Report on the USSR 1, no. 41 (1989), 3–5.
48. Joseph C. Brandt, “Economic Reform and Soviet Nationality,” Telos, no. 84 (Summer 1990).
49. For this point specifically and for an insightful analysis of the forces of change in the Soviet economy, see Anders Aslund, “Prospects for Economic Reform in the USSR” (Paper presented at the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics, 1991).
50. See RFE/RL Daily Report 170 (September 9, 1990); 183 (September 25, 1990); and 188 (October 2, 1990).
51. See Odom, “The Soviet Military in Transition,” Problems of Communism (May-June 1990).
52. See Herspring and Volgyes (fn. 13), especially the chapters by Kolkowicz and Colton.
53. See Vladimir Sokolov, “Reflections on the Variants of Our Immediate Future: To a Market Economy under the Cover of the Army?” Literaturnaya gazeta 12 (September 1990).
54. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
55. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) is perhaps the best example. More recently, Philip G. Roeder has criticized Hunting ton's approach but has remained in the political development paradigm of analysis. See Roeder, “Modernization and Participation in the Leninist Development Model American Political Science Review 83 (September 1989).
56. Rigby (fn. 1).
57. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2 (1970).
58. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984).
59. Dahl (fn. 48).
60. Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 27–63.
61. Lindblom (fn. 58), 162–169.
62. Freeman, Democracy and Markets (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
63. Hough (fn. 25).
64. Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989).
65. See, e.g., Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
66. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). Huntington has his critics concerning the applicability of some of his concepts to the Soviet political system. Roeder (fn. 59) challenges Huntington by distinguishing between institutionalized “participation” (which Huntington's “civic” class of systems involves) and institutionalized “coproduction” (which Roeder sees as the Soviet reality).
67. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capacities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
68. Tucker, “Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Societies,” Political Science Quarterly 88 (June 1973).