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Soviet Elite Participatory Attitudes in the Post-Stalin Period*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Milton Lodge
Milton Lodge*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

This paper, part of a larger study, is a comparative analysis of five Soviet elites—the central Party apparatchicki, and four specialist elites: the central economic bureaucrats, the military, the literary intelligentsia, and the legal profession. By content analyzing representative periodicals for each elite, data are collected on elite attitudes toward participation in the political system. The overall goal is to gain a measure of the direction and scope of Soviet elite attitudinal change since Stalin; more specifically, (1) to measure the extent to which the elites perceive themselves as participants in the policy-making process, (2) to determine whether the elites perceive their participatory role as expanding over time, and (3) to demark changing patterns of Partyspecialist elite relations from 1952–65.

To ground this study in a theoretical framework, analytical categories and hypotheses—derived in part from Brzezinski and Huntington's Political Power: USA/USSR—are formulated to test the perceived extent of elite participation in the Soviet political process. Synoptically, models of political systems may be built by reducing to essentials the mode of interaction between the regime and society. A key variable in analyzing this interaction between superstructure and base is the role and efficacy of societal groups in influencing policy formation and implementation. Following this tack a descriptive continuum may be set up for classifying political systems. At one end of the continuum are ideological systems (e.g., the USSR), at the other “instrumental” systems (e.g., the United States). In instrumental systems the relationship between the political and social system is characterized by “access and interaction.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 827 - 839
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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References

1 Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Huntington, Samuel, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking Press, 1964), Pt. IGoogle Scholar.

2 Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic Elites in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 70 Google Scholar; the five elites in this study generally conform to Keller's concept of strategic elites and fulfill the expectation that elite participation will increase over time.

3 Soviet references to this problem are numerous. See, e.g., the authoritative editorial titled “Concerning Discussions in Scholarly Journals,” in Kommunist, No. 7, 1955, which, after stating that Marxism-Leninism must be the “essential” framework within which specialist discussion should take place, bemoans the fact that scholarly articles “often” by-pass Party formulas and all too frequently attempt “to reverse fundamental theses of the Party.” For a general discussion of the increasing leeway for instrumental criticism in the post-Stalin period, see Ploss, Sidney, Conflict and Decision-Making in Soviet Russia, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A quantitative analysis comparing Soviet elite values manifested in journals is found in Angell's, Robert “Social Values of Soviet and American Elites,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 8 (12, 1964), 330–385 Google Scholar.

4 Note, e.g., the effect of Khrushchev's 1957 victory over Malenkov and Zhukov on the economic and military elites, and the effect of the 1962–63 anti-parasite legislation on the legal elite. The zig-zag course for the individual elites is apparently a result of major policy disputes between the Party and specific elite.

5 Terror and Progress—USSR (New York, Harpur Torchbooks, 1954), chap. 7Google Scholar.

6 Secondary support marking the missile crisis as a turning point in military-Party relations is found in Wolfe, Thomas, Soviet Strategy at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kolkowicz, Roman, The Soviet Military and the Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

7 See Linden, Carl, Khruschhev and the Soviet Leadership (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the Cuban missile crisis as a variable in Khrushchev's fall and as a possible cause for the Party's loss of control over the elites in 1963 and 1965, esp. pp. 146–147.

8 In operational terms, accommodation exists when the Party's score on the participatory categories is higher than the elite's score, i.e., when the specialist score is within the Party's prescribed boundary of the political arena. (E.g., if the Party score is 2.90 and the specialist score 2.50, the extent of accommodation is −.40, the minus sign denoting accommodation.) Conflict exists when the specialist elite score is more participatory than that of the Party. (E.g., if the Party score is 2.50 and the elite score 3.00, the level of conflict is +.50, plus signs denoting conflict.) For clarity all mean scores are carried two decimal places in the accommodation conflict tables.

9 Dahl, Robert A., Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), chap. 3Google Scholar.

10 “Interest Groups and Communist Politics,” World Politics, 18 (06, 1966), p. 449 Google Scholar.

11 Almond, Gabriel A. and Powell, G. Bingham Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967), pp. 24–25 Google Scholar; the secularization of culture is described as:

the process whereby traditional orientations and attitudes give way to more dynamic decision-making processes involving the gathering of information, the evaluation of information, the laying out of alternative courses of action, the selection of a course of action from among these possible courses, and the means whereby one tests whether or not a given course of action is producing the consequences which were intended.

12 See H. Gordon Skilling, op. cit., pp. 449–551; Inkeles, Alex, “Models in the Analysis of Soviet Society, Survey, No. 60 (07, 1966), pp. 3–12 Google Scholar; Schwartz, Joel J. and Keech, William R., “Group Influence on the Policy Process in the Soviet Union,” this Review, 840–851 Google ScholarPubMed.

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