This paper explores a particular dimension of the role of the apparatchiki in the development of the Soviet system, particularly in relation to political development. To some degree, it extends work presented elsewhere, and relates to an important dimension of Soviet (and other) political development: the role of those selected to occupy a “leading and guiding” position in society, and the limitations they impose on the prospects for political development; these stem indirectly from past recruitment and training practices, further influenced by their more recent experience in office. It is argued that the apparatchiki chosen to perform certain tasks at a particular stage of socioeconomic development, and trained to use a range of techniques deemed appropriate at the time, became an obstacle to the development of the political system in the direction to which successive leaders have declared their commitment. More specifically, leaders appointed under Stalin to enforce rapid economic growth, at the expense of developing the society's political dimension, were recruited for their possession of certain skills and attitudes that were reflected in their administrative behavior and that became the norm in Soviet administrative practice. The “consideration” with which the Brezhnev administration treated its cadres further confirmed inappropriate values in the culture of the administrators.

This feature of the role of the apparatchiki has been recognized in the Soviet Union, but little of concrete effect has been done to counteract it.

Since at least the revolution the Soviet system has been distinctive in the attention it has devoted to the ideological upbringing of its citizens. As presently constituted, the party's ideological work embraces a variety of forms which are intended, taken together, to reach all members of the society from childhood to late adult years and to inculcate in them the basis of a “communist world outlook.” Among the most important of such forms, are first of all, mass agitation and propaganda work, which is conducted by agitators, political informants and lecturers in workplaces and residential areas throughout the USSR. A further contribution is made by the 3.1 million members of the “Znanie” (Knowledge) Society, who delivered 25.1 million lectures on party-political as well as scientific and other themes in 1983 to a total audience in excess of 1.1 billion. Secondly, there is an elaborate system of political and economic study, intended particularly for party members, in which over 60 million adults were enrolled in 1984–85. In the educational system itself both the curriculum and the youth organizations based around the school are intended to play a role in developing a communist consciousness, with the Komsomol, in particular, sponsoring a system of formal political instruction for its 42 million members headed by a Higher Komsomol School based in Moscow. The mass media have an additional part to play in extending the party's interpretation of current domestic and international developments to Soviet citizens of all ages.

The Food Program enacted by the May 1982 Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU) provided for new state agencies in the countryside. Ranging hierarchically from the autonomous republic to the district level, they were mandated to harmonize the activities of kolkhozes (collective farms) and sovkhozes (state farms), processing and storage plants, as well as enterprises contributing to farm operations. With powers granted by the Plenum, the associations had the potential to assume many day-to-day tasks for coordinating rural producers' activities. The new administrative entities also had the tools to address problems and opportunities of a real agricultural development. Since the availability of food and related commodities has long been a significant public policy problem in the USSR, the 1982 structural reform is of interest as a strategy for increasing production efficacy. However, creation of the agro–industrial associations was also a departure for the Brezhnev regime, because it did not undertake any other large-scale organizational alterations of the direction of rural production. Implementation of the reorganization was continued by Brezhnev's successors, so that the structural change has enjoyed at least some measure of continuing support under several leaderships.

Probably the most significant of the novel agencies approved in the Food Program was the raion agro-industrial association or RAPO. Traditionally, in Soviet agriculture, the district sub-division has been particularly significant from a management standpoint since raion authorities are closest to the actual execution of farming processes.

The essays presented here were originally prepared for delivery at the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1985. They touch on various aspects of Soviet domestic politics.

One of the most significant developments in the USSR in the early 1980s has been the extent to which the Soviet political and economic system had to adjust to the requirements and demands of the present-day world.

In Western literature the period after the death of Brezhnev is quite often referred to as the transition period or simply as the period of modernization, in which an attempt is made to adapt traditional principles, such as integrated economic and social planning and centralized political control, to drastically changing scientific–technical and socioeconomic conditions. This process of change is particularly marked in the political sphere, characterized by rejuvenation among the Soviet elite and political cadres. But by no means is it limited to the political elite.

Special interests are well entrenched in many party and state organizations in the center, as well as in the localities. These bureaucratic interests are engaged in competition and debate over the structure, operation and performance of the Soviet economy and society.

Some of the ongoing adjustments in the system are therefore preceded by an extensive discussion in various Soviet publications and involve not only the party and government officials but also, depending on circumstances, a varying and continuously growing number of specialists.

The official Soviet ideology contends that there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union; that every Soviet citizen has the right to work, guaranteed constitutionally; and that full employment of the able-bodied population has been ensured in the country.

However, these claims must be taken with caution. The first means in effect merely that registered unemployment is absent, because unemployment benefits are not available. In connection with the second it should be remembered that work is not only a right but also a duty and a matter of honor, and that in practice the former neither eliminates open but unregistered unemployment nor assures employment at skill level and in the desired locality. And the third conceals the fact that full employment is economically irrational, i.e., characterized by considerable under-utilization and waste of working time and qualifications.

Since in the Soviet Union full employment is economically irrational in the sense mentioned, it has on the one hand a pronounced social dimension which arises from the nature of command socialism, the regime's policies, and the vested interests of individual role-players; on the other hand, it has adverse economic, behavioral, and attitudinal consequences. And this also raises the question of social deprivation and of official and unofficial response to it.

FULL EMPLOYMENT

Although Soviet sources repeatedly emphasize that full employment is an endemic feature of socialism, Soviet scholars are far from unanimous as to its definition.

Introduced by the Soviet government five days after assumption of power, on November 1917, the social security system has undergone many changes, and by now is a huge, complex and expensive undertaking. Throughout its existence, the system has been subject to a flood of normative acts, model acts (for collective farms), decrees, and regulations. Their “fluidity” has not abated, producing ever proliferating statutes – to say nothing of “instructional letters” emanating from the functioning of the system now in effect – all of which adds up to a very complicated and disjointed scenario. Writing in 1984, a Soviet authority complained that “the accumulation of layers of acts during decades, constant additions to and changes in them have led to a situation in which even specialists find it difficult at times to implement social security legislation in practice.”

Concern with administrative “errors” generated by legal complexities and ambiguities, which are either costly for the system or “pinch” the rights of its clientele, has been gaining momentum since 1967 when the question of an independent status for social security law within the Soviet system of jurisprudence was first raised. Discussion has ranged over the “imperative” need for a complete codification of social security laws which has yet to be achieved; for a clear-cut, unified concept of social security which has never been produced, either in law or in scholarship; for a clear demarcation of relations between social security and social insurance; for a definition of pensions as distinct from grants (posobiia); and for an up-dated concept of “old age.”

Knowledge of how to prevent conception and birth is not a discovery of the twentieth century. Historical demographers have hypothesized that family planning was widely practiced in pre-industrial European communities. However, organized efforts to promote the practice of birth control do not seem to have emerged until the second half of the nineteenth century in England and some time later in the United States. It is important to emphasize that the birth control movement developed as a feminist or social reform movement rather than as a specific effort to control population growth. Thus, the movement founded by Mrs Sanger in the United States in 1913 maintained that women have the right to freedom from unwanted pregnancies. In the Soviet Union this liberal notion that a woman has the right of control over her own body did not lie behind the early law which legalized abortion in that country. Abortion was first legalized, on 18 November 1920, only as a necessary but temporary health measure, quite independent of family legislation. Although at that time the legalization of abortion was a pioneering step, it should be noted that its main purpose was not so much to enhance the woman's freedom of choice as to reduce the high mortality rate associated with illegal abortions. The main rationale of the decree of 18 November 1920 was to protect the life of Soviet women, not their freedom to plan the size of their family.

Any analysis of ethnic relations in the Soviet Union requires combining two grand theories: a theory of ethnicity and ethno-nationalism in industrial society and a theory of Soviet society as one of two types of existing industrial societies. Such synthesis is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I will at least outline several premises which presuppose my understanding of these two phenomena and which underlie the argument developed here.

There is solid empirical evidence to support the claim that the rise of nationalism, the process of modernization and social mobilization are correlated. As Ernest Gellner has put it, any modern state requires “a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable population.” Correspondingly, the process of modernization imposes a standardized, homogeneous, centrally sustained culture on all minority groups in a multi-ethnic state. Some of them might resist for various reasons; and under certain conditions this objective need for homogeneity might provoke in these minorities a nationalistic response. This argument, as Arthur Waldron points out, reverses the commonly accepted causality and contradicts the widely held “belief that nationalism comes first, and then nationalist struggle.” The argument emphasizes the role of nationalism in conflict, where nationalism serves as a weapon in the struggle for self-determination or internal competition. “Ethnic groups are born and rise because of the perception of oppression,” writes Dov Ronen; “if there were no perception of oppression, real or imagined, there would be no ethnic self-determination.”

The Soviet political and administrative system is a sectional (vedomstvennyi) one, meaning that sectional institutions and interests, to a large extent based on branches of the economy, are catered for and recognized. This is evident in Soviet “interest theory,” in which it is made quite clear that sectional interests have a legitimate place in the system. It is of course also obvious in the structure of Soviet administration. With the qualified exception of the sovnarkhoz (Councils of National Economy) period (even then there was ever-growing pressure to set up branch-based State Committees), branch-based organizations have always been the basic administrative unit. Administrative procedures have always recognized and catered for the narrow interests of these organizations, in particular the requirement that all documents going to executive bodies for decision be examined first by all interested parties (vizirovanie). This has been a feature of Soviet administrative practice since the very first days of Lenin's Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars). Ellen Jones has described the way the process works in more recent times.

It is the role of the party to oversee and put to good use the sectional units of the political and administrative system. While the concept of the “vanguard” party with its “leading role” was not devised by Lenin as an administrative principle for use in government, it has proved to be very applicable to such a situation.

Research done at the University of Grenoble aspires, as do other approaches (political, historic, economic), to a better understanding of the USSR. The object of the research is Soviet political discourse (hereafter abbreviated as SPD); the method employed is linguistic and semio-linguistic analysis. The corpus of the research is the collection of official political texts ranging from Pravda editorials to the reports of the General Secretary of the Communist Party, including Intourist brochures as well as numerous ideological pamphlets.

The significance of this material, which can be extremely boring to the average reader, consists in actually entering into the fiction set forth, instead of contesting it a priori; in reading the lines instead of reading between the lines; in concentrating on the reading of the text itself, independent of all personal interpretation.

Rather than trying to decipher the message or to interpret a statement by means of “hidden signs,” the analyst, distrustful of his own biases and his implicit expectations, must first of all avoid fabricating an artificial signification which might confirm his own convictions such as, for example, “the USSR is more threatening than ever” or, “the Soviet regime will soon fall” or perhaps, “the system is blocked and political power is in the hands of the military–industrial complex,” etc.

The danger of this artificial signification is even greater due to the difficulty the analyst has in choosing his place of observation.

In Soviet legal, historical, sociopolitical and other literature, the term state is used both in a wider sense as a synonym for the country as a whole, and in a narrower sense as a synonym for an administrative–territorial formation having the status of a union national republic. Aside from instances when the juridical status of union republics is considered, it can be said that in Soviet scholarly, sociopolitical works, in periodicals, and in other publications the term state is used exclusively in the wider sense.

For example, in the constitution of the RSFSR, the largest union republic of the USSR in territory, population and economic potential, the term state occurs in the narrower sense three times only: in Article I, which states that it is “a socialist state of the whole people”; in Article 68, which states that it is “a sovereign Soviet socialist state”; and in Article 78, which stipulates that each of the autonomous republics of the RSFSR “is a Soviet socialist state.” On the other hand, the RSFSR constitution uses the term in its wider sense forty times. For example, “the state helps enhance the social homogeneity … and the all-round developing and drawing together of all the nations and nationalities of the USSR” (Article 19); “When abroad, citizens of the RSFSR enjoy the protection and assistance of the Soviet state” (Article 31), etc.

The third occurrence of the term state in its narrow sense in the constitution of the RSFSR clarifies the assertion that in this sense it serves in Soviet vocabulary merely to designate property.

The word “soviet” in Russian means advice, or counsel. Only in the twentieth century has it taken on the second meaning of a council referring to institutions of government comprised of elected representatives. The absence of such usage prior to 1905 indicates that these institutions lack roots in the political traditions of either the village or the autocracy but are sui generis in Russian history. In what follows, the evolution of local government in the Soviet period will be reviewed to determine whether a sufficient theoretical and legal basis has emerged to allow for the expansion of political participation at this level in the contemporary period.

In fact, the use of the word “soviet,” in its second meaning of a council, referred not to institutions of government but to committees of factory workers, chosen by their peers to negotiate with their employers and with the state during the strikes which emerged around the end of the nineteenth century during Russia's period of nascent industrialization. Such committees would arise on an ad hoc basis, often at the request of management, perform their function of communicating workers' grievances, and then be disbanded, not infrequently with the dismissal from work of those workers who took part.

The emergence of the idea of the soviet as a quasi-permanent body with a political character occurred at the time of the Revolution of 1905. The first of these is generally considered to have appeared in May 1905, in the textile center of Ivanovo–Voznesensk in Vladimir province, about 200 miles northeast of Moscow.