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² Inter alia: Schroeder, Gertrude E., ‘The Soviet Economy on a Treadmill of “Reforms”’, Soviet Economy in a Time of Change (Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), pp. 312–40Google Scholar; Dunmore, Timothy, The Stalinist Command Economy: The Soviet Apparatus and Economic Policy, 1945–1953 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Urban, Michael E., ‘Information and Participation in Soviet Local Government’, Journal of Politics, 44 (1982), 64–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lampert, Nicholas, ‘Law and Order in the USSR: The Case of Economic and Official Crime’, Soviet Studies, 36 (1984), 366–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Urban, Michael E., ‘Conceptualising Political Power in the USSR: Patterns of Binding and Bonding’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 18 (1985), 207–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ A sample of this literature would include: Harasymiw, Bohdan, Political Elite Recruitment in the Soviet Union (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Ronald J., Soviet Political Elites: The Case of Tiraspol (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Rigby, T. H., Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Moses, Joel C., Regional Party Leadership and Policy-Making in the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1974)Google Scholar; Hodnett, Grey, Leadership in the Soviet National Republics (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1978).Google Scholar

⁵ Discussions of the nomenklatura system can be found in Harasymiw, , Political Elite RecruitmentGoogle Scholar; Hough, Jerry F., The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Voslensky, Michael, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984).Google Scholar

⁶ Miller, John H., ‘Cadres Policy in the Nationality Areas: Recruitment of CPSU First and Second Secretaries in the Non-Russian Republics of the USSR’, Soviet Studies, 29 (1977), 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, John H., ‘Nomenklatura: Check on Localism?’Google Scholar and Jozsa, Gyula, ‘Political Seilschaften in the USSR’, both in Rigby, T. H. and Harasymiw, B., eds, Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 15–61 and pp. 139–73 respectivelyGoogle Scholar; Moses, Joel C., ‘The Impact of Nomenklatura in Soviet Regional Recruitment’, Soviet Union, 8 (1981), 62–102Google Scholar; Moses, Joel C., ‘Regionalism in Soviet Politics: Continuity as a Source of Change’, Soviet Studies, 37 (1985), 184–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blackwell, Robert E. Jr, ‘Cadres Policy in the Brezhnev Era’, Problems of Communism, 28 (1979), 29–42.Google Scholar

⁷ Bunce, Valerie, ‘Of Power, Policy and Paradigms: The Logic of Elite Studies’, in Linden, R. H. and Rockman, B. H.. eds, Elite Studies and Communist Politics: Essays in Memory nfCarl Beck (Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1984), pp. 21–48; esp. p. 26.Google Scholar

⁸ Stewman, Shelby, ‘Two Markov Models of Open System Occupational Mobility: Underlying Conceptualizations and Empirical Tests’, American Sociological Review, 40 (1975), 298–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Konda, Suresh and Stewman, Shelby, ‘An Opportunity Labor Demand Model and Markovian Labor Supply Models: Comparative Tests in an Organization’, American Sociological Review, 45 (1980), 276–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Konda, Suresh and Stewman, Shelby, ‘Careers and Organizational Labor Markets: Demographic Models of Organizational Behavior’, American Journal of Sociology, 88 (1983), 637–85Google Scholar; Marullo, Sam, ‘Housing Opportunities and Vacancy Chains’, Urban Affairs Quarterly, 20 (1985), 364–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ Vakar, Nicholas P., Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guthier, Stephen L., ‘The Belorussians: National Identification and Assimilation, 1897–1970’ (part 1 and part 2), Soviet Studies, 29 (1977), 37–61, 270–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Szporluk, Roman, ‘West Ukraine and West Belorussia’, Soviet Studies, 31 (1979), 76–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ The main source for these data is the daily, Sovetskaya Belorussiya, over the period 01 1966-06 1986Google Scholar. I also relied on the monthly, Kommunist Belorussii (1976-06 1986)Google Scholar, selected numbers of the daily, Zvyazda, and on listings which appeared (far less frequently, of course) in Sovety narodnykh deputatov (01 1976-06 1986)Google Scholar and Izuestiya (1983–1986)Google Scholar. Some data were taken from Soviet personnel directories compiled by the CIA, from Ogareff, Val's Leaders in the Soviet Republics (Canberra: Department of Political Science, Australian National University, 1980)Google Scholar, and from the short biographies in relevant editions of Deputaty Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR.

¹¹ Hough, , The Soviet Prefects, passim.Google Scholar

¹² To be sure, individual scholars in the field have devised ranking systems for positions in the Soviet Union. However, these are either of a purely nominal type (Stewart, Philip D. et al. , ‘Political Mobility and the Soviet Political Process: A Partial Test of Two Models’, American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 1269–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar) or refer to a single set of positions (Frank, Peter, ‘Constructing a Classified Ranking of CPSU Provincial Committees’, British Journal of Political Science, 4 (1974), 217–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar). The latter is obviously of no use for present purposes because we are dealing here with multiple sets of positions, while the former provides no basis for the validity of the ranking scheme. For details on this problem and on the mobility-generated hierarchy used here, see Urban, Michael E., ‘Elite Stratification and Mobility in a Soviet Republic’, in Lane, David, ed., Elites and Political Power in the USSR (London: Edward Elgar, 1988).Google Scholar

¹³ Limitations of space preclude a full listing of the 2,034 jobs ranked in the ten strata. In order to provide an idea as to the ranking itself, however, a summary of the positions ranked in Strata 2–10 may be useful. In Stratum 2, in addition to those jobs specified at the outset as noted in the text: Head of the Propaganda Department of the KPB, five obkom first secretaries, First Secretary of the Minsk gorkom, six deputy chairs of the Council of Ministers and the Minister of Industrial Construction, BSSR. In Stratum 3 appear eight department heads of the KPB, thirty ministers of the BSSR, the chairs of ohlispolkoms, three directors of major industrial enterprises, six chairs of state committees and the Procurator of the BSSR. Stratum 4 includes ten department heads of the KPB (as well as the first deputy heads of most of the departments ranked in Stratum 3), eleven obkom secretaries, the first secretaries of a number of large yorkoms and urban raifcoms, twenty-three deputy ministers, three newspaper editors and the First Secretary of the Komsomol. Strata 5–7 include 1,043 jobs of varied formal rank from chairs of state committees through instructors of the KPB and department heads in the ministries to presidents of raiispolkoms. The bottom three strata contain some 779 positions such as gorkom and raikom secretaries, heads and deputy heads of departments in obkoms, gorkoms, raikoms, oblispolkoms, gorispoikoms and raiispolkoms, and directors, party secretaries and trade-union chairs in large industrial firms.

¹⁴ White, Harrison C., Chains of Opportunity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bartholomew, D. J., Stochastic Models for Social Processes, 3rd edn (New York: Wiley, 1982), pp. 244–7.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For a development of this point, see: Kemeny, John G. et al. , Introduction to Finite Mathematics, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966)Google Scholar; Namboodiri, Krishnan, Matrix Algebra: An Introduction (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ These have been adapted from White, , Chains of Opportunity, passim.Google Scholar

¹⁷ For a discussion of this question in the context of other settings, see White, , Chains of Opportunity, pp. 100–44Google Scholar; Marullo, , ‘Housing Opportunities’, pp. 383–8.Google Scholar

¹⁸ White, , Chains of Opportunity, pp. 308–10.Google Scholar

¹⁹ White, , Chains of Opportunity, p. 104.Google Scholar

²⁰ Conover, W. J., Practical Nonparametric Statistics (New York: Wiley, 1971), pp. 293–8.Google Scholar

²¹ Miller, , ‘Cadres Policy in the Nationality Areas’Google Scholar; Cleary, J. W., ‘Elite Career Patterns in a Soviet Republic’. British Journal of Political Science, 4 (1974), 323–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Brovka, P. U. et al. , Belorusskaya Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (Minsk: Glavnaya redaktsiya Belorusskoi Sovetskoi entsiklopedii, 1978), p. 587.Google Scholar

²³ I am indebted to Alexander Rahr for this observation on the leadership of delegations to congresses of the CPSU.

²⁴ Urban, Michael E. and Reed, Russell B., ‘Regionalism in a Systems Perspective: Explaining Elite Circulation in a Soviet Republic’, Slavic Review (forthcoming).Google Scholar

²⁵ For the period 1966–76, the predicted mode in the distribution of chain lengths is 1 (28.6 per cent) while the observed mode is 3 (26.8 per cent). For the 1977–86 period, the predicted mode is, again, 1 (29.4 per cent) and the observed mode is 2 (39.6 per cent).

²⁶ McGrath, W. J., ‘The Politics of Soviet Federalism’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Carleton University, Ottawa, 1981), pp. 107–87Google Scholar; Brovka, et al. , Belorusskaya Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika, pp. 286–98.Google Scholar