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Bolshevik Administration in the Ukraine—1918
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
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Through 1918 Russia's new Bolshevik rulers, amateurs at the business of governing, were exposed to bureaucratic lessons much faster than they could assimilate them. Administrative techniques and organizational models essential for the direction of an empire had to be hurriedly invented or borrowed and rushed into operation; numerous special arrangements had to be devised for those areas where military crises or nationalist and separatist movements demanded immediate attention. During the process of simultaneously ruling and learning, the Moscow center sometimes received sharp lessons from the peripheries of the empire. Leading figures of the Russian Communist Party were often compelled by circumstances and by the hot tempers and loud voices of their colleagues out in the hustings to listen and learn and adapt themselves to the pressures of facts as others saw them. Passionate theoretical debates gave way to quarrels about the most expedient, most efficient method of getting the work accomplished; and the reciprocal adjustments resulting from this conflict between the center and the men working in the peripheral areas established patterns of thought and habits of action that were to become permanent features of the Soviet administrative system.
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References
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