I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Ford Foundation in funding part of the research reported in this article. In addition, I thank the following individuals for their useful comments on earlier drafts: Christopher Achen, Richard D. Anderson, Yaroslav Bilinsky, Barbara Ann Chotiner, Jan Åke Dellenbrandt, Gregory Grossman, Peter Hauslohner, Li Jing Jie, Joel Moses, Don Van Atta, and an anonymous reviewer for the Slavic Review.

1. George W. Breslauer, “Is There a Generation Gap in the Soviet Political Establishment?: Demand Articulation by R.S.F.S.R. Provincial Party First Secretaries,” Soviet Studies (January 1984), pp. 1–25.

2. In these studies, I have been coding explicit demands only, rather than engaging in kremlinological analyses of putative esoteric communications. Hence, I have not been tapping into aesopiandebates. For related research that also distinguishes among levels of demands, see Howard L. Biddulph, “Local Interest Articulation at CPSU Congresses,” World Politics (October 1983), pp. 28–52;for a recent analysis of articles by obkom first secretaries, which addresses the generational issueemploying a different method of content analysis, see Mark R. Beissinger, “In Search of Generationsin Soviet Politics,” World Politics (January 1986), pp. 288–314.

3. The interviews were conducted either in person with a tape recorder or through the mail. Tape-recorded interviews were later transcribed. The thirteen informants had held the following positionsin the USSR: head of information department, Vecherniaia Moskva; chief of department, L'vovskaia pravda; editor, Polish obkom newspapers, then correspondent with Polish Workers’ Agencyin Moscow; staff sociologist, Komsomol'skaia pravda; editor in Molodaia gvardiia publishing house;head of department, Sovetskii ekran; head of department, Literaturnaia gazeta and Sovetskie profsoiuzy; journalist for Ogonek and Sovetskaia Rossiia; editor, Znamia and Nash sovremennik; journalist for Literaturnaia gazeta, Izvestiia, Bakinskii rabochii; assistant to member of the CPSU Central Committee; relative of first secretary of a republic; press officer and journalist for Novosti Press Agency. This interview project was entirely distinct from an earlier project conducted in Israel and reported in George W. Breslauer, “Research Note,” Soviet Studies (July 1981), pp. 446–447. I am pleased to acknowledge the conscientious assitance of Valery Golovskoy, who located and, in some cases, interviewed the participants in the most recent project.

4. On patron-client relations in the contemporary USSR, see John P. Willerton, Jr., “Clientelismin the Soviet Union: An Initial Examination,” Studies in Comparative Communism (Summer/Autumn 1979), with comments by Zygmunt Bauman and T.H. Rigby; Graeme Gill, “The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure of Leadership in the Soviet Union,” British Journal of Political Science 10 (April 1980); Rigby, T.H. and Harasymiw, Bohdan, Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983 Google Scholar. Beyond the general agreement in this literature that patron-client ties are reciprocal but unequal, there is considerable ambiguity, and some disagreement, as to the content of the reciprocity involved, the degree of inequality, and the dynamics of the relationship.

5. Expressions of impatience include such phrases as “this is an unpostponable matter,” “there is an urgent need,” “demand the most rapid solution,” and many others. A full listing is provided inBreslauer, “Is There a Generation Gap?” pp. 10–11.

6. I excluded from the analysis suggestions in party congress speeches for revisions in the draftparty statutes, for those suggestions were extraordinarily tepid and limited in scope.

7. As is demonstrated conclusively in Jerry F., Hough, The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1969 Google Scholar, chap. 12; see also ibid., pp. 258–259, where Hough analyzes demands by obkom first secretaries at the Nineteenth Party Congress.

8. For a Soviet commentary that may explain, or simply reflect, the standardized approach toarticles by obkom first secretaries in the late-Stalin era, see “Avtory podlinnye i mnimye” [Authenticand sham authors], Partiinaia zhizri 11 (1954): 63–65. My thanks to Timothy Colton for drawing myattention to this article.

9. This sample was not random. Within each republic, my sample was designed to include the greatest number of secretaries from both the Stalin and post-Stalin political generations and of bothlow-growth and high-growth provinces. Finally, the sample had to exclude several dozen secretaries who published very few articles (fewer than five) in the period covered. Within categories created bythis stratification, the choice of secretaries was random.

10. Precisely when this change took place is, of course, unknown until research of this kind isconducted for the Khrushchev era. My current research on the early-Brezhnev era, to be reported in alater article, confirms that this change had already occurred by then. For the claim that regional firstsecretaries had become national politicians on matters of foreign policy, see Peter Hauslohner, “Prefectsas Senators: Soviet Regional Politicians Look to Foreign Policy,” World Politics (January 1981), pp. 197–233.

11. The only deferential national politician in our sample is V. I. Konotop of Moscow oblast. Irank him low on demandingness because, given his position, we would expect him to speak out on national issues. Given that expectation, we can only be impressed by how limited are his nationaldemands, how bland is his tone, and how fully he avoids making demands for devolution of authority.

12. As a result of using this alternative method of scaling, the only change in the Russian sample's categorization is that Medunov and Voropaiev, who were previously ranked medium in impatientdemandingness, are now ranked high, for the current method encourages dichotomization of this variable.

13. This definition of “co-opted party officials” follows Frederic Fleron, J. Jr. “Cooptation as a Mechanism of Adaptation to Change: The Soviet Political Leadership System,” Polity 2 (Winter 1969): 176–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. I have defined the following secretaries as co-opted: Bespalov, Bogomiakov, Bondarenko, Kliuev, Khristoradnov, Gusev, El'tsin, Kavun, Kachalovskii, Kachura, Makarenko, Morgun, Sakhniuk, larkovoi.

15. Hereafter, I will frequently use the terms, Russians and Ukrainians, to refer to members ofthe two samples. These terms are not meant to be descriptions of ethnicity, for there are Ukrainians serving as obkom or kraikom first secretaries in the Russian republic.

16. In the case of the Ukrainians, other indicators of political status, derived less from theimportance of the oblast than from the personal political connections of the provincial party leader, point in the same direction. Kachalovskii, Dobrik, and Vsevolozhskii had long-standing personal tiesto Brezhnev, through work in Dnepropetrovsk or Zaporozh'e when Brezhnev was a party leader inthose provinces (personal communications from Joel Moses and Yaroslav Bilinsky). Indeed, oneinterviewed emigre from L'vov claimed that Dobrik had been a personal friend of Brezhnev's fromtheir younger days. Morgun had been an associate of Brezhnev's in Kazakhstan in the 1950s and waseven allowed to publish his autobiography during the Brezhnev era.

17. In my earlier study, I tentatively concluded that high political status might be a necessary condition for impatient demandingness among Russian republic first secretaries. That conclusion wasbased upon two indicators: whether a given secretary spoke at either of the party congresses of 1976 and 1981 and whether he received a promotion during the period from 1976 to 1981. That conclusion may have been skewed by the limited scope of the first indicator and by the ambiguity of the evidenceon the second (were Kovalenko and Ermin actually promoted, demoted, or moved to equivalent positions in other bureaucracies?). Still more difficult is the task of documenting the patrons of members of the sample from the Russian republic. For the best effort to date, see John P. Willerton, Jr., “Patronage and Politics in the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1985). We have considerable evidence of the presence of patron-client networks in the USSR and good reason tosuspect patron-client ties between particular Politburo members and several obkom first secretaries, yet we have insufficient evidence for identification of such vertical ties in the case of the great majority of obkom first secretaries. I try to avoid this problem in this article by asking whether and how the behavior of all the putative clients as a category has changed since the Stalin era.

18. See Thane, Gustafson, The Soviet Gas Campaign: Politics and Policy in Soviet Decisionmaking (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1983), chap. 3Google Scholar. Further support for this conclusion can be found in oneresult of my earlier study. On the complex statistical scale applied in that study to the Russians, Chernyi of Khabarovsk actually exceeded Medunov of Krasnodar in impatient demandingness (whereas Chernyi trails Medunov and falls out of the demanding category by the mode of categorization employed in the present study). Now Chernyi, it turns out, rules over Khabarovsk krai, which ranks very low on our formal indicators of political status. Yet Khabarovsk was a major object of Brezhnev's Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railway project, a component of the Siberian development program. Hence, his higher levels of impatient demandingness, relative to others ranked low in thecurrent study, may be a product of circumstantial political status.

19. At this point, it is worth noting several features of the indicators of formal political statusbeing employed here. First, there is probably a strong correlation between delegation size and the population size of the oblast, in which case formal political status is a direct function of size of population. This observation would not change any of our conclusions, but it would push causationfurther back. Second, in the sample as a whole, there is a fairly strong correlation between the probability of presenting a speech at a party congress and the size of the oblast delegation to thecongress. Thus, these two indicators of political status are not entirely independent tests when used to explain variations in demandingness.

20. See Cohn, Stanley H., “Economic Growth,” in The Ukraine within the USSR: An Economic Balance Sheet, ed. Koropeckyj, I. S. (New York: Praeger, 1977 Google Scholar. Another factor to consider is the age structure of the samples. The Ukrainians are younger and more homogeneous in age than the Russians. Among the Russians, ten were born in the years 1909 to 1919, five were born during the period from 1920 to 1925, and thirteen were born in 1926 or after. Among the Ukrainians, only two wereborn between 1909 and 1919, six were born between 1920 and 1925, and ten were born in 1926 orafter. Thus, the older generation is represented much more fully in the Russian sample. It is unlikely, however, that this explains the higher level of impatient demandingness among the Russians. Onecould argue that the older Russians enjoy higher political status and are therefore more likely to bedemanding, but this explanation leaves one unable to account for the fact that younger Russianspredominate among the most demanding of the Russians.

21. Actually, for the Russian republic, we considered only fifty-four of the fifty-five provinces.Leningrad oblast was excluded on the premise that, since its leader was a member of the CPSUPolitburo, he was not a regional politician.

22. This gap would be even larger were we to adjust the publication total of the three demandingsecretaries (Gorbachev, Kovalenko, Ermin) who left their regional positions before 1981.

23. By remanipulating the data in this article and building in “hostile” assumptions about thedistribution of demanding articles among the secretaries not included in my samples, Richard D.Anderson (department of political science, University of California, Berkeley) found a very strong correlation, among both the Russian and Ukrainian secretaries, between the size of the delegation tothe party congress and the number of articles containing demands (of any sort) by the first secretaryfrom that oblast. Thus, using these indicators, Anderson's computations strongly supported the basic theme of this article.

24. Ukrainians classified as high on political status were from those oblasts that ranked high ontwo or more of the three indicators in table 3 (high means full membership of the Central Committee, three or more party congress speeches, and a delegation size that exceeded the Ukrainian average of 40.1 delegates). The Russians classified as high on political status were those that met any of thefollowing criteria: circumstantial political status (as explained in the text, above), above-average delegation size (the RSFSR average was 4S.7 if the Moscow oblast is not considered), or three or moreparty congress speeches.

25. Similarly, my use of the term demands employs the wide definition of the concept found in the work of Gabriel Almond and David Easton; see Almond, Gabriel and Powell, G. Bingham Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 25–26, 87Google Scholar; and David, Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley, 1965), pp. 38ff Google Scholar. Other, more restrictive definitions of the term might instead refer to what we have documented as proposals.

26. See sources cited in note 4. Some confusion could arise, for example, from the fact that it iscommon to refer to center-periphery relations under Stalin as “patron-client” politics, just as it is common to use the same term for such relations in the post-Stalin period. I assume, however, thatchanges since Stalin have so much affected the character of those relations that different terms aredesirable. The alternative to my approach would be to stress the highly asymmetrical exchange relationship under Stalin and the more symmetrical (relative to the Stalinist base) exchange relationship that has developed since Stalin.

27. See George W., Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982 Google Scholar.

28. Zhores, Medvedev, Gorbachev (New York: Norton, 1986, p. 60 Google Scholar, gives the following example of reciprocity in the exchange relationship between patron and client: “The Soviet system of patronageis not only political, consisting of appointments and promotion of clients by patrons. It is a two-way system. Higher officials rely on the support of their followers in the regional Party and government systems, in return for which they help them to obtain priority economic supplies, investment funds and other resources for development…. The economic success of the krai would, in turn, help [thepatron] achieve further promotion. “

29. These generalizations are stated in static terms. They are probably constant features of contemporarySoviet politics, but, because of the centralist bias of the system, a new leader can probablychange the forms and effectiveness of demand articulation or the stage of administration (e.g. theperiod of political succession or the later years of a leader's administration) can affect how the gameis played. The game per se, though, is rooted in the system.