Abstract
It is not so very long ago that there was an almost unquestioning acceptance among Western scholars that the concept of totalitarianism provided the single key to understanding the nature of the Soviet state. That view — perhaps in a modified version, that it is the best key available — still has its defenders, but it has increasingly been challenged ever since it first came under serious attack in the 1960s. In the Soviet Union itself the same decade saw the opening shots fired in a campaign to have power relations within the Soviet and other political systems discussed more realistically and less propagandistically than hitherto in the context of the development of a discipline of political science.2 It is only in recent years, however, that serious debate on the nature of political power and on the concepts of the state and the political system has been conducted in specialist Soviet journals and small-circulation books. One of the purposes of this chapter is to bring together such writings by Soviet scholars and the writings of Western political scientists on the nature of power relations within the Soviet system, partly on account of the intrinsic interest of both and also to see what relevance, if any, the Soviet discussions bear to Western arguments concerning the nature of the system.
This is a considerably expanded and revised version of a chapter that will appear in Susan Gross Solomon (ed.), Pluralism in the Soviet Union (London, 1983). It has been read in one or other of its two previous drafts by Robert A. Dahl, Neil Harding, Michael Lessnoff, Steven Lukes, Mary McAuley, David Nicholls, T. H. Rigby, Susan Solomon and Gordon Wightman. I am most grateful to them for their helpful comments.
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Notes
See F. Burlatsky, ‘Politika i nauka’, Pravda, 10 January 1965, p. 4. For discussion of this article and some of the subsequent developments along the road to a Soviet political science, see D.E. Powell and P. Shoup, ‘The Emergence of Political Science in Communist Countries’, American Political Science Review, vol. LXIV no. 2 (June 1970) pp. 572–88;
R.H.W. Theen, ‘Political Science in the USSR: “To Be or Not to Be”’, World Politics, vol. XXIII, no. 4 (July 1971) pp. 684–703;
R.H.W. Theen, ‘Political Science in the Soviet Union’, Problems of Communism, vol. XXI, no. 3 (1972) pp. 64–70; and
R.J. Hill, Soviet Politics, Political Science and Reform (Oxford, 1980).
R. Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford, 1977) p. 8.
Illustrations from the Soviet discussion will be given in the second half of this chapter. Western Marxist statements along these lines are exceedingly numerous. See, for instance, L. Althusser, For Marx (Harmondsworth, 1969) p. 240; and Miliband, Marxism and Politics, pp. 114–16. Althusser, objecting to the concept of the ‘cult of personality’, places Stalinism firmly in the context of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the ‘superstructure’. Miliband, while paying attention to the ‘extreme example’ of Stalin (p. 115), goes further than Althusser and writes of ‘the state’ in Communist systems generally as having ‘a very high degree of autonomy from society’ (p. 116, Miliband’s italics).
The most prominent advocate of an ‘institutional pluralist’ interpretation of Soviet politics (though he has also adopted the terminology, ‘institutionalised pluralism’) has been J. F. Hough. See especially his The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); and also J. F. Hough and M. Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Interesting ‘bureaucratic pluralist’ interpretations of Soviet politics include those of
D. P. Hammer, USSR: The Politics of Oligarchy (Hinsdale, Ill., 1974); and
W. Taubman, Governing Soviet Cities: Bureaucratic Politics and Urban Development in the USSR (New York, 1973). An example of an author who uses ‘pluralist’ terminology to describe institutional conflicts and rivalries within the Soviet Union, but is less inclined to make this the main defining characteristic of Soviet politics, is
G. Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’, American Political Science Review, vol. LXIV, no. 4 (December 1970) p. 1034.
The literature on totalitarianism is very extensive. The most influential early works were H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1967) (first published 1951);
C. J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1954); and
C. J. Friedrich and Z. K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) (2nd ed, revised by Friedrich, 1965). Among the most significant of more recent discussions are
C. J. Friedrich, M. Curtis and B. R. Barber, Totalitarianism in Perspective: Three Views (London, 1969);
L. Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London, 1972); and
J. L. Linz, ‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes’, in F. I. Greenstein and N. W. Polsby (eds), Handbook of Political Science, Volume 3: Macro-political Theory (Reading, Mass., 1975) pp. 175–411.
See, for example, W. Brus, Socialist Ownership and Political Systems (London, 1975) esp. pp. 140–2 and 213; and
Z. Mlynář, ‘The Rules of the Game: The Soviet Bloc Today’, The Political Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4 (October–December 1979) pp. 403–19.
See D. Easton, The Political System: An Enquiry into the State of Political Science (New York, 1953) esp. pp. 106–7 and 142; and
D. Easton, ‘The Political System Besieged by the State’, Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 3 (August 1981) pp. 303–25. The reference to the collector of the 145 definitions of the state (The Political System, p. 107) is to
J. W. Garner, Political Science and Government (New York, 1928) p. 9.
For criticism along these lines, see, for example, A. C. Janos, ‘Group Politics in Communist Society: A Second Look at the Pluralist Model’, in S. P. Huntington and C. H. Moore (eds), Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society (New York, 1970) pp. 437–50; J. J. Linz, ‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes’, in Greenstein and Polsby, Handbook of Political Science, pp. 175–411;
J. LaPalombara, ‘Monoliths or Plural Systems: Through Conceptual Lenses Darkly’, Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. VIII, no. 3 (Autumn 1975) pp. 304–32; and
A. Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, 1978) (Part One, ‘The Role of the State: Concepts and Comparisons’). See also
A. C. Janos (ed.), Authoritarian Politics in Communist Europe: Uniformity and Diversity in One-Party States (Berkeley, Calif., 1976). For an early, perceptive and open-minded consideration of the problem, see
B. Harasymiw, ‘Application of the Concept of Pluralism to the Soviet Political System’, Newsletter on Comparative Studies of Communism, vol. V, no. 1 (November 1971) pp. 40–54.
D. Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London, 1975).
D. Nicholls, Three Varieties of Pluralism (London, 1974).
See, for example, J. J. Wiatr, ‘Elements of Pluralism in the Polish Political System’, The Polish Sociological Bulletin, no. 1 (1966); J. J. Wiatr and A. Przeworski, ‘Control without Opposition’, Government and Opposition, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1966) pp. 227–39;
J. J. Wiatr, Essays in Political Sociology (Warsaw, 1978); S. Ehrlich, ‘Le Problème du Pluralisme’, L’Homme et la Societé, no. V (Juillet–September, 1967) pp. 113–18;
S. Ehrlich, ‘Pluralism and Marxism’, in S. Ehrlich and G. Wootton (eds), Three Faces of Pluralism: Political, Ethnic and Religious (Farnborough, 1980) pp. 34–45; and
V. Klokočka, Volby v pluralitních democraciích (Prague, 1968). For discussion of the ideas of the advocates of pluralism within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, see
H. G. Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, 1976) esp. pp. 333–72;
F. M. Barnard and R. A. Vernon, ‘Socialist Pluralism and Pluralist Socialism’, Political Studies, vol. XXV, no. 4 (December 1977) pp. 474–90; and Z. Mlynář, ‘Notions of Political Pluralism in the Policy of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1968’, a product of a research project under Mlynář’s direction, ‘Experiences of the Prague Spring 1968’, Working Paper No. 3.
For two East European critiques of Communists’ advocacy of pluralism — the first a measured and thoughtful analysis by a Hungarian scholar and the second a much more polemical, though also interesting, attack by a Bulgarian philosopher — see P. Hardi, ‘Why do Communist Parties Advocate Pluralism?’, World Politics, vol. XXXII, no. 4 (July 1980) pp. 531–52; and
A. Kozharov, Monizm i plyuralizm v ideologii i politike (Moscow, 1976).
E. Kardelj, Democracy and Socialism (London, 1978) esp. pp. 115–40.
R. A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs Control, (New Haven, 1982) p. 5. See also
R. A. Dahl, ‘Pluralism Revisited’, Comparative Politics, vol. 10, no. 2 (January 1978) pp. 191–203 (reprinted in Ehrlich and Wootton, Three Faces of Pluralism, pp. 20–33).
Partly as a consequence, this applies also to some criticisms of ‘pluralist’ interpretations of Soviet politics, among them S. White’s ‘Communist Systems and the “Iron Law of Pluralism”’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. VIII, no. 1 (January 1978) pp. 101–17. White provides interesting information on the number of sessions, speeches per session, etc. in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU for the years 1954–75, but as tests of the ‘iron law of pluralism’ they are of but marginal relevance. The suggestion that ‘an increased degree of interest articulation and aggregation within the Central Committee of the CPSU’ would signify pluralism is especially dubious. Even a shift in the balance of power between leading party organs — with, say, more interest mediation taking place in the Central Committee and less in the Politburo and Secretariat — would not of itself constitute pluralism. In so far as the bare statistics of meetings tend to disconfirm anything, they might be regarded as undermining either a ‘corporatist’ or an ‘inner-party democratisation’ interpretation of developments within the Soviet Union. That they do not take us very far is, however, suggested by the extent to which formal and informal access to information (Central Committee members receive minutes, though possibly abbreviated ones, of Politburo meetings) and access to key people within the Central Committee building, whether by personal visit or by telephone, may be more important than most plenary sessions of the Committee. A trenchant attack on the idea that the Soviet Union is ‘pluralist’ (except in such a broad sense of the term that Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia would also rank as pluralist) is contained in a more recent article in the same journal:
A. J. Groth, ‘USSR: Pluralist Monolith?’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 9, part 4 (October 1979) pp. 445–64. Groth, however, is less than fair to his principal antagonist, J. Hough, when he complains that ‘Hough’s discussion of the Soviet political system… is almost wholly devoid of institutional considerations’ (p. 447).
For a summary and analysis of the evidence available up to the early 1970s, see my Soviet Politics and Political Science (London, 1974) ch. 3, ‘Groups, Interests and the Policy Process’, pp. 71–88. Much information, relevant to this theme, is to be found in H. G. Skilling and F. Griffiths (eds), Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, 1971). For more recent contributions, see
R. B. Remneck (ed.), Social Scientists and Policy-Making in the USSR (New York, 1977);
P. H. Solomon, Jr, Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy: Specialists in Policy-Making (London, 1978);
J. Löwenhardt, Decision Making in Soviet Politics (London, 1981);
T. Gustafson, Reform in Soviet Politics: Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water (Cambridge, 1981); and
L. Holmes, The Policy Process in Communist States: Politics and Industrial Administration (London, 1981).
For examples of diffusion of influence under Stalin, see T. Dunmore, The Stalinist Command Economy: The Soviet State Apparatus and Economic Policy 1945–53 (London, 1981);
A. Kemp-Welch, ‘Stalinism and Intellectual Order’, in T. H. Rigby, A. Brown and P. Reddaway (eds), Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR (London, 1980) pp. 118–34; P. H. Solomon, Jr, ‘Specialists in Soviet Policy Making: Criminal Policy, 1938–70’, in Remneck (ed.), Social Scientists and Policy Making in the USSR pp. 1–33, esp. 4–6; Solomon, Jr, Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy, esp. pp. 32–4 and 146–7; and
W. O. McCagg, Jr, Stalin Embattled, 1943–1948 (Detroit, 1978).
Though Gordon Skilling has been opposed to the description of the Soviet Union as a type of pluralist system, ten years ago he wrote: ‘the system is operating differently than it did under Stalin, in part as a result of increased activity by political groups which have attained a certain degree of autonomy of action. In that sense Soviet society has shown signs of at least an incipient pluralism’ (in Skilling and Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, p. 44). Even Schapiro, who has shown no sympathy for interpretations that make pluralism a key feature of the Soviet political system, has written of totalitarianism co-existing ‘with dissent, incipient pressure groups and some pluralism of institutions in the Soviet Union’ (my italics) in his Totalitarianism, p. 124. Perhaps misleadingly, in terms of Dahl’s definition, which I now accept as the best way of making pluralism a somewhat more rigorous and useful concept, I have myself written of ‘elements of pluralism’ within the Soviet system, in Soviet Politics and Political Science, p. 74, and of ‘a limited institutional or bureaucratic pluralism — in some areas of policy very limited indeed’ — in A. Brown and M. Kaser (eds), The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khrushchev, 2nd edn (London, 1978) p.245. Like Skilling and Schapiro, however, I have never found it particularly useful to regard the Soviet Union as a ‘type of pluralist system’, even though I would interpret the concept of totalitarianism differently from Schapiro and do not find its application to the contemporary Soviet Union very useful.
Notable contributions of an empirical or theoretical nature to the debate on elites and pluralism and community power within the United States include the following: P. Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston, 1967);
R. A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, 1961);
G. W. Domhoff, Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined (Santa Monica, 1978);
R. A. Dahl, ‘Who Really Rules’, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 1 (June 1979) pp. 144–51;
F. Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill, 1953);
R. S. Lynd and H. M. Lynd, Middletown (New York, 1929);
R. S. Lynd and H. M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York, 1937);
J. J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York 1980);
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956);
N. W. Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory: A Further Look at Problems of Evidence and Inference, 2nd, enlarged edn (New Haven, 1980);
W. L. Warner et al., Democracy in Jonesville (New York, 1949); and
R. E. Wolfinger, The Politics of Progress (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974). Four British contributions to the debate (of which only Newton’s has a case-study base) worthy of note are:
S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London, 1974); Nicholls, Three Varieties of Pluralism;
K. Newton, Second City Politics: Democratic Processes and Decision-Making in Birmingham (Oxford, 1976); and
G. Parry, Political Elites (London, 1969).
See, for instance, the exchange between N. W. Polsby and K. Newton, Political Studies, vol. XXVII, no. 4 (December 1979) esp. pp. 530–1 and 543; also Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, Appendix A, pp. 207–9.
Even the party daily newspaper, Rudé právo, was not under the full control of the party leadership, nor, indeed, that of its editor, Oldřich Švestka. One article which was an embarrassment to the Czechoslovak party leadership, in view of Soviet sensitivities, was, for example, that on the front page of Rudé právo, 16 April 1968, which discussed the pros and cons of whether Jan Masaryk’s death in 1948 was by suicide or murder, and held that the possibility of Soviet involvement was worth further investigation. See H. G. Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, 1976) p. 381.
For a graph showing the pattern of popular trust in Czechoslovak politicians, 1968–9, and discussion of it, see A. Brown and G. Wightman, ‘Czechoslovakia: Revival and Retreat’, in A. Brown and J. Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London, 1977) (2nd edn, 1979) esp. pp. 174–6. For more extensive coverage of opinion-polling in Czechoslovakia in that period, see
J. A. Piekalkiewicz, Public Opinion Polling in Czechoslovakia, 1968–69: Results and Analysis of Surveys Conducted During the Dubček Era (New York, 1972).
V. V. Kusin, Political Grouping in the Czechoslovak Reform Movement (London, 1972) pp. 176–91; and
G. Golan, Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia: The Dubček Era 1968–1969 (Cambridge, 1973) pp. 80–82.
For a good general account of developments within Czechoslovakia during the 1970s, see V. V. Kusin, From Dubček to Charter 77: Czechoslovakia 1968–78 (Edinburgh, 1978).
Note, in particular, the letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Pravda, 12 June 1981, p. 2, and subsequent Soviet support for the martial-law regime. For four useful accounts of events in Poland in 1980–1 (the first and last of which also provide some of the essential historical context), see N. Ascherson, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1981);
D. McShane, Solidarity: Poland’s Independent Trade Union (Nottingham, 1981);
K. Ruane, The Polish Challenge (London, 1982); and
J. Woodall (ed.), Policy and Politics in Contemporary Poland: Reform, Failure and Crisis (London, 1982).
H. G. Skilling, ‘Interest Groups and Communist Politics’, World Politics, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (April 1966) p. 449. In an article published in the same month I used the term, ‘pluralistic trends’, with reference specifically to Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s. See A. H. Brown, ‘Pluralistic Trends in Czechoslovakia’, Soviet Studies, vol. XVII, no. 4 (April 1966) pp.453–72. As early as 1953, it should be noted, Karl Deutsch had raised the theoretical possibility of an ‘automatic drift toward pluralization and disintegration’ of ‘totalitarian regimes’ which, in the Soviet case, he believed could be staved off ‘for a considerable time’. See K. W. Deutsch, ‘Cracks in the Monolith: Possibilities and Patterns of Disintegration in Totalitarian Systems’, in Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism, p. 311.
H. Seidman, Politics, Position and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization (Oxford and New York (3rd ed.), 1980) p. 322.
H. Heclo, A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in Washington (Washington, DC, 1977) p. 12. See also Heclo on ‘issue networks’ (a concept which might well have some application in the Soviet context) in
A. King (ed.), The New American Political System (Washington, DC, 1978) pp. 87–124.
R. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership From FDR to Carter (New York, 1980 edn) p. 242.
Z. Mlynář, Night Frost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism (London, 1980) p. 111.
Ibid, p. 53; and the slightly fuller version in Z. Mlynář, Mráz prichází z Kremlu (Cologne, 1978) p. 69.
R. Rose, ‘Government against Sub-governments: A European Perspective on Washington’, in R. Rose and E. N. Suleiman (eds), Presidents and Prime Ministers (Washington, DC, 1980) p. 294.
See P. C. Schmitter, ‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’, The Review of Politics, vol. 36 (January 1974) pp. 85–139, esp. pp. 93–4, and ‘Models of Interest Intermediation and Models of Societal Change in Western Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1977) pp. 7–38, esp. p. 9. Among those who have used Schmitter’s definition (though several of them also express certain reservations) are Linz, ‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes’, p. 307; Stepan, The State and Society, p. 66;
L. Panitch, ‘The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1977) p. 64; and
L. A. Mammergren, ‘Corporatism in Latin American Politics: A Re-examination of the “Unique” Tradition’, Comparative Politics, vol. 9, no. 4 (July 1977) p. 466.
V. Bunce and J. M. Echols III, ‘Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era: “Pluralism” or “Corporatism”?’, in D. R. Kelley (ed.), Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era (New York, 1980) pp. 1–26, esp. pp. 19–20. For a brief discussion of what he calls the ‘corporate perspective’ on Soviet politics, see also
G. Breslauer, ‘Reformism, Conservatism, and Leadership Authority at the 26th Party Congress’, in S. Bialer and T. Gustafson (eds), Russia at the Crossroads: The 26th Congress of the CPSU (London, 1982) pp. 65–86, esp. 80–85.
On the nomenklatura, see B. Harasymiw, ‘Nomenklatura: The Soviet Communist Party’s Leadership Recruitment System’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. II, no. 4 (December 1969) pp. 493–512;
B. Harasymiw, Political Elite Recruitment in the USSR (London, 1983) (forthcoming);
J. H. Miller, ‘The Communist Party: Trends and Problems’, in A. Brown and M. Kaser (eds), Soviet Policy for the 1980s (London, 1982) pp. 1–34, esp. 20–23;
R.H.W. Theen, ‘Party and Bureaucracy’, in G. B. Smith (ed.), Public Policy and Administration in the Soviet Union (New York, 1980) pp. 18–52, esp. 38–44; and
M. Voslensky, La Nomenklatura (Paris, 1980).
R. A. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (London, 1975) p. 404.
See, for example, F. M. Burlatsky, Lenin, Gosurdarstvo, Politika (Moscow, 1970);
G. Shaknazarov, Sotsialistischeskaya demokratiya: nekotorye voprosy teorii (Moscow, 1972); and
R. A. Safarov, Obschestvennoe mnenie i gosudarstvennoe upravlenie (Moscow, 1975).
Yu. A. Tikhomirov, ‘Razvitie nauchnykh znaniy o sotsialisticheskom gosudarstve’, in D. A. Kerimov, V. E. Chirkin and G. Kh. Shakhnazarov (eds), Politika mira i razvitie politicheskikh sistem (Moscow, 1979) p. 37.
G. Shakhnazarov, The Destiny of the World: The Socialist Shape of Things to Come (Moscow, 1978) p. 153.
The word appeared as ‘obsolete’ in the major Soviet dictionary produced in the 1930s, Tolkovyy slovar’ russkogo yazyka, ed. D. N. Ushakov (Moscow, 1935). More surprisingly (and perhaps more questionably) it was classified as ‘obsolete’ as recently as the early 1970s in the
Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, ed. M. Wheeler (Oxford 1972).
As expressed in Yu A. Tikhomirov, Mekhanizm upravleniya v razvitom sotsialisticheskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1978); and in ‘Sotsializm i politicheskaya vlast”, Sovektskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 5 (1974) pp. 11–19.
V. S. Shevtsov, Gosudarstvennyy suverenitet (Voprosy teorii) (Moscow, 1979). The tirazh of Shevtsov’s book is by Soviet standards fairly small: 2,400. The criticism of Tikhomirov’s views occurs on pages 16 and 157. Shevtsov, a prominent jurist and party ideologist, was until recently an official within the Department of Science and Education of the Central Committee of the CPSU and a member of the executive committee of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences. Apart from Gosudarstvennyy suverenitet, his books include Natsional’nyy suyerenitet (problemy teorii i metodologii) (Moscow 1979); Citizenship of the USSR (A Legal Study) (Moscow 1979); Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe ustroystvo SSSR (Moscow, 1978); and Sotsial’no-politicheskie osnovy edinstva sovetskogo naroda (Moscow, 1975).
Burlatsky is the head of the Department of Philosophy at the Institute of Social Sciences which comes under the jurisdiction of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Party. Since 1982 he has held in addition an appointment at the USA and Canada Institute of the Academy of Sciences and he is a Vice-President of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences. As a young member of the party apparatus and as one of the authors of the book Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and of the 1961 Party Programme he was remarkably influential in the late Khrushchev years. When Otto Kuusinen and Burlatsky, together with other members of a group under Kuusinen’s direction, first put forward the idea of the ‘all-people’s state’ the high-level party reaction was one of shock, and the proposal was condemned as revisionist by some of the more conservative members of the leadership. The concept was, however, endorsed by Khrushchev and given the status of official doctrine in the 1961 Party Programme, though it was to suffer a partial and temporary eclipse in the early Brezhnev years. See F. M. Burlatsky, ‘O.V. Kuusinen — Marksistsko-Leninskoy issledovatel’ i teoretik’, Rabochiy klass i sovremenniy mir, no. 6 (1979) pp. 99–104; and R. E. Kanet, ‘The Rise and Fall of the “All-People’s State”: Recent Changes in the Soviet Theory of the State’, Soviet Studies, vol. XX, no. 1, (July 1968) pp. 81–93. The idea has been fully rehabilitated only since the appearance of the 1977 Constitution, though even then with an emphasis on the relative continuity between the ‘all-people’s state’ and the stage of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which was absent in Khrushchev’s time. On Burlatsky and his contributions to the formulation of the concepts of the ‘all-people’s state’ under Khrushchev and of ‘developed socialism’ under Brezhnev, see also Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory, pp. 112 and 256; and Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, p. 255.
See especially V. G. Kalensky, Gosudarstvo kak ob’ekt sotsiologicheskogo analiza (ocherki istorii i metodologii issledovaniya) (Moscow, 1977), and ‘Problemy sotsiologii gosudarstva v istorii politiko-pravovoy mysli’, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 5 (1979) pp. 117–22.
Ibid, pp. 50–1. L. S. Mamut, in his Karl Marks kak teoretik gosudarstva (Moscow, 1979) notes (p. 166) that Marx used the concept of public power in a variety of different senses. Referring (p. 178) to
G. N. Manov, Gosudarstvo i politicheskaya organizatsiya obshchestva (Moscow, 1974) and to Burlatsky’s ‘Politicheskaya sistema razvitogo sotsializma’, Voprosy filosofii, no. 8 (1977), Mamut notes that ‘the state’ is regarded by these authors ‘as one of the institutions of the political organisation, of the political system’, and for ‘such a formulation of the problem’, he adds, there are ‘now weighty reasons’. ‘However,’ he goes on, ‘the problem of distinguishing the state and the political organisation of society, the state and the political system, the problem of their links and relations, so controversial today, had hardly been raised so sharply in Marx’s time. Therefore, he did not specially single it out and analyse it.’
V. S. Shevtsov, ‘Politicheskaya vlast’ v sisteme politicheskoy organizatsii sovetskogo obshchestva’, in D. A. Kerimov (ed.), Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, politika i lichnost’ (Moscow, 1976) pp. 35–44, esp. p. 40.
V. M. Terletsky, Leninskoe ideynoe nasledie i problemy sovetskogo stroitel’stva (Kiev, 1974) pp. 214–15.
V. S. Shevtsov, ‘Sushchnost’ i osnovnye napravleniya razvitiya politicheskoy sistemy sovetskogo obshchestva’, in N. N. Razumovich (ed.), Politicheskoya sistema sovetskogo obshchestva (Moscow, 1980) vol. 1, pp. 7–64, esp. pp. 17, 19 (where Shevtsov briefly crosses swords with ‘the English bourgeois sociologist, R. Miliband’), 22 and 34–6.
M. Kh. Farukshin, Polit icheskaya sistema razvitogo sotsializma i sovremennyy antikommunizm (k kritike burzhuaznoy sovetologii) (Kazan’, 1980). I am grateful to Ronald Hill for bringing this book to my attention.
See, for example, V. E. Chirkin (ed.), Razvitie politicheskikh sistem v sovremennom mire (Moscow, 1981), which has a tirazh of only 750 and where this point is made in a prefatory note from the editorial board.
The Soviet literature on ‘political power in Soviet society’ was reviewed in a 1977 Moscow dissertation, in which the author placed Soviet scholars in three different groups in terms of their use of the concept of power ‘as a general sociological category’. In this particular classification, the distinctions are between (1) those who see power as the leadership, direction and co-ordination of people’s actions; (2) those (whom the author sees as composing the largest group and in which he includes Burlatsky) who define power as the ‘right and possibility’ or ‘ability’ to subordinate the wills of individuals to the predominant wishes in a given association; and (3) those who identify power directly with coercion or subordination. See V. L. Usachev, Politicheskaya vlast’ v Sovetskom obshchestve (avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoy stepeni kandidata yuridicheskikh nauk) (Moscow, 1977) esp. p. 4.
Ibid. For an example of a book that takes a similar view of power within the political system, while using the terminology, ‘Political organisation of Soviet society’ for what should now, in Shakhnazarov’s and Burlatsky’s terms, be ‘the Soviet political system’, see M. N. Marchenko, Politicheskaya organizatsiya sovetskogo obshchestva i ee burzhuaznye fal’sifikatory (Moscow, 1973) esp. p. 40 and pp. 69–70.
For a discussion of the exceptions admitted by Marx to his ‘general description of the state as an instrument of class domination’, see also D. McLellan, ‘Marx, Engels and Lenin on Party and State’, in L. Holmes (ed.), The Withering Away of the State? Party and State under Communism (London, 1981) pp. 7–31, esp. 20–2; and for an analysis of the position not only of Marx but also of contemporary Western Marxists on ‘the state as a political force’, see
F. Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (London, 1979) esp. his chapter, ‘Social Cleavages and the Forms of State’, pp. 119–42.
Apart from numerous articles, he published a well-informed book on American political science which R.H.W. Theen took as his major point of reference for an entire article on Soviet political science. See V. G. Kalensky, Politicheskaya nauka v SShA: kritika burzhuaznykh kontseptsiy vlasti (Moscow, 1969); and R.H.W. Theen, ‘Political Science in the USSR: “To Be or Not to Be”’ (see note 2).
His latest book is devoted to the political thought of James Madison. See V. G. Kalensky, Madison (Moscow, 1981).
Jack Hayward has suggested that both the terms, ‘state’ and ‘society’, have ‘a misleadingly monolithic ring about them’, that this is especially true of the former, and that this is ‘one reason why many political scientists eschew the term “state” and prefer “political system”’. See J. Hayward and R. N. Berki (eds), State and Society in Contemporary Europe (Oxford, 1979) p. 23.
A view expressed, for example, by Z. Mlynář, ‘The Rules of the Game: The Soviet Bloc Today’, The Political Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4 (October–December 1979) p. 407.
For valuable accounts of this evolution, see D. Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948–1974, (London, for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1977); and
A. Carter, Democratic Reform in Yugoslavia: The Changing Role of the Party (London, 1982).
See H. G. Skilling, ‘Interest Groups and Communist Politics’, World Politics, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (April 1966) p. 449. Cf.
H. G. Skilling, ‘Pluralism in Communist Societies: Straw Men and Red Herrings’, Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. XIII, no. 1 (Spring 1980) p. 84.
See, for example, J. F. Hough, ‘The Evolution of the Soviet World View’, World Politics, vol. XXXII, no. 4 (July 1980) pp. 509–30;
M. Schwartz, Soviet Perceptions of the United States (Berkeley and London, 1978); and
S. Bialer (ed.), The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colorado, 1981) esp. the chapter by A. Dallin, ‘The Domestic Sources of Soviet Foreign Policy’, pp. 335–408. Other writers continue to see only the undifferentiated view of ‘Moscow’s spokesmen’. See, for instance,
S. P. Gibert, Soviet Images of America (London, 1977).
This holds true for many areas of social policy, from reform of family law to the problem of explaining and combating crime and to protection of the environment. For useful accounts of debates in these areas of policy, see P. H. Juviler and H. W. Morton, Soviet Policy-Making: Studies of Communism in Transition (London, 1967);
P. H. Juviler, ‘Whom the State has Joined: Conjugal Ties in Soviet Law’, in D. D. Barry, G. Ginsburgs and P. B. Maggs (eds), Soviet Law after Stalin, part I (Leyden, 1977); P. H. Juviler, ‘Crime and Its Study’, in Morton and Tökés (eds), Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s; P. H. Solomon, Jr, Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy;
D. R. Kelley, ‘Environmental Policy-Making in the USSR: The Role of Industrial and Environmental Interest Groups’, Soviet Studies, vol. XXVIII, no. 4 (October 1976) pp. 570–89; and Gustafson, Reform in Soviet Politics: Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water.
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Brown, A. (1984). Political Power and the Soviet State: Western and Soviet Perspectives. In: Harding, N. (eds) The State in Socialist Society. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17408-9_2
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