Abstract
Earlier Western studies of the Soviet Communist Party have reported in greater or lesser detail about the composition of that body and have attempted to interpret the findings either as chronological trends or as expressions of the party leaders’ recruitment policies.[1] Valuable as these are, they nevertheless do not represent studies in recruitment, notwithstanding the presence of this work in some of their titles, for they do not focus, except rarely, on the persons stepping into the party (as the previous chapter has attempted to do), but rather on the persons who are already in the CPSU. Nor do they, in other than a limited manner, draw comparisons between Soviet society and the party, an important aspect of political recruitment. In the present work, on the contrary, a distinction is being made between candidate and full members of the CPSU, and each category is examined from a comparative, analytical perspective rather than a purely descriptive one.
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Notes
See, for example: Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, The Communist Party Apparatus (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1966) ch. 5;
Jan Ake Dellenbrant, ‘Regional differences in political recruitment in the Soviet republics’, European Journal of Political Research, VI (1978) 181–201;
Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, revised edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) ch. 8;
Merle Fainsod, ‘Transformations in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, in Donald W. Treadgold (ed.), Soviet and Chinese Communism: Similarities and Differences (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1967) pp. 42–72;
Michael P. Gehlen, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union: A Functional Analysis (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969) ch. 2;
Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1979) ch. 9;
Terry McNeil, ‘The party and the people: A profile of political recruitment’, Radio Liberty Research, RL 364/76 (20 July 1976);
T. H. Rigby, ‘Social orientation and distribution of membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, American Slavic and East European Review, XVI (1957) 275–90;
T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968);
T. H. Rigby, ‘Soviet Communist Party membership under Brezhnev’, Soviet Studies, XXVIII (1976) 317–37.
In Estonia, the average figure for 1956–70 was 19.1 per cent annually, most of these being in their second year of candidacy (Pankseev, 1967, p. 367, and his ‘Izmeneniia kolichestvennogo i kachestvennogo sostava Kompartii Estonii posle XXIII s”ezda KPSS’, in Nekotorye voprosy organlzatsionno-partiinoi raboty (Tallin: Izdatel’stvo ‘Eesti raamat’, 1971) p. 79). In the period immediately before and after the Second World War, the percentages were much higher. For example, in Estonia in 1961, it was 60.3 (Pankseev, 1967, p. 367). In the USSR in 1932, 44 per cent (Rigby, Communist Party Membership, p. 196). In the Ukraine, on 1 January 1946, of 74,834 candidates fully 74 per cent had had their term of candidacy extended (V. A. Naidion, ‘Nekotorye voprosy organizatsionno-partiinoi raboty Kommunisticheskoi partii Ukrainy v poslevoennye (1946–1950) gody’, in Nekotorye voprosy istorii KPSS (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo VPSh i AON pri TsK KPSS, 1961) p. 120).
By 1955, their proportion had decreased, but only to 39.6 per cent; in certain oblasti, of course, their percentage was much higher than this republic average: Kyiv, 53.4; Kharkiv, 45.3; Donetsk, 44.2; and Luhans’k, 44.1 (M. M. Matviichuk, Orhanlzators’ka robota partii u promyslovosti Ukrainy (1952–1958 rr.) (Kiev: Vydavnytstvo Kyivs’koho universytetu, 1966) p. 27). Apparently, the weeding out of suitable material for full Party membership has, in certain regions, persisted well into the Brezhnev era.
In Kazakhstan, it was reported that those with extended terms constituted 14.1 per cent in 1970, down from 28 per cent four years earlier (M. Tazhin and L. Nikitin, ‘V bor’be za ukreplennie leninskogo printsipa popolneniia partiinykh riadov’, in Voprosy part. stroit. (Alma-Ata, 1972) p. 79; see Appendix).
In 1965, the Party saturation figures were 16.8, 8.0 and 6.9 per cent, respectively; in 1973, 18.5, 9.4 and 8.8 (Bohdan Harasymiw, ‘Developmental trends in Soviet political recruitment’, Berichte des Bundesinstituts für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien, no. 11 (1979) p. 53, Table 25). See also the educational levels for various agricultural occupations in 1970 in Itogi 1970, VI, 625–30.
P. Neshcheretnii, ‘Chlenstvo v partii, povyshenie zvaniia kommunista’, Partiinaia zhizn’, no. 4 (1980) p. 22 (see Appendix). This source also boasts that not only is every fourth engineer or teacher a CPSU member, but so also is every fourth or fifth agricultural specialist, as well as every fifth or sixth physician (p. 23). As one tenth of the entire labour force is comprised of Communists (see Table 5.7), these high ratios among the intelligentsia must naturally be offset by correspondingly much smaller ratios among unnamed other groups — manual workers and peasants, to be exact. For more precise figures on the saturation of persons in the labour force with higher and secondary education, see Table 5.11.
For example, Rigby, Communist Party Membership, p. 407, Jerry F. Hough, ‘Party saturation in the Soviet Union’, in his The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1977) pp. 128–32, and Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, pp. 344 – 6.
In this connection, it should be pointed out that Hough’s assertion that in the late 1970s, ‘approximately half of the men over thirty with a college degree… and over a third of men over thirty with a high school degree alone’ in the Soviet Union were Party members (Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, p. 345) is based on pure guesswork, even though since its publication it has begun to be treated as fact (for instance, by Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union [Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 1980], p. 191). It is guesswork simply because in none of the Party sources cited by Hough, as he himself admits (p. 345), nor indeed anywhere else as far as this writer has been able to ascertain, are levels of education reported by sex or by age groups. Even if Hough’s estimates were correct, it would hardly warrant our abandoning, as he advocates, the term ‘elite’ to describe the Party. Thirty per cent of all people in the Soviet Union with higher education themselves comprise only 10 per cent of the labour force and about 9 per cent of the adult population. Thirty per cent of 10 per cent is still only 3 per cent, a minority of the population in anybody’s book. On quantitative grounds, therefore, which is the basis for Hough’s argument, the Party indeed qualifies as an ‘elite’. On other criteria, developed elsewhere in this work, of course, it fails to do so.
In 1959–60, the coefficient of rank-order correlation between the percentage of Communists in the republic population and that republics per capita net national income was plus 0.1813 (insignificant); in 1970, it was plus 0.5178 (significant at p less than .05). The ranking of republics in terms of national income per capita is taken from Zev Katz, Rosemarie Rogers and Frederic Harned (eds), Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1975) p. 452, Table A.15.
See Peter Zwick, ‘Intrasystem inequality and the symmetry of socioeconomic development in the USSR’, Comparative Politics, VIII (1976) 501–24.
John A. Armstrong, Ideology, Politics, and Government in the Soviet Union, 4th edn (New York: Praeger, 1978) pp. 179–87, and Rigby, Communist Party Membership, pp. 388–9. Indeed, in Moscow and Leningrad in 1970, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Baits and Transcaucasians were all characterized by higher levels of Party membership than Russians themselves. See Harasymiw, ‘Developmenal trends’, p. 63, Table 34. Obviously, the members of these non-Russian nationalities were not merely Party members, but must have been persons with Party jobs in the two cities.
Ralph S. Clem (ed.), The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization (New York: Praeger, 1975).
For detailed studies of the participation of Soviet women in the CPSU, see, for example, Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) ch. 6, and this writer’s ‘Have Women’s Chances for Political Recruitment in the USSR Really Improved?’ in Tova Yedlin (ed.), Women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1980) pp. 140–85.
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© 1984 Bohdan Harasymiw
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Harasymiw, B. (1984). The Pool of Eligibles: Full Members of the CPSU. In: Political Elite Recruitment in the Soviet Union. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17425-6_5
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