Abstract
The Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, held at the end of February and the beginning of March 1986, marked the close of one of the major transition periods in Soviet political history. Not only had the country gone through an unprecedented series of leadership changes, with the successive deaths of three national chiefs in less than two and a half years; the replacement of a whole generation in the bureaucratic elite was consummated as well. These experiences, however, did not constitute a crisis for the Soviet political system. Indeed, the continuity of the real mechanisms of power in the Communist Party, dating at least from the death of Stalin and in some respects from the 1920s, was powerfully reaffirmed by the events of 1982–6.
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Notes
See Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), especially chapters 2 and 3; also Stephen White, ‘The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialism’, in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977).
The generational phenomenon is well described in Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) pp. 59–61, 86–9.
Jerry Hough Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington: Brookings, 1980) pp. 37–60
See T. H. Rigby, ‘Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?’, Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3 (July 1986).
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of the New Elite, 1928–1939’, Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (September, 1979).
Edward L. Keenan, ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, The Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April 1986) pp. 167–9. See also Michael S. Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984).
Graeme Gill, ‘Institutionalization and Revolution: Rules and the Soviet Political System’, Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2 (April 1985) pp. 212–26.
See Robert V. Daniels, ‘Office Holding and Elite Status: The Central Committee of the CPSU’, in Paul Cocks, Robert V. Daniels, and Nancy Whittier Heer (eds), The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976) pp. 77–95.
I first spelled out the notion of the ‘circular flow of power’ in ‘Stalin’s Rise to Dictatorship’, in Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin (eds), Politics in the Soviet Union: Seven Cases (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966) pp. 4–5. See also Robert V. Daniels, ‘Soviet Politics since Khrushchev’, in John W. Strong (ed.) The Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Kosygin (New York: Van Nostrand, 1971) pp. 20–1.
Lenin, ‘Freedom of Criticism and Unity of Action’ (June 1906) Soch- ineniia, 2nd edn (Moscow: Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 1928) IX pp. 274–5. Lenin was defending himself against charges of indiscipline by those Social Democrats who were trying to reunite the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. See also Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957) pp. 92–103.
See Ronald Tiersky, Ordinary Stalinism: Democratic Centralism and the Question of Communist Political Development (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985), especially pp. 8, 42. One hint of reviving the democratic component was offered by the Soviet scholar, A. P. Butenko, in ‘Protivo- rechiya razviitiya sotsianlizma kak obshchestvennogo stroya’, Voprosy filosofii, No. 10 (1982).
See Robert V. Daniels, ‘The Secretariat and the Local Organizations in the Russian Communist Party’, The American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. XVI, No. 1 (February 1957) pp. 32–49.
See Robert V. Daniels, ‘Evolution of Leadership Selection in the Central Committee, 1917–1927’, in Walter M. Pintner and Don K. Rowney (eds) Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) pp. 355–68.
Robert V. Daniels, ‘Participatory Bureaucracy and the Soviet Political System’, in Norton T. Dodge (ed.), Analysis of the USSR’s 24th Party Congress and 9th Five-Year Plan (Mechanicsville, Md: Cremona Foundation, 1971).
See Archie Brown, ‘Andropov: Discipline and Reform?’, Problems of Communism (Vol. XXXII, No. 1 January-February 1983) pp. 18–31.
Seweryn Bialer, ‘The Political System’, in Robert F. Byrnes (ed.), After Brezhnev: Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) p. 23.
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© 1989 Archie Brown
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Daniels, R.V. (1989). Political Processes and Generational Change. In: Brown, A. (eds) Political Leadership in the Soviet Union. St. Antony’s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20262-1_4
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