Political Participation and Party Democracy

Abstract

The preceding chapters have shown that rank and filers in the Communist Party had a certain amount of influence over local affairs. The official line was not always clear, leaving room for local adjustments, initiatives and amendments. Such initiatives could influence central policy, and certainly determined the extent to which it was effective in a range of areas from industrial management to education. But the autonomous activity of the rank and file could be curbed by the leadership, and decisions were frequently taken by the elite without consultation of any kind. The full-time party officials, and above them the elite — members of party committees at the guberniya and national levels — had the ultimate power. Traditional accounts of the Soviet political process have tended to leave the matter there, as if ‘the leadership’ were a settled and immutable entity, separate from (and usually more or less antagonistic to) the mass from the early 1920s onwards. On the other hand, the work of recent revisionists has suggested that the elite was influenced by pressure ‘from below’ at several crucial junctures.