Abstract
In a brief autobiographical sketch in a 1990 volume of collected writings T.H. Rigby described his early intellectual influences.1 As an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne immediately after the end of World War Two he was intellectually most stimulated by Karl Marx and Max Weber — although as he wrote: ‘I could never claim to be a real disciple of either’. The influence of Marx was limited even at that early stage by Rigby’s inability to accommodate Marx’s views on property with what he knew of the social distribution of power and privilege in the USSR. The influence of Weber was far stronger. From the beginning Rigby was excited by the linkages that could be made between Weber’s typologies of authority and legitimation and actual social structures, including those of the Soviet Union.
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Notes
T.H. Rigby (1990), The Changing Soviet System: Mono-organisational Socialism from its Origins to Gorbachev’s Restructuring (Aldershot: Edward Elgar), pp.1–3.
Two chapters of the thesis are published in T.H. Rigby (1990), Political Elites in the USSR. Central Leaders and Local Cadres from Lenin to Gorbachev (Aldershot: Edward Elgar), chapter 5.
T.H. Rigby (1968), Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp.18–28.
T.H. Rigby, ‘A conceptual approach to authority, power and policy in the Soviet Union’, in T.H. Rigby, Archie Brown, Peter Reddaway (eds) (1983), Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan), p.10.
T.H. Rigby (2003), ‘Russia’s nationhood from its origins to Putin’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, XVII, 1–2, 124.
T.H. Rigby, ‘“Totalitarianism” and change in communist systems’, in Rigby, Changing Soviet System, p.135. (Originally published in Comparative Politics (1972), 4, 3, 433–53.)
T.H. Rigby, ‘Stalinism and the mono-organisational society,’ in Rigby, Changing Soviet System, p.108. (Originally published in R.C. Tucker, Stalinism, 1977.)
T.H. Rigby, ‘Bureaucratic politics: An introduction’, Public Administration, XXXII, 1973, 6.
T.H. Rigby, ‘Hough on political participation in the Soviet Union’, Soviet Studies, XXVIII, 2, April 1976, 259.
Dankwart A. Rustow (1957), ‘New horizons for comparative politics’, World Politics, 9, 4, 530–49.
T.H. Rigby, ‘Reconceptualising the Soviet system’, in Stephen White, Alex Pravda, Zvi Gitelman (eds) (1992), Developments in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics (Durham: Duke University Press), pp.302–3.
Rigby, ‘Conceptual approach’, p.25. The author, as an Honours student at the ANU at the time, remembers the discussion lunch that Rigby organized for academic colleagues and Soviet specialists in Canberra’s bureaucracy to discuss what he immediately recognized as a major event, the 1972 appearance of Jerry Hough’s article, ‘The Soviet system: Petrification or pluralism’, Problems of Communism, 2, March–April 1972, 25–45.
T.H. Rigby, ‘Crypto-Politics’, in Frederic J. Fleron (ed.) (1969), Communist Studies and the Social Sciences: Essays in Methodology and Empirical Theory (Chicago: Rand McNally), p.117. (Originally published in Survey, 50, January 1964, 183–94.)
T.H. Rigby, ‘The Soviet leadership: Towards a self-stabilising oligarchy’, Soviet Studies, XXII, 2, October 1970, 188. His awareness of the activities of the Standing Commissions would have come from the work at the time of his PhD student, Shugo Minagawa, which was published in 1985 as Supreme Soviet Organs (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press).
T.H. Rigby, ‘Traditional, market and organizational societies and the USSR’, World Politics, XVI, 4, 1964, reprinted in Changing Soviet System, chapter 3.
T.H. Rigby, ‘Mono-organisational socialism in the civil society’, in Chandran Kukathas, David W. Lovell, William Maley (eds) (1991), The Transition from Socialism: State and Civil Society in the USSR (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire), p.111.
T.H. Rigby (1979), Lenin’s Government. Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
T.H. Rigby, ‘Political patronage in the USSR from Lenin to Brezhnev’, Politics, XVIII, 1, May 1983, 85.
T.H. Rigby, ‘The Soviet political executive’, in Archie Brown (ed.) (1989), Political Leadership in the Soviet Union (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan), p.6.
T.H. Rigby, ‘Russia’s clientelism, cliques, connections and “clans”: The same old story?’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, XXV, 2, 1998, 109–23; ‘Russia’s provincial bosses: A collective career profile’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, XXVII, 4, December 2001, 1–14, ‘New top elites for old in Russian politics’, British Journal of Political Science, XXIX, 2, April 1999, 323–43; ‘Russia’s business elite’, Russian and Euro-Asian Bulletin, VIII, 7, August–September 1999.
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© 2010 Stephen Fortescue
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Fortescue, S. (2010). T.H. Rigby on Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Politics. In: Fortescue, S. (eds) Russian Politics from Lenin to Putin. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230293144_1
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