Abstract
The vigorous debate about Soviet ideology that took place in the 1960s was followed by a reaction in which many of the participants who were not Marxists abandoned a discussion in terms of ideology for one in terms of political culture. The impulse was given not so much by the difficulties of pinning down a highly volatile concept: this was a time when people were beginning to seek explanations for the evident differences between societies ruled by communist parties. Accustomed to a discourse in which ideology as presented as one of the factors that linked those societies, commentators on the communist scene, not unnaturally, looked to culture as a factor of differentation.
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Notes
Quoted in Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964 ), p. 98.
Among the works that deserve particular mention are Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China ( Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1966 )
Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975 )
A. Ross Johnson, The Transformation of Communist Ideology: the Yugoslav Case 1945–1953 ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972 )
and Ray Taras, Ideology in a Socialist State: Poland 1956–83 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
See Hough in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds. Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 69.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia ( London: Routledge, 1960 ), p. 57.
M. Verret, ‘Mémoire ouvrière, mémoire communiste’, in Revue française de science politique (RFSP), vol. 34, no. 3 (June 1984), pp. 413–27.
Bernard Williams, ‘Democracy and ideology’, Political Quarterly, vol. 32 (1961) no. 4, pp. 374–84.
Alfred Evans Jr., ‘Trends in Soviet secondary school histories in the USSR’, Soviet Studies, vol. 28, no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 224–43, at p. 238.
Jean Baechler, Qu’est-ce que l’idéologie? ( Paris: Gallimard, 1976 ), p. 58.
John B. Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 24.
Robert V. Daniels, ‘The ideological vector’, Soviet Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (July 1966), p. 71.
On the first major post-revolutionary dictionary published under the editorship of D. N. Ushakov see Michael Waller, ‘The -isms of Stalinism’, Soviet Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (October 1968), pp. 229–34.
This process has been particularly well treated by Stephen White in his Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan, 1979).
Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies ( London: Macmillan, 1984 ), p. 177.
For further reference to an ‘official political culture’ see Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 8ff., and Stephen White in the same work, p. 35.
For a studious determination not to allow the term ‘ideology’ to intrude into a discussion of a revolutionary assult on established values, see Gabriel Almond, ‘Communism and political culture theory’, Comparative Politics, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1983), p. 137.
Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir ( Paris: Gallimard, 1969 ).
See also Verret, ‘Mémoire ouvrière’, and D. Labbé, ‘Le discours communiste’, RFSP, vol. 30, no. 1 (February 1980), pp. 46–77.
On these aspects of the CPSU’s ideology see Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
and Christopher A. P. Binns, ‘Revolution and accommodation in the development of the Soviet ceremonial system’, Man, vol. 14 (1980), no.4 and vol. 15 (1981), no. 1.
For one example among many, see V. M. Lavrichev, Demokraticheskii tsentralizm — dialekticheskii printsip organizatsionnogo stroeniya KPSS (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971 ).
See Nigel Harris, ‘The owl of Minerva’, Soviet Studies, vol. 18, no. 3 (January 1967), pp. 328–39, at pp. 329–31.
See White, Political Culture, ch. 4; Gayle D. Hollander, Soviet Political Indoctrination ( New York: Praeger, 1972 )
Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), ch. 11.
See John H. Miller, ‘The top Soviet censorship team?’, Soviet Studies, vol. 29 (1977), no. 4, pp. 590–8
and Sidney Monas and Ronald Levaco on cinema censorship in Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. 17 (1984–5), nos. 3 and 4, pp. 163–84.
N. A. Moiseenko and M. V. Popov, Demokraticheskii tsentralizm—osnovnoi printsip upravleniya sotsialisticheskoi ekonomikoi (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1975) and Lavrichev, Demokraticheskii tsentralizm.
The 1977 Soviet Constitution, for example, included a formal reference to democratic centralism, which until then had been a constitutional matter only in the party. Constitutional lawyers had for some time accepted the de facto constitutional status of the ‘Leninist principle’: see V. I. Vasilev, Demokraticheskii tsentralizm v sisteme sovetov ( Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literatura, 1973 ).
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© 1988 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London
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Waller, M. (1988). What is to Count as Ideology in Soviet Politics?. In: White, S., Pravda, A. (eds) Ideology and Soviet Politics. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19335-6_2
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