1. The Analytical Framework

1.2. Political sectors

Let us posit three sectors in the Soviet political system: the elite, the regime, and the community.[15] Each sector is a set of roles; collectively, the three sectors exhaust the Soviet political system. However, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, for individuals who occupy more than one role may occupy them in different sectors. The first task is to specify which roles comprise each sector.

The regime sector is both the most difficult to specify and the most crucial to the analysis thus, it is probably best to begin there. Two ideas from Gaetano Mosca pertain. The first is the distinction between upper and lower levels of the elite: “Below the highest stratum of the ruling class there is always … another that is more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country [and without which] any sort of social organization would be impossible.” The second is that this lower-level elite is a bridge between the core decision makers and the rest of society.[16] Mosca’s lower-level elite is the regime sector. To make this assertion both credible and applicable, we must examine its implications for the analysis of the Soviet political system.

John A. Armstrong, in his study of the Ukrainian bureaucratic elite, identifies obkomburo members as the “middle-level elite” of the union republic. That would seem to end our search for the all-union lower-level elite; but Armstrong limits his sample to party generalists, the apparatchiki.[17] That may have made sense twenty years ago, but we cannot stop there today. Any study of

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the Soviet system that is based on the bureaucratic model must account, as Hough has written, not only for policy execution but also for policy formulation.[18] The specification of the regime sector must not be limited to policy-execution roles, as might be inferred from Mosca.

In practice, the political roles that compose the regime sector may be determined by positional analysis. Although Gwen Moore Bellisfield’s sociometric approach[19] cannot be applied experimentally to the Soviet case, it suggests the analytical separation of the core decision makers—the “power elite”—from the various specialized groups—the different “issue elites.” That distinction in turn permits the positional specification of the regime sector of the Soviet political system. The specialist issue elites fill the policy-formulating roles in the regime sector, and the all-union lower-level power elite is the policy-executing complement. These two sets of roles may, but need not, overlap in the same persons.

Let us now specify positionally the political roles that compose the regime scoter, taking the lower-level power elite first. The basic all-union lower-level executive unit is the oblast; the primary executive body of the oblast is the obkomburo, the object of Armstrong’s study. Philip D. Stewart’s research on the Stalingrad oblast between 1954 and 1962 tells us not only who the obkomburo members are but also what their relative potential influence is at obkom plenums. Ranking consistently high in relative potential influence were: the first secretaries of the obkom, of the gorkom, and of the komsomol; the chairmen of the obispolkom, of the trade union council, ant of the sovnarkhoz (this last now anachronistic); the obkom secretaries for agriculture, for ideology, for cadres, and for industry; the editor of the regional edition of Pravda; and the chief of the oblast KGB. Slightly lower in influence were the various obispolkom vice-chairmen, followed by the directors of the various local heavy_industry concerns. At the bottom were the first secretaries of the various raikoms and the chairman of the gorispolkom. The ensemble of these roles provides the positional specification of the policy-executing component of the regime sector.[20]

Previous research on Soviet “interest groups” simplifies the task of specifying positionally the policy-formulating component of the regime sector. It will suffice here to validate the seven occupational categories that Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths include in their survey: the party apparatchiki, the security police, the military, the industrial managers, the economists, the writers, and the jurists.[21] The security police and the industrial managers are already represented in theca obkomburos in policy-executing roles. Milton Lodge’s independent study concerns every Skilling-Griffiths group (except for the apparatchiki generalists, a special case), which does not have such corporate representation in the obkomburos.[22] This confirms the validity of the categories in the Skilling-Griffiths survey. Therefore, Lodge’s groups are the

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sets of specialists that we should add to the obkomburo members in order to complete the positional inventory of the “Soviet regime.”[23]

Specifying positionally the elite and community sectors is now quite easy. The elite sector corresponds to Mosca’s notion of the “upper level elite”: it comprises the Central Committee of the CPSU, including its Secretariat. The community sector comprises all political roles not subsumed under the definition of the elite and regime sectors.

The ensemble of relationships among these three sectors are a structure.[24] Under the totalitarian conditions associated with Stalin, intersectoral relationships were characterized by pervasive controls downward through the sectoral hierarchy and by absence of spontaneity upward. After Stalin’s death, that totalitarian model became inadequate to describe accurately the structure of the Soviet political system. A number of reforms were introduced between 1953 and 1964, many but not all of them by Khrushchev in his successful attempt to gain power and eventually unsuccessful attempt to retain it. If those reforms can be described in terms of the relationships among the elite, regime, and community sectors, then the effects of those reforms on the structure of the Soviet political system can be specified analytically.

Three structural transformations may in fact be discerned: (1) decreases in the elite’s coercion both of the community, mediated by the regime, and of the regime directly; (2) attempts by the elite, mediated by the regime, to induce the community to conform both with norms of participation and obligation and with norms of cultural identity, all newly prescribed and having political implications; and (3) a differentiation of roles within both the elite and the regime sectors, leading to a multiplication of the number of political actors occupying roles in them. Each of these transformations comprises a set of policies initiated over a continuous interval of time, and the three intervals are mutually exclusive. Taken together, furthermore, these three time periods collectively exhaust the 1953–64 era. We may therefore periodize Khrushchev’s tenure at the head of the Party according to them.

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[Note 15]. Following David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, 1965}, chaps. 11–13. The analysis in this article also has resonances with chaps. 14–21 passim.

[Note 16]. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. by Hannah D. Kahn, edited and revised with an introduction by Arthur Livingston (New York, 1939), p. 404. Cf. Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York, 1966), p. 154: “The strategic ‘middle level’ … is that level of communication that is ‘vertically’ close enough to the large mass of consumers, citizens, or common soldiers to forestall any continuing and effective direct communication between them and the ‘highest echelons’; and it must be far enough above the level of the large numbers of rank and file to permit effective ‘horizontal’ communication and organization among a sufficiently large portion of the men or units on its own level.”

[Note 17]. Nevertheless, the universe Armstrong analyzes is that of delegates to the Ukrainian Party Congresses, because “while they include some persons of little political importance, … information on their compositions is much more complete. ” It is, however, evident from his Tables 1 and 2 that those Party Congresses include members of union-republic organizations, of the army, and of educational institutions. Since these three establishments are not represented at the obkom level, we should supplement obkomburo membership with union-republic Party Congress attendance in our specification of the all-union lower-level executive elite; but it turns out that these three categories of delegates to union-republic Party Congresses are included in our breakdown of the policy-formulating component of the regime sector. See John A. Armstrong, The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite: A Case Study of the Ukrainian Apparatus (New York, 1959), pp. 4, 13–15.

[Note 18]. Jerry F. Hough, “The Bureaucratic Model and the Nature of the Soviet Political System,” Journal of Comparative Administration, 5 (April 1973), 144–48.

[Note 19]. Gwen Moore Bellisfield, “Preliminary Notes on the Influence Structure of American Leaders” (1973, mimeo.), cited in Robert D. Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, [N.J.], 1976), pp. 17–18. For a similar technique, see Allen H. Barton, Bogdan Denitch and Charles Kadushin, eds. Opinion-Making Elites in Yugoslavia (New York, 1973).

[Note 20] . Philip D. Stewart, Political Power in the Soviet Union: A Study of Decision Making in Stalingrad (Indianapolis, [Ind.], 1968), chap. 9.

[Note 21]. Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds. Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1971).

[Note 22]. Milton Lodge, Soviet Elite Attitudes since Stalin (Columbus,[ Ohio], 1969).

[Note 23]. The various chapters in Skilling and Griffiths provide positional specifications.

[Note 24]. Jean Piaget, Le structuralisme, 4th ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970).