2. The Transformations in Soviet Political Structure under Khrushchev

2.2 Enforcement of conformity

Decreased coercion led to demands that threatened the legitimacy of the political system. In particular, the hierarchical nature of controls seemed under attack from below. In these conditions the authorities sought to inculcate, in the community sector, values designed to reinforce the legitimacy of the system’s erstwhile structure. At the same time, Khrushchev sought to secure his own position as primus inter pares by harnessing, with his populism, that same loyalty of the community. These operations were not unrelated. They had two facets: first, the regulation of culture within the community sector; and second, the expansion and regulation of political participation of the community sector. In both cases, the elite’s instrument for realizing its goal was the regime sector.

The attempt to regulate the cultural norms of the community took the form of three campaigns: the New Soviet Man campaign, an associated Russification campaign highlighted by the educational reforms of 1958–1959, and a series of antireligious drives. The first two together exacerbated the community− and

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regime-sector nationalism already recrudescent thanks to Beria’s nationality policy with respect to lower-level Party appointments in non-Russian republics. The Russification campaign also fomented Russian nationalism, bolstering the growing sentiment against restrictions on the Russian Orthodox church. In particular, Russian nationalism fueled demands that the separation of the church and the Soviet state be observed, as established on paper, in consonance with socialist legality. In this way the issues around which Soviet dissent aggregated began in practice to become interrelated. The task of containing the protest became correspondingly more difficult.[38]

The second facet of the attempt to reinforce the legitimacy of the political system, and that of the elite’s position in it, coincided with a manifestation of Khrushchev’s populism. It comprised initiatives for the routinization of legal procedures and for the expansion of participation in them; as such, it was not without contradictions. The intent was, on the one hand, to institutionalize the functions of the judiciary in the regime sector and, on the other hand, to promote increased participation in judicial affairs by the members of the community. Both these initiatives were animated by “new socialist legality,” but they differed in their aims, in their effects, and in the reactions they elicited

The routinizing aspect of the judicial reforms is embodied in twelve texts—a sort of codification of socialist legality—dated December 25, 1958.[39] The popularizing aspect is fairly wall expressed in A.N. Shelepin’s speech of February 4, 1959, to the Twenty-first Party Congress, where he emphasized the role of the comrades’ courts and of the druzhinniki (a volunteer militia for the control of drunkenness, hooliganism, and the like).[40] These attempts at popularization were on the whole opposed by Soviet lawyers and judges, who considered them extrasystemic controls deleterious to socialist legality. At the same time, higher-ranking lawyers and judges and professors of law as well—all occupying roles in the regime sector—fought in the name of socialist legality to increase their own influence in the formulation of legal codes.[41] That the initiatives for popularization were implemented as successfully as they were attests both to Khrushchev’s narodnichestvo (populism) and to his political primacy.

The various campaigns in the name of socialist legality added fuel to two old fires: one stoked by non-Russian nationalists who wanted their union republics to exercise the constitutional right of secession from the U.S.S.R.,[42] the other by the new and old religionists who publicized the violations of law committed in the antireligious campaigns. Khrushchev’s creation of the regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy) promoted Russian and non-Russian nationalism, and the resulting “localism” (mestnichestvo) eventually wrecked the economic reform. In ways such as this, the effects of reforms initiated by the political leadership fell at cross-purposes with their own intentions. As that occurred, the concerns of persons who found themselves to be dissidents became more and

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more clearly interdependent. Bociurkiw, for example, has vividly described the evolution of that interdependence in the case of Russian nationalist demands for the observance of the formal separation of church and state:

The decline in the capacity of the regime to terrorize the public into blind obedience to arbitrary commands, the progressive erosion of the official ideology, and the greater sensitivity of the Soviet leadership to foreign criticism, as well as the slow emergence of a domestic public opinion—all this was bound to affect the attitudes and expectations of at least the younger elements of the clergy and believers whose past had not been compromised either by “counter-revolutionary” associations or by embarrassing “deals” with the Stalinist authorities. It was from these strata, as well u from the older opponents of Soviet church policy released from concentration camps during the fifties, that movement of protest emerged within the Russian Orthodox Church and the Evangelical Christian Baptists which ultimately challenged the established notion of church-state relations in the USSR.[43]

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[Note 38]. See Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “Church-State Relations in the USSR,” Survey, no. 66 (January 1968), 4–32, esp. 26–31, for details; also Bociurkiw, “The Shaping of Soviet Religious Policy,” Problems of Communism, 22 {May–June 1973), 37–51 passim.

[Note 39]. See John Gorgone, “Soviet Jurists in the Legislative Arena: The Reform of Criminal Procedure,” Soviet Union, 3, no. 1 (1976), 1–35.

[Note 40]. Pravda, 5 February 1959, pp. 7–8. There is a brief discussion in Werth, pp. 48–50.

[Note 41]. Harold J. Berman, “The Struggle of Soviet Jurists against a Return to Stalinist Terror,” Slavic Review, 22 (June 1963), 314–20; Donald D. Barry and Berman, “The Jurists,” in Skilling and Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, esp. pp. 316–330.

[Note 42]. Myroslav Styranka, “Active Forces of Resistance in the USSR,” Ukrainian Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1970), 12–23, esp. 22–23.

[Note 43]. Bociurkiw, “Church-State Relations in the USSR,” p. 27.