3. Conclusion

3.1. Political analysis of Soviet dissent

As a result of decreases in the elite’s coercion of the regime and in the regime’s coercion of the community between 1953 and 1956, artistic freedoms and socialist legality erupted as issue areas, largely within the community sector. Some of those sentiments were aggregated in various institutional forums and were amplified there by members of the regime sector who occupied leading roles in those institutions.

In response to this development, the elite instituted policies (1956–1960/61) designed to instill values, among the members of the community, that would induce them to uphold the legitimacy of the system and of its erstwhile structure. Khrushchev identified himself with some of those reforms in order to promote his own personal legitimacy among the community. During this period, however, the community’s response to those very policies reinforced the dissident trends. In particular, campaigns on behalf of “new socialist legality” exacerbated and broadened protests within the community sector. The issue areas of nationality rights and religious autonomy erupted, further expanding the range of dissident interests.

The elite thereupon began (1959/60–1964) to reform its own relations with the regime sector and even tried to alter the nature of the regime. This was attempted by introducing policies—some of which, again, Khrushchev sponsored personally in order to aggrandize his power—that would internally differentiate the elite and the regime sectors, increasing the number of roles within them. The main results of those developments for Soviet dissent were that (l) developmental rationality increased in salience as a dissident issue area within the regime sector and (2) in that sector there surfaced a bargaining ethos—especially in questions of resource allocation—that facilitated the diffusion of political authority.

These interactive events are represented statically in Table 1. Its format does not capture all the subtleties discussed above; nor does that discussion even capture all the historic idiosyncrasies of the development of Soviet dissent between 1953 and 1964. The distinction, for instance, between specialist policymakers and specialist policy-advisors is not so clear in reality as it is in theory. Likewise, it is impossible to attribute with certainty demands for

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political democracy to such specialists. Further, such issues as nationality rights certainly antedate Stalin’s death. These details are sacrificed to analytical parsimony in the hope that insights more generally applicable may be gained, though also in the belief that history is not falsified by their omission.

Table 2 sacrifices further detail and substance to parsimony and schematization. Compared to Table 1, it is a more dynamic, but also cruder, representation of the evolution of Soviet dissent between 1953 and 1964. Table 2 provides “snapshots” of the flow of information (upward) and coercion (downward) between hierarchically adjacent sectors. Some of the assignments can be disputed, and some are to a degree “judgment calls”; regardless, Table 2 summarizes much of the preceding discussion into an analytical Gestalt. Moreover, it begins to suggest the interactive nature of Soviet dissent. In particular, it suggests the inference that any particular transformation in the political structure actually affects the whole range of dissident issues. If that is so, then the transformations are not mutually independent, since the policies composing each of them respond to changes in the articulation of Soviet dissent. The schema is, however, rather abstract. It is therefore appropriate to relate this theoretical representation back to the reality from which it was constructed. In the process, some conclusions may be drawn.

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We began by assuming, for heuristic purposes, that the totalitarian model accurately represented the Soviet political system under Stalin. Then:

1. Spontaneous articulation of interests upward from the community to the regime and from the regime to the elite became possible under conditions of the first transformation in this political system.

The sentiments expressed generally originated in the community sector, rather than in the regime sector. In some cases, however, those communications were intercepted by the regime sector, which filtered and amplified them. In the language of functionalist systems theory:

2. Institutions that originally were intended to facilitate the flow of “coercion” down from the elite, through the regime, to the community—institutions thus having a measure of legitimacy for the elite—functioned to aggregate certain types of Soviet dissent and propel it further up the sectoral hierarchy to the elite’s attention. Such institutions were characteristically home to specific occupational groups.

Dissident political demands that received this kind of airing catalyzed their adherents into sustained political activity. For example, the writers—to use Almond’s terminology—had access, as an institutional group, to political resources that enabled them to function as an associational group more successfully than other groups could. Supporters of demands for nationality rights constituted one of those other groups: once Khrushchev had removed the ethnically conscious local Party secretaries whom Beria had promoted, advo-

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cates of nationality rights had no politically legitimate nor any institutionally
secure forum from which to articulate their demands.

With the second transformation of the political system, community-sector Soviet dissent ceased meeting mere passive obstruction and began to encounter purposeful resistance and conscious coercion from the regime sector, through those same institutions. That, for instance, is precisely how state organs to control the church affected the dissident issue of religious autonomy, which had begun to percolate through them. We might, then, conclude that:

3. Dissident activity in those institutions is easier for the authorities to control than activity outside those institutions.

It is worth noting, however, that community-sector participation in legitimated institutions[55] can also be intentionally expanded by decisions made on high. That is what happened with respect to some socialist legality issues (e.g., the druzhinniki), and it happened despite the misgivings of a fair number of occupants of regime-sector roles in those institutions (judges and procurators who believed the reforms hampered them).

With the third transformation, Soviet dissent articulated by the community sector became less potent while that expressed from the regime sector appeared to reach a modus vivendi with the controls exercised downward by the elite. The contrast between the evolution of artistic freedom and religious autonomy issues, on the one hand, and developmental rationality, on the other, exemplifies this trend. To generalize:

4. The issue areas aggregated in those institutions tend, under conditions of coercion exercised from above, to lose what shared-interest quality they have and to become more constituency-specific.

That process can transmute the very nature of the demands, as when the nationality rights issue, during the 1950s, ceased being explicitly “political” and became instead “cultural.” And when cultural dissent among Great Russians found the form of demands for religious autonomy, the existence of legitimate political institutions governing relations between the Soviet state and the Orthodox church breached the union between those constiuency-specific demands and other, shared-interest “freedom-to-practice” demands. Thus:

5. That process of aggregation, which narrows the scope of the Soviet dissent expressed, tends to cut off from access to legitimate political resources those tendencies of dissident articulation that are based on shared interests among members of the community sector.

For after the elite had “attempted to silence the voices of discontent by relaxing antireligious pressures on ‘legal’ churchmen,” it could proceed “to tighten legal restrictions on religious activities, especially [on those of] the less institutional, more elusive sectarians.”[56]

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[Note 55]. See the distinction between “community political culture” and “regime political culture’ in Kenneth Jowitt, “An Organizational Approach to the Study of Political Culture in Marxist-Leninist Systems,” American Political Science Review, 68 (December 1974), 1173.

[Note 56]. Bociurkiw, “Church-State Relations in the USSR,” 31, 25.