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3. Conclusion

3.2. Soviet dissent and political analysis

Work by Herbert Kelman suggests that the patterns of Soviet dissent analyzed here are manifestations, in one system, of more universal processes. He has described six different “patterns of personal involvement in the national system,” defined by three system-level requirements for political integration (conformity, consolidation, and mobilization) and two individual-level sources of attachment or loyalty to the system (sentimental and instrumental. The three “system-level requirements” that Kelman describes bear strong kinship to the three structural transformations in the Soviet political system specified in this article. Moreover, shared-interest dissident issues—prevalent within the community sector—seem to reflect miscarriages of what Kelman calls “sentimental system-attachment,” whereas constituency-specific issues—predominant in regime-sector dissent—tend to be animated by incomplete “instrumental system-attachment.” In this perspective, each of the six issues finding dissident articulation represents a response to the failure of one of the three dimensions of systems integration, animated by one of the two modalities of individual attachment to the system.[57]

Kelman’s remarks strengthen the conclusion that Soviet dissent is symptomatic of a political bind of the Soviet system: more specifically, a double bind of the regime sector. If Connor has written that “[Soviet] political culture links the bureaucratic elite and the ‘masses’ more closely than it links the dissidents to either,”[58] this is at least as true of the regime sector as of the dissidents. Like its Tsarist forebear, Soviet political culture leaves little independence to the regime sector, which has gained real importance only since 1953. Yet hardly is the regime sector born when thrust upon it are the obligations of mediating between an elite and a community, which traditionally communicate little if at all in the format that it, the regime, discovers it has the responsibility to facilitate.

Regime-community relations were permitted a measure of autonomy so that the community might consider the system in general, the post-1953 elite in particular, and even Khrushchev personally, politically legitimate in Stalin’s absence. To accomplish this end, the attitude that the regime sector was legitimate in and of itself had first to be cultivated among the community. Yet while this was and is not possible unless the regime responds to the community’s claims, which it is, moreover, unaccustomed to address directly, still the regime was, and continues to be, regarded instrumentally by the elite, which thereby not only restricts the regime’ s ability to address those claims constructively but also opposes the claims of the regime itself qua bureaucracy.

The categories used in this article describe well the types of dissent found in Marxist-Leninist systems generally. However, since the discussion here—and the definition of Soviet dissent in particular—is specific to those systems, generalizations beyond them must be made with caution. A study, using the framework outlined here, of Spanish dissent from 1968 to the present or, more ambitiously, of Yugoslav dissent over the past third of a century could help to clarify the

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limitations of this approach by suggesting a conceptualization of dissent that does not identify it axiomatically with interest articulation.

For that purpose it would be worthwhile to use explicitly the information-coercion framework of David Apter, which has been implicit in this discussion of the transformations of totalitarianism. Apter’s notion that different functional groups provide different qualities of information is useful, and his ideas concerning the various ways in which those various groups participate politically appear particularly applicable. For instance, in the case of the present study, it is clear that what he calls “interest groups” tended in general to animate dissident issues associated with the first structural transformation; “populist groups,” those with the second; and “professional groups,” those with the third. A few thoughts on East Europe, however, make it evident that this pattern is not universal even among Marxist-Leninist systems. But since dissent in such systems (if not in all systems) is unavoidably normative, and since the framework developed in this study is explicitly structural, the potential for an operational synthesis, in the context of Apter’s structural-normative theory, with special attention to the question of participation in Soviet dissent, appears quite promising. The immediate requirement of such a project is further case studies of the present sort, so that a comparative middle-range theory might be elaborated that could mediate between the “community” of empirical reality and the “elite” of Apterian grand theory.[59]

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[Note 57]. Herbert C. Kelman, “Patterns of Personal Involvement in the National System: A Social-Psychological Analysis of Political Legitimacy,” in James N. Rosenau, ed. International Politics and Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (New York, 1969), pp. 276–88, esp. p. 280, Table 1.

[Note 58]. Connor, “Dissent in a Complex Society,” 50.

[Note 59]. See David E. Apter, Choice and the Politics of Allocation (New Haven, [Conn.], 1971), esp. chap. 4.