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Elite Career Patterns in A Soviet Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

J. W. Cleary
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Extract

Appointments and removals or resignations of leading personnel in the Soviet Union constitute the raw data analysed in this article. These career movements are not examined in the ‘kremlinological’ manner, as individual transfers related to a particular policy change or factional struggle. The scope here is both more limited and more general — more limited in that the job transfers considered are confined to one union republic; and more general in that the raw data embrace all transfers of the republic's elite over a period of seventeen years. The aim is to discover both general career patterns and changes in these patterns over time, and to assess the significance of both.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , July 1974 , pp. 323 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 Fleron, F. J., ‘Note on the Explication of the Concept of “Elite” in the Study of Soviet Politcs’, Canadian Slavic Studies, II (1968), 111–15.Google Scholar

2 Berson, A. C., Changes in Structure and Personnel in the Soviet State and Communist Party from 1953 to 1959 (doctoral thesis, University of London, 1962), p. 290Google Scholar, is probably the first clear observation of this phenomenon. See also Gehlen, M. P. and Mcbride, D. M., ‘The Soviet Central Committee: An Elite Analysis’, in Kanet, R. E., ed., The Behavioral Revolution in Communist Studies (New York: Free Press, 1971), p. 111.Google Scholar

3 Concerning both obstacles to operationalizing the concept of a Soviet elite, the writer has attempted to argue, in a paper to the 1973 conference of NASEES, that Severy n Bialer (Problems of Communism, XIII (1964), p. 46Google Scholar) was justified in claiming that each CC contains all the elite; that this elite consists of the ex-officio core of successive CCs; and that it can be defined in terms of power.

4 The choice of three committees was dictated by the probability of any position dropping out after one, two, three and four consecutive terms in the CC. The chances of any position not recurring in the next committee are 26.7 per cent. After two terms in the CC there is still a 13.6 per cent chance of disappearing. After three consecutive terms the figure drops to a mere 3 per cent. Finally a position that recurs four times has a 2 per cent chance of not being in the next committee. Thus one has a 97 per cent probability of predicting ex-officio membership after studying three committees, and this probability is not significantly improved by including a fourth.

5 As far as the writer is aware there are no compact sources for occupational identification of republican CC membership such as now exist for the CC CPSU. One is forced to scan newspapers and journals — Kazakhstanskaya Pravda and Partiinaya Zhizn Kazakhstana were the main sources used.

6 The ex-officio core of the Kazakh CC grew with the size of the committee. Between 1956 and 1971 there was a 22.8 per cent growth in full membership and a 23.3 per cent increase in ex-officio membership. Turnover of this ex-officio membership was much lower (average = 39.6 per cent) than for the remaining CC members (average = 63.1 per cent) — a fact which needs to be considered in the use sometimes made of CC membership turnover as an index of political turmoil between Congresses. Clearly the turnover of the inner core is a finer index, and one which is greatly exaggerated by the figure for total turnover, since such nonentity members as collective farmers exhibit a 100 per cent turnover rate.

7 P. K. Ponomarenko, L. I. Brezhnev and N. I. Belyaev.

8 Something similar did happen under Stalin, when Kaganovich, Khrushchev and then Kaganovich again were sent to the Ukraine.

9 The ‘odd’ residual cases were: a secretary who came from a ‘responsible post’ in the NKVD — an appointment made in 1938 and without parallel since then; two propaganda secretaries, one of whom had been a kraikom propaganda secretary, and the other an academic who had previously been head of the CC Department of Culture and Science; lastly there is currently a secretary who formerly headed the CC Department of Organizational Party Work.

10 ‘Leadership pool’ as used here refers to a group within the elite, not to earlier common origins of the elite.

11 It is not intended to convey the impression that obkom first secretaries were continually rocketing up or plummeting down, even during the Khrushchev era. The pattern of moves away from this position was, and to a lesser extent still is, one of extremes, but this has little bearing on the frequency of such moves; even during the Khrushchev period average tenure was not significantly lower than for other elite positions.

12 For one of the rare statements on this subject by a Soviet writer see Shorina, E. V., Kollegialnost, edinonachalie v sovetskom gosudarstvennom upravlenii (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959). pp. 31, 32.Google Scholar Each deputy chairman is here said to be in charge of a defined range of matters,and empowered to make decisions relating to the ministries and agencies subordinate to him. Both chairman and individual deputy chairmen issue ordinances (rasporyazhenia), fulfilment of which is obligatory for the ministries etc. below them. (The area of responsibility is not announced at the time of appointment and can be discovered only by recording the public occasions in which the various deputy chairmen participate.)

13 See Khrushchev, N. S., Stroitelstvo Kommunizma v SSSR i razvitie selskogo khozyaistva (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), Vol. 1, p. 134.Google Scholar

14 F. J. Fleron, ‘Cooptation as a mechanism of adaption to change: The Soviet Political Leadership System’, in Kanet, , ed., Behavioral Revolution, p. 124.Google Scholar M. B. Iksanov, the official referred to, had a higher technical education, worked in construction up to managerial level, and subsequently took up party work - he was first secretary of Kzyl Orda obkom before becoming a government deputy chairman. In 1971 he was elected secretary of the CC of Kazakhstan. He therefore clearly belongs to the leadership pool, but is something of a curiosity within this pool — a party generalist with a managerial background.

15 See e.g. Blau, P. M. and Scott, W. R., Formal Organizations (San Francisco: Chandler, 1962), p. 173.Google Scholar

16 Armstrong, J. A., The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite: A Case Study of the Ukrainian Apparatus (New York: Praeger, 1959).Google Scholar

17 M. E., and Dimock, G. D., Public Administration (New York: Rinehart, 1954), p. 286.Google Scholar

18 Blau, and Scott, , Formal Organizations, p. 172.Google Scholar

19 Etzioni, A., ‘Authority Structure and Organizational Effectiveness’, Administrative Science Quarterly, IV (1959), 43–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Nine appointments in all, two individuals having returned to serve a second term.

21 Even he was not in fact an obkom first secretary, but first secretary of Alma Ata gorkom. This post and that of Karaganda gorkom have always been elite positions, and Ust Kamenogorsk joined them in the second period. For brevity's sake all are subsumed under ‘obkom first secretary’ in this article.

22 This statement holds true not only of the CC department heads nominated as members of the elite (see Appendix 1) but of all department heads. In order to give a complete picture the data discussed in this section includes all transfers in and out of all departmental headships. If only elite headships had been considered, two of the ‘exceptional’ transfers across the staff-line barrier would have been eliminated.

23 In the period after 1964 direct promotion from obkom secretary to first secretary became extremely rare. The common line of promotion became obkom secretary, chairman oblispolkom, first secretary obkom – a reflection no doubt of the slower turnover rate of line elite in the post-Khrushchev period.

24 As to why the myth is accepted, see Simon, H. A., Smithburg, D. W. and Thompson, V. A., Public Administration (New York: Knopf, 1950), pp. 284–291.Google Scholar

25 Rigby, T. H., The Selection of Leading Personnel in the Soviet State and Communist Party (doctoral thesis, London, 1954), p. 422.Google Scholar

26 M. S. Sapargaliev, minister of internal affairs from 1959 to 1961 had been an obkom first secretary. The minister at the time of writing, Sh. Kabylbaev, was head of the Administrative (now Administrative Organs) Department of the CC in the early ‘fifties, so that his career has not been entirely closed. However this represents an exchange with the corresponding staff institution on the party side, the Administrative Organs Department being charged with the supervision of police and courts.

27 The antecedents of the current chairman of the People's Control Committee, P. S. Kantselyaristov, will serve as an example: raikom first secretary, chairman Alma Ata oblispolkom, first secretary Alma Ata agricultural obkom, and chairman Alma Ata oblispolkom again.

28 The current ministries of agriculture, procurement, melioration and water economy, together with the earlier permutations of these.

29 Rush, Myron , Political Succession in the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 89–96.Google Scholar

30 M. B. lksanov. See fn. 14.

31 Keller, S., Beyond the Ruling Class (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 212.Google Scholar

32 Rigby, , Selection of Leading Personnel, pp. 422–8Google Scholar; Armstrong, , Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, p. 144.Google Scholar

33 Wright Mills, C., The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 288.Google Scholar

34 Fleron, , in Kanet, , ed., Behavioral Revolution; Fischer, G., The Soviet System and Modem Society (New York: Atherton, 1968).Google Scholar

35 The obstacle to ascertaining the degree of overlap at republican level was the shortage of full career histories – see p. 326. A tentative analysis suggested that co-optation into the line elite was minimal but rising.