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Bureaucracy as Culture: A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

George Yaney
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Extract

Each of the foregoing articles deals with a separate department of Soviet government. Thomas Remington’s State Control Commissariat began as an agency for auditing accounts; David Christian’s procuracy has always had the task of checking on the legality of the government’s operation. In practice the two departments seem to have been doing the same thing: sending out agents with virtually arbitrary power in the hope that they will make the government’s operating departments obey the government’s rules and perform their tasks with maximum efficiency. Remington refers to this activity as control. Christian calls it supervision. Christian’s term monitoring comes close to describing both activities.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Spring 1982 , pp. 104 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1982

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References

1. M. M. Speranskii wrote something to this effect in 1803 (see M. M. Speranskiy Proekty i zapiski [Moscow, 1961], pp. 105-106 and pp. 119–25Google Scholar). See also Gradovskii, A. D., Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1899), 1: 306–13Google Scholar; Squire, P. C., The Third Department (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 234–38 Google Scholar; and Iu. Got'e, Istoriia oblastnogo upravleniia v Rossii ot Petra I do Ekateriny II, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1913, 1941), 2: 12-45, 91–110 Google Scholar.

2. Such information does occasionally come to light. See, for example, Got'e's study of eighteenth-century local administration (Istoriia oblastnogo upravleniia), Alexander Herzen's description of his work in remote guberniia offices (My Past and Thoughts, vol. 1 [New York, 1926Google Scholar]), and la. Iakovlev's books about his work in Rabkrin during the early 1920s, especially Derevnia kak ona est (Moscow, 1924).

3. Anthony, Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, 1967), pp. 2, 24Google Scholar.

4. This approach to the study of government is taken largely from Korkunov, N. M., Ukaz i zakon (St. Petersburg, 1894Google Scholar).

5. Got'e, Istoriia oblastnogo upravleniia, 2: 46-83. Rudolph von Ihering set forth the idea that the use of law to serve private ends gives a legal system its real strength (see Ihering, Rudolph von, Struggle for Law [Chicago, 1879Google Scholar]).

6. Thurman Arnold has made the point that systematic law depends for its existence on performances that dramatize the contradictions in it (see Thurman, Arnold, Symbols of Government [New Haven, 1935Google Scholar] and idem, Folklore of Capitalism [New York, 1937]).

7. V. M., Andreev, “Prodrazverstka i krest'ianstvo,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 97 (1976), p. 22Google Scholar

8. See George, Yaney, Systematization of Russian Government (Urbana, Illinois, 1973Google Scholar).

9. I describe the evolution of the tsarist Ministry of Agriculture from land reforming benefactor to agency of forced grain procurement in my book, The Urge to Mobilize (Urbana, Illinois, forthcoming), chaps. 8-10.

10. Lorenz von Stein took this view of revolution in his History of the Social Movement in France, 1789-1850 (Totowa, New Jersey, 1964), pp. 84–91 Google Scholar.

11. Concerning Bolshevik grain grabbing, see Yaney, Urge, chap. 11.