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The Supervisory Function in Russian and Soviet History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David Christian
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Extract

Even a brief survey of the institutional history of Russia and the Soviet Union will show the existence of a remarkable number of institutions and officials whose main function is best described as supervisory. They do not usually legislate or make policy decisions. For the most part they do not execute policy directly or pass legal judgments. Their task is to check that other government officials and institutions are acting in conformity to the law and the commands of their superiors. Yet for all their evident importance during two and a half centuries (and in spite of the fact that Russian statesmen were always aware of their importance), the general nature and significance of these institutions have not been fully clarified. Of the several important works on individual supervisory institutions, none that I know of attempts to explain the role played in Russian institutional history by supervisory institutions as a whole.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Spring 1982 , pp. 73 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1982

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References

1. See, for example, Gradovskii, A. D., “Vysshaia administratsiia Rossii XVIII St. i General- Prokurory,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1899)Google Scholar; Morgan, Glenn G., Soviet Administrative Legality: The Role of the Attorney General's Office (Stanford, 1962Google Scholar); Smith, Gordon B., The Soviet Procuracy and the Supervision of Administration (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1978Google Scholar); Adams, Jan S., Citizen Inspectors in the Soviet Union: The People's Control Committee (New York, 1977Google Scholar). See also Viacheslav, Gribovskii, Vysshii sud i nadzor v Rossii v pervoi polovine tsarstvovaniia imp. Ekateriny II (St. Petersburg, 1901Google Scholar).

2. Peter I's contribution to the building of the Russian bureaucracy may well have been exaggerated (see Borivoj Plavsic, “Seventeenth Century Chanceries and their staffs,” in Pintner, Walter M. and Rowney, Don K., eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980], pp. 19–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). But it was not until his reign that supervisory institutions appear with a distinctive and formalized role.

3. Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter cited as PSZ), lstser., 46 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830-43), vol. 4, no. 2, 331, March 5, 1711.

4. Eroshkin, N. P., htoriia gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1968), p. 101 Google Scholar. The name fiskal was borrowed from Prussia.

5. Ocherki istorii SSSR; pervaia chetvert’ XVIII v. (Moscow, 1954), p. 307.

6. Morgan, , Soviet Administrative Legality, pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

7. See ibid., pp. 28-43, for the debates behind the reestablishment of the procuracy.

8. Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 139.

9. See Hough, Jerry F., The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decisionmaking (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), chaps. 4 and 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Smith, , Soviet Procuracy, p. 3 Google Scholar.

11. Merle, Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 388 Google Scholar.

12. E., Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917 (Leiden, 1966), p. 73 Google Scholar.

13. Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, chap. 5.

14. Ibid., chap. 7. This was also the aim of a curious reform project submitted by the poet and senator Gavriil Derzhavin in 1801. Derzhavin's paper is an early attempt to identify a distinct supervisory (oberegatel'nyi) function in Russian bureaucratic practice. His project is printed in Sbornik arkheologicheskogo instituta, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1878-98), 1: 134-51, where it is falsely attributed to Speranskii because the copy used there is in Speranskii's hand. la. Grot has shown that the project is in fact Derzhavin's (see la. Grot, ed., G. R. Derzhavin: sochineniia, 9 vols. [St. Petersburg, 1864-83], 9: 190Google Scholar). The project is also printed in N. M., Korkunov, “Proekt ustroistva Senata G. R. Derzhavina,” Ministerstvo iustitsii, Zhurnal, 10 (1896): 1–14Google Scholar. For a summary of Derzhavin's main ideas, see David G. Christian, “The Reform of the Russian Senate: 1801-1803” (D. Phil, diss., University of Oxford, 1974), pp. 120-34.

15. Berman, Harold J., Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet Law, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 238–39Google Scholar.

16. Lebedinskii, V. G., Sovetskaia prokuratura i ee deiatel'nost’ v oblasti obshchego nadzora (Moscow, 1954)Google Scholar, cited in Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 125.

17. Ibid., pp. 133-34.

18. Ibid., p. 125.

19. Turovtsev, V. I., ed., Gosudarstvennyi i obshchestvennyi kontrol’ v SSSR (Moscow, 1950), p. 12 Google Scholar.

20. Turovtsev, V. I., ed., Narodnyi kontrol’ v SSSR (Moscow, 1967), pp. 23–24 Google Scholar.

21. Walter, Gellhorn, Ombudsmen and Others (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 2 Google Scholar.

22. PSZ, vol. 6, no. 3, 979, April 17, 1722; my emphasis.

23. Walter Gellhorn comes close to this view (see Gellhorn, , Ombudsmen and Others, p. 367 Google Scholar).

24. Smith, , Soviet Procuracy, p. 25 Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., p. 15.

26. For this reason it is confusing to describe the procuracy, as does Glenn Morgan, as a “branch of the Executive” ( Morgan, , Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 3 Google Scholar).

27. Smith, , Soviet Procuracy, p. 22 Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., p. 133.

29. The books of Gordon Smith and Jan Adams document this role in some detail. Adams concludes that the citizen controller often acts as a “consumer ombudsman” and as “a champion of the citizen's interests versus a bureaucracy that tends to ignore those interests” (Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 191).

30. Morgan, , Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 110 Google Scholar.

31. Anthony, Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, 1967)Google Scholar. Both Gordon Smith and Jan Adams rely on Downs's work.

32. Ibid., p. 148. For the purposes of this article, the crucial chapters of Downs's book are 10, 11, and 12.

33. Ibid.

34. I have posed the contrast in these terms because since World War II much comparative j political study has revolved around this particular polar contrast.

35. Hough, Jerry F., The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Ibid., p. 50.

37. Ibid., chap. 9.

38. Downs, Inside Bureaucracy, p. 119.

39. This conclusion follows from Gordon Tullock's model of hierarchical distortion described in ibid., pp. 116-18. This is really a formalized version of the party game in which a secret message is given to one player, who whispers it to a second player, who passes it on to a third player and so on until eventually the end result is compared with the original message.

40. Ibid., p. 164.

41. This second claim remains valid even if one concedes that in a certain sense nineteenthcentury Russia was undergoverned in comparison with Britain and France (see Starr, S. F., Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1820-1870 [Princeton, 1972], p.38Google Scholar). The claim itself has not gone unchallenged (see Daniel Orlovsky, “Recent Studies on the Russian Bureaucracy,” Russian Review, 35, no. 4 [1976]: 459). The relevant figures are summarized in Walter M. Pintner, “The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755-1855,” in Pintner and Rowney, , eds., Russian Officialdom, p. 192 Google Scholar. In the mid-eighteenth century there were about 10, 500 state officials, one official for every 2, 000 people; in the mid-nineteenth century there were about 114, 000, one official for every 500 people. In any case, the important point is not the relative, but the absolute, size of the respective bureaucracies. Furthermore, the institutional divisions within the governmental structures of Western Europe (divisions that were formalized in the notion of a division of powers) mean that from the point of view of Downs's model, these governments are best regarded as consisting of several smaller bureaucracies rather than one huge bureaucracy. It is in this sense that the Russian government was clearly the largest single bureaucracy in Europe.

42. Downs, Inside Bureaucracy, pp. 128-31.

43. Ibid., p. 122.

44. Ibid., p. 143.

45. Ibid., p. 147.

46. Ibid., p. 157.

47. Richard, Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976), p. 61 Google Scholar.

48. Zaionchkovskii, P. A., Pravitel'stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow, 1978), p. 168 Google Scholar.

49. Ibid., p. 169.

50. Ibid., p. 171.

51. George, Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government (Urbana, 111., 1973), p. 26Google Scholar.

52. Roy, Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (New York, 1976), pp. 161–62 Google Scholar.

53. Berliner, Joseph S., Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 324–25Google Scholar, cited in Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 63

54. PSZ, vol. 6, no. 3, 877.

55. The wording of this clause is virtually unchanged in the 1977 constitution.

56. Lenin, V. I., “'Dual’ Subordination and observation of the law,” Collected Works, 45 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960-70), 33: 363–67Google Scholar, May 20, 1922. For other examples of Lenin's growing concern with supervision in the last two years of his life, see “How we should reorganize the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate,” ibid., 33: 481-86, January 25, 1923 and “Better Fewer but Better,” ibid., 33: 487-502, March 2, 1923. The latter is the last article Lenin wrote.

57. A. V. Muller, trans, and ed., The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great (Seattle and London, 1972), p. London Google Scholar. On collegiality as a specialized form of state supervision, see David G. Christian, “The Senatorial Party and the Theory of Collegial Government,” Russian Review, 38, no. 3 (1979): 298-322.

58. Zaionchkovskii, , Pravitel'stvennyi apparat, pp. 170–71Google Scholar. In Zaionchkovskii's sample (which included fifty-two procurators), there is a statistically significant difference between the age of procurators and that of other officials, and there is no significant difference among the other groups excluding the procurators. I have also checked the claim with respect to social origins against Zaionchkovskii's data, and here too the procurators rank significantly lower than all the other central and provincial institutions covered by Zaionchkovskii.

59. Smith, , Soviet Procuracy, p. 25 Google Scholar. These techniques, incidentally, are all mentioned in Downs, Inside Bureaucracy.

60. Z. Szirmai uses this phrase in the forward to Z., Szirmai, ed., Law in Eastern Europe, vol. 13Google Scholar: Legal Controls in the Soviet Union (Leiden, 1966), p. 7.

61. Morgan, , Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 16 Google Scholar.

62. Moshe, Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

63. Lenin's target in this case was Stalin. Ibid., p. 120.

64. Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 35.

65. Ibid., p. 69.

66. Leonid Brezhnev to the plenum of the Central Committee, December 6, 1965, cited in ibid., p. 94; emphasis in the original.

67. Ibid., pp. 118-19.

68. Ibid., p. 110.

69. Ibid., p. 150.

70. Hough, , Soviet Union, pp. 119–24Google Scholar.

71. Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 7.

72. Ibid., p. 67.