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The 1971 Soviet Central Committee: An Assessment of the New Elite

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert H. Donaldson
Robert H. Donaldson
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

On March 30, 1971, as the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opened, the prediction was widely voiced in the West that no surprises were in the offing. Basing their judgments on the aura of “business as usual” which had emanated from the Soviet leadership in the months prior to the Congress, Western specialists predicted a dull gathering, keynoted by signs of stability and ostensible unity—a far cry from the lively Congresses, full of unanticipated developments, over which Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had presided.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , April 1972 , pp. 382 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 For an examination of the reasons for defining the Central Committee as constituting the “political elite” of a Communist system, see Donaldson, Robert H. and Waller, Derek J., Stasis and Change in Revolutionary Elites: A Comparative Analysis of the 1956 Party Central Committees in China and the USSR, Sage Professional Papers: Comparative Politics Series, I, No. 11 (Beverly Hills 1970), 614–15Google Scholar.

2 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “The Soviet Political System: Transformation or Degeneration?” Problems of Communism, XV (January-February 1966), 5Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Fleron, Frederic, “Cooptation as a Mechanism of Adaptation to Change: The Soviet Political Leadership System,” Polity, II (Winter 1969), 176–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Donaldson and Waller (fn. 1), esp. 621–27, 655–58.

4 For a discussion of the difficulties involved in linking background variables and elite attitudes, see Edinger, L. J. and Searing, D. D., “Social Background in Elite Analysis: A Methodological Inquiry,” American Political Science Review, LXI (June 1967), 428–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The following sources were used in compiling biographical data: Deputaty Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR: Vosmoi Sozyv [Deputies of the USSR Supreme Soviet: Eighth Convocation] (Moscow 1970)Google Scholar; Ezhegodnik Bol'shoi Sovetskoi Entsiklopedii [Yearbook of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia] 1966 (Moscow)Google Scholar; Crowley, Edward L. and others, eds., Prominent Personalities in the USSR (Metuchen, N.J. 1968)Google Scholar; Simmonds, George W., ed., Soviet Leaders (New York 1967)Google Scholar; and, for recent changes in occupation, the pages of Pravda and Izvestiia.

6 Certain of these variables are not reported on in this paper due to space limitations.

7 See, for example, Shabad, Theodore, “Central Committee Newcomers Reflect Prestige of Brezhnev,” New York Times, April 11, 1971Google Scholar. My own research indicates that eleven of the full members were employed in Dnepropetrovsk oblast during Brezhnev's years in that province. Of these, six were newly elected to full membership.

8 This argument is made in Donaldson and Waller (fn. i), 629.

9 Results of the 1970 Soviet census were reported in Izvestiia, April 17, 1971, pp. 1–2.

10 William B. Quandt, in a study of the average ages of political elites in twenty countries, cites 42 as the mean age of elites in 11 countries classified as “ideological,” and 51 as the average in 9 “nonideological” systems. The Comparative Study of Political Elites, Sage Professional Papers: Comparative Politics Series, I, No. 4 (Beverly Hills 1970), 209Google Scholar.

11 These figures are from Hough, Jerry F., “In Whose Hands the Future?” Problems of Communism, XVI (March-April 1967), 19Google Scholar.

12 “Generations in Conflict,” Problems of Communism, XVI (January-February 1967), 36–40Google Scholar.

13 For Fischer's list, see The Soviet System and Modern Society (New York 1968), 25Google Scholar.

14 This translation of Brezhnev's report is from New Times, No. 15 (1971), 62.

15 Hough (fn. 11), 25.

16 Donaldson and Waller (fn. 1), 644–49.

17 Brezhnev (fn. 14), 62.

18 Of the 28 cases in which party and state jobs carrying full-member rank in 1966 had “turned over” between Congresses, thus allowing their new occupants to acquire seats on the CC, only 11 involved the ouster (or death) of the previous incumbent. The remaining 17 individuals were retained on the CC in new positions.

19 Hough, Jerry F., “The Party Apparatchiki” in Skilling, H. G. and Griffiths, F., eds., Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton 1971), 47–92Google Scholar.

20 See the following articles by Fleron, all of which deal with ramifications of this subject: “Toward a Reconceptualization of Political Change in the Soviet Union: The Political Leadership System,” Comparative Politics, I, 2 (January 1969), 228–44Google Scholar; “Representation of Career Types in the Soviet Political Leadership,” in Farrell, R. Barry, ed., Political Leadership in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Chicago 1970), 108–139Google Scholar; and the article cited in footnote 3.

21 The above quotations are from Fleron's article in Farrell (fn. 20), 123–24.

22 Ibid., 125.

23 For a discussion of this nonparametric technique for measuring the degree of correlation between variables, see Goodman, L. A. and Kruskal, W. H., “Measures of Association for Cross-Classification,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, XLIX (December 1954), 732–64Google Scholar. Another measure of the significance of this correlation is the chi-square value, which is 60.10; thus the null hypothesis is rejected at the .001 level of significance.

24 Brezhnev (fn. 14), 64.