Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:30:09.157Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

New Factors of Stability in Soviet Collective Leadership

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Jerome M. Gilison
Get access

Extract

With the reluctant retirement of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union entered a new phase of collective leadership. Past experience with such periods has led many Western specialists to expect that the collective leadership pattern will lead to the emergence of a single leader, who will hold preponderant power and who will seek to consolidate and strengthen that power, ultimately acquiring something approaching dictatorial authority. The assumptions of this “conventional wisdom” (to borrow a phrase from John Galbraith) are that (i) there is something inherently unstable in a collective leadership pattern, given Soviet conditions; (2) the personal ambitions and power drive of Soviet leaders prevent, in the long run, their acceptance of a situation of shared power; and (3) historical evidence of past breakdowns of collective leadership is applicable to present conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , July 1967 , pp. 563 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1967

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 “The Revolution Withers Away,” Problems of Communism, xiv (January–February 1965), IIGoogle Scholar.

2 Political Succession in the USSR (New York 1965), 204Google Scholar. The thesis of the inevitability of personal dictatorship is also invariably found in the literature on totalitarianism, which has been strongly influenced by Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Even a recent revision of one of the seminal works in the field does not stray too far from the old model of the totalitarian dictator. See the second edition, revised by Friedrich, Carl, of Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York 1966), 31–44, 70–81.Google Scholar

3 As quoted in Ploss, Sidney I., Conflict and Decision-Making in Soviet Russia (Princeton 1965), 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lenin, V. I., Sochineniia [Collected Works] (Moscow 1930), xxvi, 227–28Google Scholar, emphasis mine. It is always possible, of course, that he would have forgotten his original intentions as the need for continued suppression of opposition became apparent.

5 Compare, in this respect, Lenin's total rejection of Plekhanov and Martov with his support of the Tsarist spy, Malinovsky, despite the warnings of others.

6 The Russian Institute, Columbia University, ed., The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism: A Selection of Documents (New York 1956), 82. Khrushchev attributed the remark to Bulganin.Google Scholar

7 In Trotsky's case, it should be noted, his initial legitimacy derived also from his brilliant role in the Revolution and civil war and from his impressive personal gifts.

8 In this connection, George Kennan refers to a lack of a “clear code of personal and collegial ethics” that could serve “to contain the powerful impulses of personal ambition and the multitudinous abrasions, frictions, misunderstandings, and jealousies that affect the mutual relations of men associated in a political undertaking.” See his Introduction to Nicolaevsky, Boris I., Power and the Soviet Elite (New York 1965), xiv–xvGoogle Scholar.

9 January 31, 1924.

10 Some disturbances and even riots reportedly occurred, but this is another matter.

11 In addition to Ploss, see Linden, Carl A., Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–1964 (Baltimore 1966)Google Scholar.

12 Zbigniew Brzezinski has suggested that the new processes have given rise to a “counterelite” of purged officials, ready, willing, and able to offer an alternative to the functioning leadership. See his article “The Soviet Political System: Transformation or Degeneration?” Problems of Communism, xv (January–February 1966), 8Google Scholar.

13 Pravda, April 16, 1953, as translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, v (May 09, 1953)Google Scholar. This appeared three years before the beginning of full-scale de-Stalinization.

14 I am referring here not to the specific problem of Soviet ideology, but to the advent of a period when all ideological tendencies seem increasingly irrelevant, as described in Bell's, DanielThe End of Ideology (New York 1961)Google Scholar and Lipset's, Seymour MartinPolitical Man (New York 1960)Google Scholar.

15 Of course, this analysis is not meant to imply that Stalin's support was unanimous or that fear was not an operative element.

16 Pravda, January 15, 1961, as translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, xiii (March 01, 1961)Google Scholar.

17 The post-Khrushchevian Twenty-third Party Congress indicated some relaxation of this conformity to rules, since it met some five months after the specified time limit.

18 In his last months as First Secretary, Khrushchev apparently tried to overcome hostile groupings around him by calling together ad hoc and essentially illegitimate groups of supporters to approve his proposals and create fails accomplis for the party leadership opposing him.

19 In the summer of 1964, just a few months before his removal, Khrushchev went on a “barnstorming” tour of rural areas, during which he repeatedly seemed to be appealing directly to his audience over the heads of the party leadership. Carrying things this far undoubtedly worsened his relations with the other leaders, wh o already felt threatened by Khrushchev's maneuvers.

20 The following pattern assumes a continuation of the present set of “external” pressures felt by the Soviet leadership. Most important is the assumption that such pressures will not increase traumatically and cause a return to a crisis situation brought about by a catastrophic failure in internal policy or a sudden and threatening increase in foreign hostility, from either the West or the East.

21 The Soviet Political System: An Interpretation (New York 1965), 467Google Scholar.