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Soviet Politics and After: Old and New Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

William E. Odom
William E. Odom
Affiliation:
Yale University.
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Abstract

The totalitarian model remained the best analytic concept for studying Soviet politics because it offered clear empirical referents, provided a yardstick for measuring change, and could be adapted to explain the nature of change. Alternative models emphasizing pluralism encouraged the impression that “political development” was occurring rather than the ”political decay” that led to the Soviet Union's collapse. The study of the successor states must now be brought within a more general approach to comparative political analysis. Yet the totalitarian model retains utility for understanding the legacies those states still confront.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , October 1992 , pp. 66 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1992

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References

1 Rigby, , “Traditional, Market, and Organizational Societies and the USSR,” World Politics 16 (July 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar This excellent essay still offers useful ways of looking at Soviet politics.

2 Meyer, , “The USSR, Incorporated,” in Treedgold, Donald W., ed., The Development of the USSR: An Exchange of Views (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).Google Scholar Meyer elaborates the concept more fully in The Soviet Political System (New York: Random House, 1965).

3 Linden, , Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).Google Scholar Linden's excellent monograph, The Soviet Party-State (New York: Praeger, 1983), strikes me as somewhat at odds with his effort to develop his “conflict” model. Rather, his insightful treatment of the ideological foundations of the system places him closer to the totalitarian model.

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9 Huntington discusses these three features, which are necessary for a model to be “accepted and useful.” See Huntington, , “Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many,” Political Science Quarterly 89 (March 1974), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 The literature on the totalitarian model is growing, and the variety of arguments is large. I am sidestepping most of the debate by taking only the Friedrich-Brzezinski variant. The concept has too many authors and too much history to list them all briefly and elaborate them fairly. Proponents who offer strong, commonsense analysis include Linz, Juan J., “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 3:1745–411Google Scholar; Moore (fn. 7),36ff.; and Hassner, Pierre, “Communist Totalitarianism: The Translantic Vagaries of a Concept,” Washington Quarterly 6 (Fall 1985).Google Scholar Although this selection does injustice to a large number of other scholars, it at least captures important highlights.

11 See Arch Getty, J., Origins of the Great Purges (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hough, Jerry, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 174–78.Google Scholar

12 Part of the problem with “terror” as an analytical concept is defining it. The authors of the model would surely qualify as terror the fear of incarceration and execution with no serious judicial process, if one had seen that happen to a significant number of fellow citizens. Fear of losing one's job, career, and status with no recourse might also qualify, but agreement on this definition might not be as wide. I have no solution to this definitional problem beyond a commonsense judgment that fear was more widespread and far more significant for Soviet citizens than for those living under most other political systems; and in some states, fear and terror for some parts of the population may be as severe as it ever was in the Soviet Union. In general, however, the Soviet system seemed to create that climate on a broader scale than did most nontotalitarian forms of dictatorship.

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18 Essentially this is the starting assumption for “social historians” such as Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Arch Getty, J., and Manning, Roberta T.. See the discussions in the Russian Review (fn. 8).Google Scholar These scholars use the dichotomy “from above” / “from below” to study the Stalin period in a way that ridicules the totalitarian model. To a large degree, they have adopted a straw man as an alternative in their effort to make a straw man of the totalitarian model.

19 Merle Fainsod offers abundant empirical evidence of this local political voluntarism. See Fainsod, , Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).Google Scholar Getty (fn.11) lets a similar impression emerge from his evidence, though his thesis may seem to say otherwise.

20 For a case study of this kind of bureaucratic diffusion of power and its periodic recentralization, see Odom, , The Soviet Volunteers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

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24 Ibid., 556–76.

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26 To be sure, Hough never made highly specific predictions on this point, and he occasionally provided caveats—especially in the final chapter of How the Soviet Union Is Governed (fn. 11)—but this was hardly of sufficient weight to balance his optimistic message about liberal trends in Soviet political change.

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42 Pravda, August 6, 1988.

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44 Vera Tolz offers the first effort to analyze the proliferation of new parties. She concludes that “it is more likely that outbreaks of popular discontent will occur than that there will be gradual transformation of the country into a democratic, multiparty state”; see Tolz, , The USSR's Emerging Multiparty System (New York: Praeger, 1990), 93.Google Scholar

45 Boris Kagarlitsky offers an eyewitness account of efforts to organize political movements on an all-Union basis, the obstacles they faced, and the contrasting organizational strength of those in some republics. See Kagarlitsky, , Farewell Perestroika: A Soviet Chronicle (New York: Verso, 1990).Google Scholar

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47 Throughout his personal chronicle of political developments, Kagarlitsky (fn. 45) offers examples of officially guided media attention and deliberate neglect of various political groups to shape both domestic and foreign perceptions. For considerable detail on the politics of media controls, see an unpublished paper by Peniston, Bradley, “Gorbachev, Glasnost, and GLAVLIT: The Persistence of Controls in the Soviet Media” (New Haven: SEES, Yale University, April 15, 1991).Google Scholar

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49 For essays that demonstrate how serious this error has been, see Rowen, Henry and Wolf, Charles Jr, eds., The Impoverished Empire (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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54 See RFE/RL Daily Report 170 (September 9, 1990); 183 (September 25, 1990); and 188 (October 2, 1990).

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60 Rigby (fn. 1).

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63 Dahl (fn. 48).

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67 For reasons of space, I do not spell out an important distinction between “liberal” and “democracy.” Sartori (fn. 14) states it succinctly: “We cannot speak of political freedom without referring to liberalism—liberalism, I insist, not democracy” (p. 309). The diffusion of power through private property has been most important for liberalism, that is, the defense of individual rights. It by no means ensures it, but liberalism has preceded the broadening of the democratic political franchise in most Western liberal democracies, and the concern with rights has underpinned constitutionalism far more predominantly than concern for the right of democratic majorities to decide “who gets what, when, and how.”

68 Hough (fn. 25).

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