In Substate Dictatorship, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk draw on the expansive social science literature on comparative dictatorship to examine the functioning of the Soviet political system on the regional level. The authors begin from the assumption that Soviet substate functionaries faced the two key problems of authoritarian rulers: namely, those pressures and threats emanating from their own ruling circle and from the broader social constituency over which they exercised their power. Soviet regional leaders also had to contend with a third source of potential trouble, namely the Central Committee. Drawing on a large volume of archival material, the book composes a detailed picture of the tactics they used to build and sustain political networks that would enable them to succeed in this challenging environment. These included over-promotion (to create dependents), blackmail through compromising material and various forms of political exclusion. Depending on their particular combination of these tools, and their success in repelling threats from competitors, the authors class regional leaders as “substate dictators,” “contested autocrats,” and “party governors” (22). The first two categories emerged during the late-Stalin era, while the third became the norm during the Brezhnev period. In many ways, the core narrative thread of the book is the gradual maturation of Soviet regional governance from substate dictatorship as essentially unchecked, military-style rule constrainable only by the center or actors with access to its resources (powerful industrial directors), to party governorship, a more sophisticated and stable system of power relations still operated by a principal actor (the regional secretary) but held together by a complex web of norms of seniority and personal respect.
There is little doubt that this book is a valuable contribution of exemplary scholarship. The primary material deployed is voluminous, rigorously selected and, significantly, largely untapped. As the world of post-WWII Soviet politics remains understudied, Substate Dictatorship is a pioneering work empirically as well as conceptually. It is therefore difficult to measure the book's findings against other contributions, though the authors make excellent use of the available secondary literature (especially when considering less examined cases, such as the Baltic republics). The theoretical toolkit of the social sciences is also skillfully used. For example, the concept of institutional conversion (114) is particularly illuminative with regard to the process by which regional officials used their position to redirect organizational innovations initiated by Moscow in a way that served their own interests.
Nevertheless, though ably deployed, the analytical framework of comparative dictatorship is also a constraint on the book's explanatory power. Historians will be naturally suspicious of attempts to draw parallels between political systems as diverse as absolute monarchies, military dictatorships and single party states. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk recognize the limitations of working on the basis of a residual concept of dictatorship as non-democracy (311) and do attempt to highlight some of the defining traits of the USSR, such as economic planning and public ownership, along with the prominent public role of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Unfortunately, the treatment of such—to this reviewer—central elements of the Soviet system is cursory and of little import to the book's main arguments. With regard to ideology in particular, the authors’ treatment of Marxism-Leninism as a “language spoken by political actors that knitted the ruling elite together” (93) is intuitively plausible, but somewhat difficult to square with the party's repeated campaigns to expel careerists, or indeed the notion that for some committed members, political exclusion could be “a life-shattering blow” leading to “depression and, on occasion, suicide” (307). Similarly, though the pressures of taut planning are acknowledged as a major factor in center-periphery dynamics, there is no broader discussion of the political economy of the USSR as a determinant of the evolution of sub-state politics, or conversely, of sub-state pressures as drivers of central economic policy. The absence of an index entry on Alexei Kosygin or the reforms associated with his name is symptomatic in that regard, although the connection between the growth of regional autonomy in the political and economic sphere during the Brezhnev era is alluded to in the chapter on party governors (279).
One book can only do so much, however. The authors have certainly succeeded in their main goal of providing a granular account of Soviet politics on the substate level over an extensive timeframe. Like all good pieces of research, Substate Dictatorship raises questions as well as providing answers. This book will be an essential starting point for future research into all aspects of post-WWII Soviet history, including those it addresses only partially.
