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Turnover and “Family Circles” in Soviet Administration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

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Students of the Soviet political system have frequently noted the high turnover rates and the short terms of office of middle and lower ranking Soviet party and governmental officials. Soviet leaders have striven to combat the formation of informal structures within the party and governmental bureaucracies which, if allowed to go unchecked, could erode the control of the central political leadership.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1973

References

1. Merle Fainsod returned to this topic repeatedly in How Russia Is Ruled, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 235-37, 388-89, 213, 240, 412, 475.

2. Cattell, David T., Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Urban Government (New York, 1968), p. 1968 Google Scholar. See also p. 56.

3. Meyer, Alfred G., The Soviet Political System: An Interpretation (New York 1965), pp. 131 and 148Google Scholar.

4. Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Huntington, Samuel P., Political Power USA/USSR (New York, 1963), pp. 222–23.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., pp. 173-74 and 177-80.

6. Armstrong, John A., The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite (New York, 1959), p. 1959 Google Scholar. See also his remarks concerning industry, pp. 50-52.

7. These sources would include Merzalov, Vladimir S., ed., Biographic Directory of the USSR (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; Lebed, Andrew, Schulz, Heinrich, and Taylor, Stephen, eds., Who's Who in the USSR, 1961-1962 (New York, 1962)Google Scholar and Who's Who in the USSR, 1965-1966 (New York, 1966); Crowley, Edward, Lebed, Andrew, and Schulz, Heinrich, eds., Prominent Personalities in USSR (Metuchen, N J., 1968)Google Scholar; Eshegodnik Bol'shoi Sovetskoi Entsiklopedii (Moscow, 1958-71); and Deputaty Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR (Moscow), which is published every four or five years following elections to the Supreme Soviet.

8. Moskovskaia pravda (before 1950 it was Moskovskii Bolshevik) and Vechemiaia Moskva; and Biulletin' ispolnitel'nogo komiteta Moskovskogo gorodskogo Soveta deputatov trudiashchikhsia, which is published bimonthly.

9. Robert, Conquest, Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R. (Torchbook ed.; New York, 1967), p. 100.Google Scholar

10. Armstrong, Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, p. 55.

11. Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, p. 226.

12. Cattell, Leningrad, p. 54. The terms were two-year terms.

13. Detailed accounts of the careers of all three of these officials may be found in the standard sources cited in note 7.

14. Both of the gorkom secretaries who were holdovers served for less than six months following Khrushchev's arrival. Of the eight executive committee officers who were holdovers, three served for six months or less following Khrushchev's arrival and another two were re-elected in December 1950 but were no longer serving by early 1953. Of those remaining, P. I. Lionov continued as the committee's secretary until 1953, when he became a deputy chairman, a post he held until 1958. N. I. Bobrovnikov had served under Popov as a deputy chairman. Khrushchev promoted him to first deputy chairman and he served in that post until 1956, when he replaced lasnov as chairman. The last holdover was V. F. Promyslov, who is currently chairman of the committee. Of the eighteen city agency heads who were holdovers, only four were serving in their former positions by March 1953.

15. In view of the coming power struggle, which all leading Soviet officials surely must have foreseen by this time, this made considerable sense. Khrushchev's relatively moderate purge of the Moscow apparatus must have made an impression on party functionaries who had sufficient information to compare it with Malenkov's notorious Leningrad Affair. It is also worth noting that shortly after Khrushchev arrived in Moscow, the local press began to run articles, supported with appropriate quotations from Lenin and Stalin, on the virtues of collegial leadership in local party and governmental organs.

16. This point is further supported by the fact that the same observation may be made concerning city governmental agency heads promoted to the position of executive committee officer.

17. This last point deserves emphasis. For gorkom secretaries appointed from within the ranks of existing city cadres, the mean number of years of service in the city before that appointment is over nine years with a median of ten and a range of from five to eighteen years. The figures for executive committee officers are a mean of ten years, a median of nine, and a range of from five to twenty years. It should be noted that these figures exclude any short periods of service outside the city organization. Furthermore, the figures actually understate length of service in the city, because the base year for this study is 1947 and any service before that date is excluded from the calculations.

Those heading city governmental agencies also have long records of service in the city. For example, of all those agency heads appointed or reappointed in 1971, nearly 60 percent had served in the city as early as 1961, and just over a third of them had held city posts at least as early as 1950. This, of course, serves to point up the danger of assuming that the short term of office for particular categories of officials is evidence of disruptive turnover. The average length of time a given category of posts is occupied by a given set of officials has nothing to do with the average length of time these persons spend in a given territorial jurisdiction or, and this is even more important, with the length of time these persons spend in particular functional areas, such as construction, in that jurisdiction.

18. Cattell, Leningrad, p. 156.

19. Adjusted Chi Square, p > .20.

20. It is also worth noting that although his use of the republic press rather than the local press enabled Armstrong to gather, as he himself notes, only limited data on the careers of lower-level oblast officials, such data as he does present suggest that these posts were filled by local people more often than the two highest oblast posts. See Armstrong, Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, pp. 77-78. Admittedly Cattell, making use of the local press in his study of Leningrad, argues a case for disruptive turnover among lower-level city officials. However, his conclusion rests not on career data but on turnover-rate data. The point of this study is that turnover data can establish only rates of turnover, not the pattern of turnover. Therefore, Cattell's conclusion is open to question.

21. Brzezinski and Huntington, Political Power, pp. 222-23.

22. Vecherniaia Moskva, June 23, 1965, p.1.