Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev: An Analytical Study

Robert M. Cutler

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Abstract: This article surveys existing concepts of dissent and opposition and clarifies their implications for the definition of the Soviet political system. It defines the Soviet political system to comprise elite, regime, and community sectors; specifies the political roles composing each sector; and considers intersectoral relationships as the structure of the Soviet political system. Three major structural changes, defined in terms of such interrelationships and specified in terms of the actual policies themselves, subsume the policies introduced during the Khrushchev period. These policies (and the structural changes they signify) are continually related to their effects on various modalities of political dissent, thereby showing how particular structural changes gave rise to particular dissident issues within particular political sectors. Its key predictions for the post-Brezhnev era were borne out by events. There are 67 explanatory and bibliographical notes incorporating sources and studies in English and French, as well as two Tables.	Outline: [ Introductory Remarks ] The Analytical Framework Dissent and Opposition Political Sectors   The Transformations in Soviet Political Structure under Khrushchev Decrease in Coercion Enforcement of Conformity Differentiation of Roles   Conclusion Political Analysis of Soviet Dissent Soviet Dissent and Political Analysis   Prospect: Soviet Politics and the Future of Soviet Dissent
Suggested citation for this webpage: Robert M. Cutler, "Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev: The Analytical Framework" [excerpt from "Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev: An Analytical Study," article in Comparative Politics, 13, no. 1 (October 1980): 15–35, at 15–19, 32–33], available at <http://www.robertcutler.org/sections/ar80cpx1.html>, accessed 16 December 2024.

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It is well known that many political reforms were introduced in the U.S.S.R. between 1953 and 1964. It is sometimes forgotten that Soviet dissent antedates the Brezhnev–Kosygin era and in fact burst forth after Stalin' s death. To explain in a systematic fashion the dynamic of reform and dissent under Khrushchev is the goal of this article.

1. The Analytical Framework

1.1. Dissent and opposition

To write that there has been controversy over the definition of "dissent" and "opposition" would be an understatement. A brief review of the meanings attached to these concepts, with particular reference to Marxist-Leninist systems, is therefore worthwhile.

Ghita Ionescu once suggested that opposition in "sovereign oppositionless states" was reduced to "inferior forms" because it was not institutionalized. He called those forms "political checks" and "political dissent"—the former "originating from the conflicts of interest" and the latter "originating from the conflicts of values."[1] Studying opposition in East Europe, H. Gordon Skilling developed a fourfold typology: (1) "integral opposition" involved a total rejection of the political system; (2) "factional opposition" referred to elite infighting; (3) "fundamental opposition" entailed a stand against certain basic policies of the regime and signalled partial rejection of the political system; and (4) "specific opposition" concerned loyal, legitimacy-supportive disagreement with particular policies.[2]

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Frederick Barghoorn defined opposition in the Soviet Union as "the persistent—and from the official point of view—objectionable advocacy of policies differing from or contrary to those which the dominant group in the supreme CPSU control and decision making bodies … adopt,"[3] and discerned three forms of it: (1) "factional," connoting internecine battles among the highest policymakers; (2) "sectoral," meaning loyal interest group politicking; and (3) "subversive," referring to activity that promotes the radical change in, or abolition of, the established order.[4] This last form of opposition appears for Barghoorn to be equivalent to dissent, which he has called "the deliberate and purposive behavior, manifested in the articulation, orally or in writing of opinions critical of, or protesting against, established ideological, cultural, and political norms and arrangements, and the authorities who maintain the existing regime and enforce its rules and policies."[5]

Rudolf Tökés has noted that both Skilling's and Barghoorn's definitions are presented as landmarks on a "seamless continuum" from "harmless and loyal disagreements about the regime's policies ('specific' and 'sectoral' opposition) … to the end of the spectrum labelled 'integral' and 'subversive' opposition."[6] Tökés does not suggest that the "continuum" may itself be multidimensional; he proceeds, however, to remark:

What neither [Skilling nor Barghoorn] appears to consider is the basic epistemological difference between "within-system" and "system-rejective" kinds of opposition. The first is aimed at effecting changes in the system and the second at change of the system. The difference between the two is in fact a difference between reform and revolution as methods of effecting a political change.[7]

Trying to distinguish opposition from dissent, Tökés once suggested that those in opposition "must have the 'will to power' and must be prepared to act," whereas dissenters "have no direct designs on power."[8] Later, however, he recognized that opposition is a more encompassing category, in fact subsuming dissent.[9] Dissent, Tökés concluded, could be "viewed as a type of within-system opposition loyal to some aspects of the status quo … and critical of others," that is, "as a form of interest articulation with a normative content."[10] He also took the peculiar, but peculiarly operationalizable, view that even system-rejective ideologies in the Soviet Union are not oppositional because a "lack of resources prevents them from qualifying as revolutionary in any practical sense."[11]

There are two problems with Tökés's conceptualization of dissent: first, it is not clearly different from Skilling's notion of fundamental opposition, although it is more rigorous; and second, it risks becoming a universally inclusive category; nevertheless, Tökés's summary of Soviet dissent is the best analytical description available. Dissent, he writes, is "a culturally conditioned political reform movement seeking to ameliorate and ultimately to eliminate the

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perceived illegitimacy of the posttotalitarian Communist-party leadership's authoritarian rule into authoritative domination through (1) structural, administrative, and political reforms; (2) ideological purification ant cultural modernization; and (3) the replacement of scientifically unverifiable normative referents with empirical (nonideological) criteria as political guidelines and developmental success indicators."[12] Tökés has further determined, through content analysis of samizdat documents, that all dissident currents

have a set of shared interests in advocating reforms in the areas of political democracy, nationality rights, socialist equality [read: legality] and human rights. These are supplemented by and, in certain instances, subordinated to demands by specific groups focusing on "constituency-specific" grievances such as religious persecution, violations of artistic freedoms, and critical arguments about economic problems and the quality of life in the USSR.[13]

Tökés's definition of dissent accords very well with Connor's view of dissent as "both product and symptom of the confrontation of two phenomena in the contemporary Soviet system—on the one hand, the structural complexity of a society at a rather high level of development; and, on the other, the persistence of a centralist-command mode of integrating the increasingly differentiated segments of that society."[14] But let us give this insight additional rigor.

1.2. Political sectors

Let us posit three sectors in the Soviet political system: the elite, the regime, and the community.[15] Each sector is a set of roles; collectively, the three sectors exhaust the Soviet political system. However, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, for individuals who occupy more than one role may occupy them in different sectors. The first task is to specify which roles comprise each sector.

The regime sector is both the most difficult to specify and the most crucial to the analysis thus, it is probably best to begin there. Two ideas from Gaetano Mosca pertain. The first is the distinction between upper and lower levels of the elite: "Below the highest stratum of the ruling class there is always … another that is more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country [and without which] any sort of social organization would be impossible." The second is that this lower-level elite is a bridge between the core decision makers and the rest of society.[16] Mosca's lower-level elite is the regime sector. To make this assertion both credible and applicable, we must examine its implications for the analysis of the Soviet political system.

John A. Armstrong, in his study of the Ukrainian bureaucratic elite, identifies obkomburo members as the "middle-level elite" of the union republic. That would seem to end our search for the all-union lower-level elite; but Armstrong limits his sample to party generalists, the apparatchiki.[17] That may have made sense twenty years ago, but we cannot stop there today. Any study of

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the Soviet system that is based on the bureaucratic model must account, as Hough has written, not only for policy execution but also for policy formulation.[18] The specification of the regime sector must not be limited to policy-execution roles, as might be inferred from Mosca.

In practice, the political roles that compose the regime sector may be determined by positional analysis. Although Gwen Moore Bellisfield's sociometric approach[19] cannot be applied experimentally to the Soviet case, it suggests the analytical separation of the core decision makers—the "power elite"—from the various specialized groups—the different "issue elites." That distinction in turn permits the positional specification of the regime sector of the Soviet political system. The specialist issue elites fill the policy-formulating roles in the regime sector, and the all-union lower-level power elite is the policy-executing complement. These two sets of roles may, but need not, overlap in the same persons.

Let us now specify positionally the political roles that compose the regime scoter, taking the lower-level power elite first. The basic all-union lower-level executive unit is the oblast; the primary executive body of the oblast is the obkomburo, the object of Armstrong's study. Philip D. Stewart's research on the Stalingrad oblast between 1954 and 1962 tells us not only who the obkomburo members are but also what their relative potential influence is at obkom plenums. Ranking consistently high in relative potential influence were: the first secretaries of the obkom, of the gorkom, and of the komsomol; the chairmen of the obispolkom, of the trade union council, ant of the sovnarkhoz (this last now anachronistic); the obkom secretaries for agriculture, for ideology, for cadres, and for industry; the editor of the regional edition of Pravda; and the chief of the oblast KGB. Slightly lower in influence were the various obispolkom vice-chairmen, followed by the directors of the various local heavy_industry concerns. At the bottom were the first secretaries of the various raikoms and the chairman of the gorispolkom. The ensemble of these roles provides the positional specification of the policy-executing component of the regime sector.[20]

Previous research on Soviet "interest groups" simplifies the task of specifying positionally the policy-formulating component of the regime sector. It will suffice here to validate the seven occupational categories that Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths include in their survey: the party apparatchiki, the security police, the military, the industrial managers, the economists, the writers, and the jurists.[21] The security police and the industrial managers are already represented in theca obkomburos in policy-executing roles. Milton Lodge's independent study concerns every Skilling-Griffiths group (except for the apparatchiki generalists, a special case), which does not have such corporate representation in the obkomburos.[22] This confirms the validity of the categories in the Skilling-Griffiths survey. Therefore, Lodge's groups are the

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sets of specialists that we should add to the obkomburo members in order to complete the positional inventory of the "Soviet regime."[23]

Specifying positionally the elite and community sectors is now quite easy. The elite sector corresponds to Mosca's notion of the "upper level elite": it comprises the Central Committee of the CPSU, including its Secretariat. The community sector comprises all political roles not subsumed under the definition of the elite and regime sectors.

The ensemble of relationships among these three sectors are a structure.[24] Under the totalitarian conditions associated with Stalin, intersectoral relationships were characterized by pervasive controls downward through the sectoral hierarchy and by absence of spontaneity upward. After Stalin's death, that totalitarian model became inadequate to describe accurately the structure of the Soviet political system. A number of reforms were introduced between 1953 and 1964, many but not all of them by Khrushchev in his successful attempt to gain power and eventually unsuccessful attempt to retain it. If those reforms can be described in terms of the relationships among the elite, regime, and community sectors, then the effects of those reforms on the structure of the Soviet political system can be specified analytically.

Three structural transformations may in fact be discerned: (1) decreases in the elite's coercion both of the community, mediated by the regime, and of the regime directly; (2) attempts by the elite, mediated by the regime, to induce the community to conform both with norms of participation and obligation and with norms of cultural identity, all newly prescribed and having political implications; and (3) a differentiation of roles within both the elite and the regime sectors, leading to a multiplication of the number of political actors occupying roles in them. Each of these transformations comprises a set of policies initiated over a continuous interval of time, and the three intervals are mutually exclusive. Taken together, furthermore, these three time periods collectively exhaust the 1953–64 era. We may therefore periodize Khrushchev's tenure at the head of the Party according to them.

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[Notes]

[Note 1]. Ghita lonescu, The Politics of the European Communist States (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), pp. 2–5, esp. p. 3.

[Note 2]. H. Gordon Skilling, "Opposition in Communist East Europe," in Robert A. Dahl, ed. Regimes and Oppositions (New Haven, [Conn.], 1973), esp. pp. 92–94.

[Note 3]. Frederick C. Barghoorn, "Soviet Political Doctrine and the Problem of Opposition," Bucknell Review, 12 (May 1964), 4–5. "CPSU" is a standard abbreviation for Communist Party of the Soviet Union and is used as such in the present article.

[Note 4]. Barghoorn, "Factional, Sectoral and Subversive Opposition in Soviet Politics," in Dahl, pp. 27–87.

[Note 5]. Barghoorn, "The General Pattern of Soviet Dissent," paper prepared for the Conference on Dissent in the Soviet Union, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 22–23 October 1971 (Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University: [New York, 1972]), p. 1.

[Note 6]. Rudolf L. Tökés, "Varieties of Soviet Dissent: An Overview," in Tökés, ed. Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, and People (Baltimore, [Md.], 1975), p. 17.

[Note 7]. Ibid., pp. 17–18. Cf. Leonard Schapiro, "Introduction," in Schapiro, ed., Political Opposition in One-Party States (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 2–10.

[Note 8]. Tökés, "Dissent: The Politics for Change in the USSR," in Henry W. Morton and Tökés, eds., Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s (New York, 1974), p. 10. Emphasis in the original.

[Note 9]. Tökés, "Varieties of Soviet Dissent," p. 17.

[Note 10]. Ibid., pp.18–19.

[Note 11]. Ibid., p.18.

[Note 12]. Tökés, "Dissent: The Politics for Change," p. 10.

[Note 13]. Tökés, "Varieties of Soviet Dissent," p. 14 Emphasis in the original.

[Note 14]. Walter D. Connor, "Dissent in a Complex Society: The Soviet Case," Problems of Communism, 22 (March–April 1973), 40.

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[Note 15]. Following David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, 1965}, chaps. 11–13. The analysis in this article also has resonances with chaps. 14–21 passim.

[Note 16]. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. by Hannah D. Kahn, edited and revised with an introduction by Arthur Livingston (New York, 1939), p. 404. Cf. Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York, 1966), p. 154: "The strategic 'middle level' … is that level of communication that is 'vertically' close enough to the large mass of consumers, citizens, or common soldiers to forestall any continuing and effective direct communication between them and the 'highest echelons'; and it must be far enough above the level of the large numbers of rank and file to permit effective 'horizontal' communication and organization among a sufficiently large portion of the men or units on its own level."

[Note 17]. Nevertheless, the universe Armstrong analyzes is that of delegates to the Ukrainian Party Congresses, because "while they include some persons of little political importance, … information on their compositions is much more complete. " It is, however, evident from his Tables 1 and 2 that those Party Congresses include members of union-republic organizations, of the army, and of educational institutions. Since these three establishments are not represented at the obkom level, we should supplement obkomburo membership with union-republic Party Congress attendance in our specification of the all-union lower-level executive elite; but it turns out that these three categories of delegates to union-republic Party Congresses are included in our breakdown of the policy-formulating component of the regime sector. See John A. Armstrong, The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite: A Case Study of the Ukrainian Apparatus (New York, 1959), pp. 4, 13–15.

[Note 18]. Jerry F. Hough, "The Bureaucratic Model and the Nature of the Soviet Political System," Journal of Comparative Administration, 5 (April 1973), 144–48.

[Note 19]. Gwen Moore Bellisfield, "Preliminary Notes on the Influence Structure of American Leaders" (1973, mimeo.), cited in Robert D. Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, [N.J.], 1976), pp. 17–18. For a similar technique, see Allen H. Barton, Bogdan Denitch and Charles Kadushin, eds. Opinion-Making Elites in Yugoslavia (New York, 1973).

[Note 20] . Philip D. Stewart, Political Power in the Soviet Union: A Study of Decision Making in Stalingrad (Indianapolis, [Ind.], 1968), chap. 9.

[Note 21]. Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds. Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1971).

[Note 22]. Milton Lodge, Soviet Elite Attitudes since Stalin (Columbus,[ Ohio], 1969).

[Note 23]. The various chapters in Skilling and Griffiths provide positional specifications.

[Note 24]. Jean Piaget, Le structuralisme, 4th ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970).

The complete article is available in    full text.