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, "Political Analysis and Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev" [excerpt from "Soviet Dissent under Khrushchev: An Analytical Study," Comparative Politics, 13, no. 1 (October 1980): 15–35, at 25–30, 34–35], available at <http://www.robertcutler.org/sections/ar80cpx3.html>, accessed 16 December 2024.

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Claims for political democracy during this period were not identical with those of the democratic movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under Khrushchev, such advocacy was limited to those segments of the elite and regime sectors in which policy specialists challenged the Party generalists' monopoly on decision-making. Such claims nevertheless shared with the later democratic movement a protest against the monistic justification of unrestricted power in the hands of self-appointed agents.

3. Conclusion

3.1. Political analysis of Soviet dissent

As a result of decreases in the elite's coercion of the regime and in the regime's coercion of the community between 1953 and 1956, artistic freedoms and socialist legality erupted as issue areas, largely within the community sector. Some of those sentiments were aggregated in various institutional forums and were amplified there by members of the regime sector who occupied leading roles in those institutions.

In response to this development, the elite instituted policies (1956–1960/61) designed to instill values, among the members of the community, that would induce them to uphold the legitimacy of the system and of its erstwhile structure. Khrushchev identified himself with some of those reforms in order to promote his own personal legitimacy among the community. During this period, however, the community's response to those very policies reinforced the dissident trends. In particular, campaigns on behalf of "new socialist legality" exacerbated and broadened protests within the community sector. The issue areas of nationality rights and religious autonomy erupted, further expanding the range of dissident interests.

The elite thereupon began (1959/60–1964) to reform its own relations with the regime sector and even tried to alter the nature of the regime. This was attempted by introducing policies—some of which, again, Khrushchev sponsored personally in order to aggrandize his power—that would internally differentiate the elite and the regime sectors, increasing the number of roles within them. The main results of those developments for Soviet dissent were that (l) developmental rationality increased in salience as a dissident issue area within the regime sector and (2) in that sector there surfaced a bargaining ethos—especially in questions of resource allocation—that facilitated the diffusion of political authority.

These interactive events are represented statically in Table 1. Its format does not capture all the subtleties discussed above; nor does that discussion even capture all the historic idiosyncrasies of the development of Soviet dissent between 1953 and 1964. The distinction, for instance, between specialist policymakers and specialist policy-advisors is not so clear in reality as it is in theory. Likewise, it is impossible to attribute with certainty demands for

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political democracy to such specialists. Further, such issues as nationality rights certainly antedate Stalin's death. These details are sacrificed to analytical parsimony in the hope that insights more generally applicable may be gained, though also in the belief that history is not falsified by their omission.

Table 2 sacrifices further detail and substance to parsimony and schematization. Compared to Table 1, it is a more dynamic, but also cruder, representation of the evolution of Soviet dissent between 1953 and 1964. Table 2 provides "snapshots" of the flow of information (upward) and coercion (downward) between hierarchically adjacent sectors. Some of the assignments can be disputed, and some are to a degree "judgment calls"; regardless, Table 2 summarizes much of the preceding discussion into an analytical Gestalt. Moreover, it begins to suggest the interactive nature of dissent. In particular, it suggests the inference that any particular transformation in the political structure actually affects the whole range of dissident issues. If that is so, then the transformations are not mutually independent, since the policies composing each of them respond to changes in the articulation of dissent. The schema is, however, rather abstract. It is therefore appropriate to relate this theoretical representation back to the reality from which it was constructed. In the process, some conclusions may be drawn.

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We began by assuming, for heuristic purposes, that the totalitarian model accurately represented the Soviet political system under Stalin. Then:

1. Spontaneous articulation of interests upward from the community to the regime and from the regime to the elite became possible under conditions of the first transformation in this political system.

The sentiments expressed generally originated in the community sector, rather than in the regime sector. In some cases, however, those communications were intercepted by the regime sector, which filtered and amplified them. In the language of functionalist systems theory:

2. Institutions that originally were intended to facilitate the flow of "coercion" down from the elite, through the regime, to the community—institutions thus having a measure of legitimacy for the elite—functioned to aggregate certain types of dissent and propel it further up the sectoral hierarchy to the elite's attention. Such institutions were characteristically home to specific occupational groups.

Dissident political demands that received this kind of airing catalyzed their adherents into sustained political activity. For example, the writers—to use Almond's terminology—had access, as an institutional group, to political resources that enabled them to function as an associational group more successfully than other groups could. Supporters of demands for nationality rights constituted one of those other groups: once Khrushchev had removed the ethnically conscious local Party secretaries whom Beria had promoted, advo-

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cates of nationality rights had no politically legitimate nor any institutionally secure forum from which to articulate their demands.

With the second transformation of the political system, community-sector dissent ceased meeting mere passive obstruction and began to encounter purposeful resistance and conscious coercion from the regime sector, through those same institutions. That, for instance, is precisely how state organs to control the church affected the dissident issue of religious autonomy, which had begun to percolate through them. We might, then, conclude that:

3. Dissident activity in those institutions is easier for the authorities to control than activity outside those institutions.

It is worth noting, however, that community-sector participation in legitimated institutions[55] can also be intentionally expanded by decisions made on high. That is what happened with respect to some socialist legality issues (e.g., the druzhinniki), and it happened despite the misgivings of a fair number of occupants of regime-sector roles in those institutions (judges and procurators who believed the reforms hampered them).

With the third transformation, dissent articulated by the community sector became less potent while that expressed from the regime sector appeared to reach a modus vivendi with the controls exercised downward by the elite. The contrast between the evolution of artistic freedom and religious autonomy issues, on the one hand, and developmental rationality, on the other, exemplifies this trend. To generalize:

4. The issue areas aggregated in those institutions tend, under conditions of coercion exercised from above, to lose what shared-interest quality they have and to become more constituency-specific.

That process can transmute the very nature of the demands, as when the nationality rights issue, during the 1950s, ceased being explicitly "political" and became instead "cultural." And when cultural dissent among Great Russians found the form of demands for religious autonomy, the existence of legitimate political institutions governing relations between the Soviet state and the Orthodox church breached the union between those constiuency-specific demands and other, shared-interest "freedom-to-practice" demands. Thus:

5. That process of aggregation, which narrows the scope of the dissent expressed, tends to cut off from access to legitimate political resources those tendencies of dissident articulation that are based on shared interests among members of the community sector.

For after the elite had "attempted to silence the voices of discontent by relaxing antireligious pressures on 'legal' churchmen," it could proceed "to tighten legal restrictions on religious activities, especially [on those of] the less institutional, more elusive sectarians."[56]

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3.2. Soviet dissent and political analysis

Work by Herbert Kelman suggests that the patterns of political dissent analyzed here are manifestations, in one system, of more universal processes. He has described six different "patterns of personal involvement in the national system," defined by three system-level requirements for political integration (conformity, consolidation, and mobilization) and two individual-level sources of attachment or loyalty to the system (sentimental and instrumental. The three "system-level requirements" that Kelman describes bear strong kinship to the three structural transformations in the Soviet political system specified in this article. Moreover, shared-interest dissident issues—prevalent within the community sector—seem to reflect miscarriages of what Kelman calls "sentimental system-attachment," whereas constituency-specific issues—predominant in regime-sector dissent—tend to be animated by incomplete "instrumental system-attachment." In this perspective, each of the six issues finding dissident articulation represents a response to the failure of one of the three dimensions of systems integration, animated by one of the two modalities of individual attachment to the system.[57]

Kelman's remarks strengthen the conclusion that Soviet dissent is symptomatic of a political bind of the Soviet system: more specifically, a double bind of the regime sector. If Connor has written that "[Soviet] political culture links the bureaucratic elite and the 'masses' more closely than it links the dissidents to either,"[58] this is at least as true of the regime sector as of the dissidents. Like its Tsarist forebear, Soviet political culture leaves little independence to the regime sector, which has gained real importance only since 1953. Yet hardly is the regime sector born when thrust upon it are the obligations of mediating between an elite and a community, which traditionally communicate little if at all in the format that it, the regime, discovers it has the responsibility to facilitate.

Regime-community relations were permitted a measure of autonomy so that the community might consider the system in general, the post-1953 elite in particular, and even Khrushchev personally, politically legitimate in Stalin's absence. To accomplish this end, the attitude that the regime sector was legitimate in and of itself had first to be cultivated among the community. Yet while this was and is not possible unless the regime responds to the community's claims, which it is, moreover, unaccustomed to address directly, still the regime was, and continues to be, regarded instrumentally by the elite, which thereby not only restricts the regime' s ability to address those claims constructively but also opposes the claims of the regime itself qua bureaucracy.

The categories used in this article describe well the types of dissent found in Marxist-Leninist systems generally. However, since the discussion here—and the definition of dissent in particular—is specific to those systems, generalizations beyond them must be made with caution. A study, using the framework outlined here, of Spanish dissent from 1968 to the present or, more ambitiously, of Yugoslav dissent over the past third of a century could help to clarify the

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limitations of this approach by suggesting a conceptualization of dissent that does not identify it axiomatically with interest articulation.

For that purpose it would be worthwhile to use explicitly the information-coercion framework of David Apter, which has been implicit in this discussion of the transformations of totalitarianism. Apter's notion that different functional groups provide different qualities of information is useful, and his ideas concerning the various ways in which those various groups participate politically appear particularly applicable. For instance, in the case of the present study, it is clear that what he calls "interest groups" tended in general to animate dissident issues associated with the first structural transformation; "populist groups," those with the second; and "professional groups," those with the third. A few thoughts on East Europe, however, make it evident that this pattern is not universal even among Marxist-Leninist systems. But since dissent in such systems (if not in all systems) is unavoidably normative, and since the framework developed in this study is explicitly structural, the potential for an operational synthesis, in the context of Apter's structural-normative theory, with special attention to the question of participation in dissent, appears quite promising. The immediate requirement of such a project is further case studies of the present sort, so that a comparative middle-range theory might be elaborated that could mediate between the "community" of empirical reality and the "elite" of Apterian grand theory.[59]

[Notes]

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…

[Note 55]. See the distinction between "community political culture" and "regime political culture' in Kenneth Jowitt, "An Organizational Approach to the Study of Political Culture in Marxist-Leninist Systems," American Political Science Review, 68 (December 1974), 1173.

[Note 56]. Bociurkiw, "Church-State Relations in the USSR," 31, 25.

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[Note 57]. Herbert C. Kelman, "Patterns of Personal Involvement in the National System: A Social-Psychological Analysis of Political Legitimacy," in James N. Rosenau, ed. International Politics and Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (New York, 1969), pp. 276–88, esp. p. 280, Table 1.

[Note 58]. Connor, "Dissent in a Complex Society," 50.

[Note 59]. See David E. Apter, Choice and the Politics of Allocation (New Haven, [Conn.], 1971), esp. chap. 4.

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