Pillars of the Soviet Dictatorship at the Local Level

Governance, 1993

The main feature of the former Soviet system was the absolute dominance of the Communist Party legally confirmed in Art. 6 of the USSR Constitution and firmly entrenched in the entire political, administrative, and economic fabric of the country. The dominance was expressed, first, by the nomenklatura system in which the party had the sole power to make appointments for all key elite positions in the Soviet Union. This included political, administrative, and economic elite positions, and all other public posts, as well as those in the religious sphere, such as the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. The term nomenklatura refers to a list of key positions and appointments to be made by the higher authorities in the party, and lists of persons appointed to those positions or held in reserve for them (Voslensky 1980, 75). Thus, the party was a gatekeeper for, and the master of, all elite positions in the country. Another key feature was the unique position which the party had in the overall decision-making and controlling of all other political and public organizations, including state agencies. This decision-making and controlling power was exercised, first of all, by the Central Committee and by the party's units that formed a "parallel" organizational structure in all political, administrative, economic and other public organizations, including state agencies, military units, and KGB units as well as economic enterprises. This combination of central decisionmaking and an all-penetrating net of "double" structures gave the party its unique organizational power base. The ideological and organizational iron grip in which the party held the country over many decades, climaxing in the gruesome dictatorship of Stalin, allowed earlier Western analysts, such as Friedrich and Brzezinski, to call the Soviet Union a totalitarian state. "De-stalinization"

Studies in Comparative Communism, 1991

Warwick Research Archive Portal (University of Warwick), 2007

The paper investigates the link between the sub-national variation of political regimes in a (at the federal level) non-democratic country and the appointments of federal officials in the sub-national provinces. In particular, we look at the appointment of the chief federal inspectors to the regions in Putin's Russia in 2000–2012. Our main research question is whether appointment patterns can be explained by top-down concerns of the central government willing to keep control over the most unruly regions or by bottom-up self-selection of bureaucrats belonging to influential groups into more attractive positions more suitable for rent-seeking. The advantage of our case is that data we have at hand allow us to distinguish these two logics. Our results indicate that for the Russian chief federal inspectors in 2000–2012 bottom-up self-selection appears to be the more plausible explanation of the link between sub-national political regimes and appointment patterns.

International Relations and Diplomacy, 2016

Informal networks, practices and institutions may be observed in many different social contexts, particularly in politics. In certain political regimes, certain forms of informality are to be expected and are also tolerated more than in others. Political informality in Eastern Europe may be presented on an axis with two poles, with many variants or combinations of informality and formality between them. These positions also allow the identification of specific regime types and legal systems. This chapter seeks to contextualize the distinction between the formal and the informal and to relate it to types of political regime, the principal focus resting on informal politics. Specific political contexts may produce practices of informality that have become so generalised that they can be described as cultures of informality. The interesting question is: to what extent are specific forms of informal structures more resilient in particular regime types than in others? Particularly looking at some of the more-or-less autocratic Euroasiatic states, one can easily recognize that the very purpose of informal politics and institutions is to restrict or eliminate political competition. Forms and meanings of what is informal and formal change the further one moves eastwards. Formal rules are and may be used together with informal institutions to control society. All this points to specific cultures of informality that can be observed, as well as different cultures of trust and distrust. On the other hand, such cultures of informality have to be considered in the context of specific political systems, together with their regimes (the concrete configurations of political power) and their organisations. This paper looks particularly at hybrid non-democracies and suggests one might consider them, in the perspective of Niklas Luhmann's system theory, as parasites of functional differentiation.

RIDDLE Russia, 2024

2004

his article presents the argument that Soviet-Russian politics from 1990 to 1995 should be evaluated not as a battle between democrats and Communists (or neocommunists) but as an intra-party split and a realignment of former Soviet party leaders. For this purpose, local politics in Chelyabinsk, Samara, Ulyanovsk, Tambov, and Tver oblasts are analyzed. One of the most obvious, but never fully considered, facts is that almost all the political leaders in post-Soviet Russia occupied nomenklatura posts only a few years before, including former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar (an editor of the journal Kommunist) and former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov (a senior economist of the Foreign Currency Department of the State Bank). A simple fact would suffice for understanding the historical significance of the intra-nomenklatura struggle: in May 1990, the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, 86 percent of whom were members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), elected as their ch...

Party Politics, 2012