Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders (Routledge Revivals)

Building Authority in Soviet Politics

George W. Breslauer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138686700
• eBook ISBN: 9781134875795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1982, this book explores how Khrushchev and Brezhnev manipulated their policies and personal images as they attempted to consolidate their authority as leader. Central issues of Soviet domestic politics are examined: investment priorities, incentive policy, administrative reform, and political participation. The author rejects the conventional images of Khrushchev as an embattled consumer advocate and decentraliser, and of Brezhnev's leadership as dull and conservative. He looks at how they dealt with the task of devising programs that combined the post-Stalin elite's goals of consumer satisfaction and expanded political participation with traditional Soviet values.

Part One Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315542577-1

1 Building Authority since Stalin

DOI: 10.4324/9781315542577-2

Building authority is not the same as consolidating power. Most Western literature on Soviet elite politics has been concerned with power consolidation: with the ability of Party leaders to strengthen their grip on office, and to parry challenges to their right to rule. That literature has focused largely on the formal institutional mechanisms manipulated by the General Secretary to protect and aggrandize power: patronage allocation, patron–client obligations, and purge. Beyond patronage, analyses have focused on the ability of Party leaders to buttress their power by fashioning policies that appeal primarily to one or two of the main institutional pillars of the Soviet establishment: the party apparatus, the state bureaucracy, the military, the police, and the military-industrial complex. Thus, through a combination of patronage and payoff, power consolidation allows the General Secretary to outflank rivals and rise within the leadership. ¹

¹ In this book, I shall use the term, “national leadership,” to refer to the highest levels of the policy-making arena, that is, Politburo-members and candidate members, and their immediate subordinates within the party and state hierarchies. In contrast, I shall use the terms, “political elite” or “political establishment,” to refer to policy influential at all levels of the party and state hierarchies.

Building authority refers to another dimension of elite politics that has generally been neglected in the study of Soviet politics. Authority is legitimized power. ² Building authority is the process by which Soviet leaders seek to legitimize their policy programs and demonstrate their competence or indispensability as leaders. A concern with building authority assumes that “pulling rank” may not always be effective in mobilizing political support if a leader is perceived to be incompetent or dispensable. And it assumes that, in the post-Stalin era, when regime goals are more diversified and trade-offs more complex, coalitions must be built across institutions, with policies that appeal to a diverse set of cadre orientations. A leader may consolidate his power through patronage and through priority emphasis on currying support in one or two institutions, but his authority as leader cannot be increased beyond a certain point on these bases alone. As T. H. Rigby has observed:

² For a perceptive discussion of authority after Stalin and Mao, see Jeremy T. Paltiel, “DeStalinization and DeMaoization,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Université du Québec á Montréal, June 2–4, 1980.

Formal positions have, of course, been vital as means to and channels of personal authority, but there is none in the Soviet Union that suffices to impart it: except for Lenin, leaders have had to work and fight for it after appointment to high office. ³

(Italics in original)

³ T. H. Rigby, “A conceptual approach to authority, power, and policy in the Soviet Union,” in T. H. Rigby, Archie Brown, and Peter Reddaway (eds), Authority, Power, and Policy in the USSR (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 16.

There are two roles the post-Stalin Party leader plays in seeking to build his authority: problem-solver and politician. As problem-solver he attempts to forge policy programs that promise to further the goals of the post-Stalin era. As politician he attempts to create a sense of national élan, so as to increase the political establishment’s confidence in his leadership ability.

Political conflict since Stalin has rarely revolved around whether or not to pursue new goals. Rather, it has centered on the costs to be borne in traditional values in pursuing the new tasks on the political agenda. As problem-solver, the General Secretary has sought to demonstrate his political skill and intellectual vision in forging programs that will implement the new, post-Stalin consensus without foresaking traditional values. His coalition-building strategy has typically centered on efforts to build support in various institutional constituencies for his distinctive synthesis of conflicting values.

The Khruschchev and Brezhnev administrations shared a broad regime consensus ⁴ on behalf of breaking with the extremes of Stalinism and tackling new tasks: increased consumer satisfaction; greater material incentives for the masses; deconcentration of public administration; ⁵ expanded political participation by social activists and specialists; a narrower definition of political crime; an end to mass terror; and greater collective leadership. All of which pointed in the direction of greater political, social, and economic equality than existed under Stalin.

⁴ Throughout this book, I shall document the policy consensus that emerged after Stalin and after Khrushchev. Use of the terms, “agreement,” “majority consensus,” “broad consensus,” and the like does not refer to unanimity. But it does mean something considerably greater than a narrow majority, and it includes both the Party First Secretary (or General Secretary, as Brezhnev came to be called in 1966), and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. ⁵ The post-Stalin effort to deburden higher levels of administration of excessively detailed planning is not decentralization, but deconcentration. Decentralization, or “marketization,” would require the extension to local executives of genuine autonomy from party or ministerial intervention, and the establishment of markets as coordinating devices. Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev stood for this. For further discussion of this distinction, see Donald V. Schwartz, “Decisionmaking, administrative decentralization, and feedback mechanisms: comparison of Soviet and Western models,” Studies in Comparative Communism (Spring–Summer 1974).

Efforts to cope with these new tasks, however, have been shaped by constant tension and competition with ongoing elitist features of the Soviet tradition: heavy-industrial and military priorities; party activism and pressure as spurs to labor productivity, and political intervention as a spur to managerial initiative; the leading role of party apparatchiki in political, economic, and social life; a strong commitment to social discipline, political obedience, and the work ethic (“he who does not work, neither shall he eat”); a tendency to look to a strong leader to provide both leadership and a symbol of unity around which to rally the nation; and a preference for big projects to generate national unity, élan, and fervor.

In building his authority in post-Stalin politics, the Party leader has rarely chosen between traditional values and new goals. Rather, in his role as problem-solver, he has sought to demonstrate his ability to synthesize the two—or to put together packages that borrow from each.

Both the egalitarian and elitist orientations find substantial legitimation in Marxist–Leninist and Stalinist theory and practice. For the Soviet political tradition is multifaceted and contradictory. ⁶ Yet there are limits to the degree of diversity easily legitimized by that tradition. Neither the elitist nor the egalitarian strand sanctions the dominance of political or economic markets: private ownership of the means of production on a large scale; consumer sovereignty; multiparty competition; autonomous concentrations of political or economic power; or a conception of the public arena as a “marketplace of ideas.” Hence, the challenge facing the Soviet Party leader since Stalin has been to propose innovative policies that would move beyond Stalinism without creating an economic or political order based on autonomous markets. His challenge has been to move in a more egalitarian direction without overly compromising traditional elitist values. Conceptualization of the character and limits of “Post-Stalinism” in the USSR appears in Table 1.1.

⁶ For the argument that Soviet history has been marked by a “dual political culture,” see Stephen F. Cohen, “The friends and foes of change: reformism and conservatism in the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review (June 1979).

But politics is more than just coalition-building for the advancement of concrete material and institutional interests. It is also a process of generating and manipulating more diffuse appeals. In his role as politician, the General Secretary has sought to build his authority by propagandizing appeals that will (hopefully) create a sense of national purpose, élan, or fervor, and by manipulating the language and arenas of politics in ways that will increase the political elite’s sense of dependence upon him for leadership, direction, or protection. There are many ways to do this, the effectiveness of which will depend upon the climate of opinion prevailing within the political establishment at the time. Thus, he may create or exploit an atmosphere of crisis or threat, in order to parry criticism or present himself as a national “hero.” ⁷ He may generate ideological or nationalistic appeals, or launch economic campaigns, for purposes of creating a sense of dynamism, progress, and solidarity that transcends narrow political interests or material concerns. He may make common cause with the masses in order to intimidate organized political interests. Toward this same end, he may expand the scope and visibility of political conflict, activating previously passive groups on his behalf. ⁸ Alternatively, he may eschew strategies of intimidation, presenting himself as the political leader best able to protect the elite, both from the masses and from the threat of purge.

⁷ On heroic leadership, see James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), ch. 9. ⁸ Expanding the scope of political conflict as a basic technique of political struggle is the theme of E. E. Schattschneider’s The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960).

Table 1.1 Stalinism and Beyond

Policy Realm	Stalinist	Regime-Type Post-Stalinist	Liberal-Democratic Polity; Affluent Society
Investment Priorities	Military/Heavy-Industrial monopoly	Selective reallocation	Consumerism
Incentive Policy	Mass exhortation and coercion	Increased material incentives	Consumerism
Administration	Terroristic; super-centralized	Reduced pressure; deconcentration	Decentralization; marketization
Social and Individual Autonomy	Little social autonomy; broad definition of political crime	Increased social autonomy; narrower definition of political crime	Social pluralism; very narrow definition of political crime
Political Participation: officials vis-à-vis masses and specialists	Autocratic/highly exclusionary	Expanded participation	Political marketization
Authority-building: Party leader vis-à-vis political elite	Autocratic	Increased collective leadership	Constitutional

An ineffective authority-building strategy would be one that failed to persuade influentials within the political establishment of his problem-solving competence and political indispensability. This state of affairs would not necessarily lead to his dismissal from office, for the General Secretary might still be able to fend off challenges to his rule by “pulling rank” and mobilizing his political clients. His power would be less broadly legitimate, but he could still be powerful enough to coerce opponents. This seems to have been the state of Brezhnev’s authority in the late 1970s. At some point, however, the perception that a leader is incompetent and dispensable—indeed, threatening—can become so widespread that it can undermine his hold on office. This is what happened to Khrushchev in 1964.

Strategies for authority-building have become more important to Soviet leaders since Stalin’s death. Stalin, in his last years, was able to terrorize members of the leadership through his independent control of a vast police empire. Stalin’s successors reined in the secret police and put an end to terror as a means of ordering relationships among individuals and groups within the political establishment.

This change had momentous implications for the relationship between power and authority in Soviet elite politics. The key to power consolidation was still the accumulation of patronage and cultivation of the party apparatus and military–industrial complex as bases of support. The General Secretary still had plentiful political resources with which to pull rank (as Krushchev demonstrated in 1957). But the change after Stalin meant that political support became more contingent as the stakes in political conflict were reduced. The abandonment of terror, and the rise in collective restraints on the leader, fostered a reduction in the reliability of patronage as a source of support. ⁹ Clients of the leader would be less likely than in the past to ignore their personal policy preferences, the interests of their nominal constituents, or the interests of the bureaucracies in which they worked in order to support the program of their patron. As a result, Party leaders have had to worry more since Stalin about how to increase their authority in order to maintain their grip on office, and in order to maintain control over the policy agenda and parry challenges to their policy programs.

⁹ On this point, see Grey Hodnett, “The pattern of leadership politics,” in Seweryn Bialer (ed.), The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One Introduction
• Part Two The Khrushchev Years
• Part Three The Brezhnev Years
• Part Four Conclusion
• Part Five Bibliography
• Index