Archie Brown

Political culture and political change in Communist States

Michel Patrick. Brown (Archie) Gray (JacPolitical Culture and Political Change in Communist States. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°59/2, 1985. p. 249.

Political leadership in the Soviet Union

The Soviet political executive, 1917-1986, T.H.Rigby putting clients in place - the role of patronage in co-optation into the Soviet leadership, John H.Miller political processes and generational change, Robert V.Daniels policy outside and politics inside, Marie Mendras power and policy in a time of leadership transition (January 1982-February 1988), Archie Brown.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union

This encyclopedia explores all aspects of Russia and the former Soviet Union, past and present. It emphasizes contemporary issues, with analysis of the era of glasnost, the 1991 coup attempt, and the problems now facing Russian history and culture.

Forms Without Substance

Twenty years ago, there was a more thoroughgoing political pluralism in Russia than there is today. Contested elections took place for a new legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR. Along with its inner body, a radically reformed Supreme Soviet, it wielded real power, as Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov discovered when in June 1989 the legislature rejected no fewer than nine of his candidates for ministerial office. At that time, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still the only legal party in the country, but there was a public political life and an open struggle among several fundamentally different tendencies. In 2009, there is a variety of parties, but the system has been managed in such a way that recent elections have produced little real choice; moreover, the lack of accountability of those elected, already a feature of Russian politics in the 1990s, persists. In some respects, the forms of democracy—including party consolidation—have been enhanced, but they have been so manipulated as to deprive them of substance.1 Elections keep up the pretense of democracy, but their political significance has been eroded. The results of the 2007 parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential balloting were more predictable than the outcome of elections had been during the last three years of the Soviet Union’s existence. Russian voters had a stronger sense of political efficacy in 1989, 1990, and 1991 than they have had over the past decade. As Juan J. Linz has noted, “electoral authoritarianism” and “multiparty authoritarianism” are more appropriate characterizations for many states that have been described as “electoral democracies.”2 Either of Linz’s terms may reasonably be applied to contemporary Russia, although “façade democracy” is no less apt.3

Perestroika and the End of the Cold War

The author argues, on the basis of a close examination of archival sources (including Politburo minutes) and the numerous memoirs of leading Soviet political actors, that an interdependent mixture of new leadership, new ideas, and long-standing institutional power in the Soviet Union was primarily responsible for the Cold War ending when it did. While acknowledging that the ‘Reagan factor’ was important in some ways, he rejects the view that the Reagan administration played the decisively important role in ending the Cold War, and he contests various arguments which have been advanced in the attempt to sustain a Realist interpretation of its ending.

The Cambridge encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union

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Russia and Democratization

Russian democracy needs party consolidation and realignment, constitutional change, and an elected president who will give priority to political and legal institution-building and the rule of law.

Political Science in the USSR

This article presents an overview of the development of political science as a discipline in the Soviet Union over the last 20 years. Such an overall perspective is not easily accessible to political scientists who do not read Russian because only a small percentage of the work appears in translation. Furthermore, many scholars believe that restrictions on publication in the USSR make Soviet academic writing unworthy of perusal—a view I strongly refute here. Trends in growth and influence of Soviet political science have a bearing on the intellectual climate of the USSR and, to a certain extent, on the politics practiced there.

Czechoslovakia: Revival and Retreat

Any comprehensive attempt to understand political change within Czechoslovakia in the Communist period, and, in particular, the reformist trends of the nineteen-sixties, which culminated in the events of 1968, would involve a study of developments within Czechoslovak society and a detailed examination of the tendencies and conflicts within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.1 To appreciate the preconditions of these changes, however, we must delve deeper into Czechoslovak history and culture than that. The two major contexts in which changing attitudes and practices within the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and the constraints upon them, have to be understood are, on the one hand, the political cultures of Czechs and Slovaks and, on the other, the geopolitical environment in which Czechoslovakia is situated. While it is thus clear at the outset that we are not suggesting that political change in Czechoslovakia can be explained entirely in terms of political culture, we shall argue that analysis of the political culture is an essential part of an adequate explanation of change in Czechoslovakia after 1956 and especially in the period from 1963 until the late summer of 1968 when the trends were arrested by outside intervention.2

Questioning the mythology of the strong leader

The cult of the strong leader is dangerous not only in dictatorships but also in democracies. Political commentators too readily equate ‘strong’ with successful leadership. Yet, the idea that one person is entitled to take all the big decisions is antithetical to good governance and at odds with democratic values. In the British case, contemporary obsession with the one person at the top of the political hierarchy has led to anachronistic attribution of past policies to prime ministers when in reality they were very much the product of collective government deliberation. Thus, it is totally misleading to credit Clement Attlee with the creation of the National Health Service and the post-war British welfare state. Attlees considerable achievement was to hold a strong and disparate team together. He did this without dominating his party or determining all major policy, and without aspiring to do so. Recent commentary, which uses the prime ministers name as a synonym for the government, exaggerates the actual determination of policy by that one person – and overstates also the significance of party leaders for electoral outcomes. There is one area of policy where heads of government have, indeed, acquired greater power and authority ever since the late 1930s – namely, foreign policy. Even in this sphere, however, the consequences can be disastrous when prime ministers are allowed to pull rank, to sustain an unrealistic belief in the exceptional quality of their own judgements, and to assert a corresponding right to discount intra-governmental, party and specialist opinion.