Gordon B. Smith

Ideology and Political Socialization

No element of Soviet political life has preoccupied Western observers as much as communist ideology. Children in the West learn to value democracy and to renounce communism even before they understand the meaning of those complex concepts. Western television-news reports of parades from Red Square show banners devoted to Lenin and Marx, and viewers conclude that ideology in the USSR is ubiquitous. Westerners assume that Marxist ideology is used to “brainwash” Russian citizens, keeping them under control and encouraging them to support the regime. In addition, the West tends to view Soviet ideology either as a body of mistaken and dogmatic creeds or as crude rationalizations used to legitimize the self-interested actions of the political leadership. Westerners contrast this picture with their own society, which they generally consider to be free of ideology.

Russian Political Culture

Russia is a land of contradictions. It is a modern superpower, capable of challenging the military might of the United States. Yet, it is also a country in which citizens routinely stand in long lines to buy milk, meat, and potatoes, and where items such as fresh fruit, toilet paper, and typewriters are in chronic short supply. Soviet youth today wear Levis purchased on the black market and listen to the latest Western rock music, yet their attitudes and values are not Western. There is a mysticism, a fatalism, an attachment to the Russian soil that transcends simple patriotism. As one citizen remarked, “My parents and grandparents—like me—were born out of this black Russian soil. And when they died, they returned to the soil. This is my place, this is where I belong.”1

Science, Technology, and Education

From its founding, the Soviet regime has manifested an ambivalent attitude toward science and scientists. On the one hand, science has been accorded a prominent role in Soviet ideology. Marx noted that the progression to socialist society depended on the general condition of science and technology and their application to production.1 Lenin echoed this stress on science and technology by urging Bolsheviks “to take all science, technology, knowledge” because communism could not be built without them.2 Lenin frequently referred to a “technical revolution,” which would change the nature of the society. Throughout the Bolshevik period, science and technology were seen as the great transformers of society. The Bolsheviks expected the development of a “new,” revolutionary science, free of ties to bourgeois society, to unleash the creative powers of science on behalf of all social classes. A clear illustration of Lenin’s views on the revolutionizing effect of technology was the GOELRO (electrification) plan. For Lenin, electrification was not simply a technical problem, but a socioeconomic one with profound political and social implications.

Gorbachev and the Council of Ministers: Leadership Consolidation and Its Policy Implications

For the last decade of the Brezhnev regime, Western observers predicted a generational transfer of power to occur in the USSR.1 The Brezhnev generation demonstrated remarkable continuity and stability, resulting in long tenure in office and the aging of those not only in top leadership posts, but throughout the Party and state apparatuses. After Brezhnevs death in November 1982 many observers expected the generational shift to occur at last; however, the short-lived regimes of Iurii Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko precluded extensive personnel changes. With the succession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of General Secretary, the long-awaited generational change has at last occurred, perhaps more rapidly than many predicted. The personnel changes that have taken place to date in the Gorbachev reign, especially those within the USSR Council of Ministers, offer a unique opportunity to assess the process of leadership consolidation in the USSR and also provide some insights into Gorbachevs economic reform strategy.

The State Apparatus

If the function of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is to make policy, control appointments to influential positions, and oversee the implementation of policy, what then is left for the Government to do? In the Soviet Union, more than in any Western political system, there is a blurring of the Party and the State, a tendency for the Party to subsume the role and functions normally associated with governments. The USSR Constitution reveals the contradiction. Article 2 reads: All power in the USSR belongs to the People. The people exercise state power through Soviets of People’s Deputies, which constitute the political foundation of the USSR.1

The Uniformed Services

With the succession of Iurii Andropov, the former chief of the KGB, to the head of the CPSU in 1982, Western observers speculated about the growing role and prominence of the “uniformed services” in the Soviet political system. Three main elements comprise the uniformed services—the security police (KGB), the regular police (militia), and the Soviet armed forces. Although each exists as a distinct entity, the three share several characteristics. Each is hierarchically organized and follows a code of strict discipline. The three services hold a monopoly on weapons and intelligence-gathering technology, and they control information vitally important to the policymakers. They also perform essential social control functions, frequently adopting similarly tough stances on law-and-order issues, dissent, and detente. Order and control have always been highly desired values in Soviet society, which helps to explain the size and power of the uniformed services. This chapter will examine these three institutions, analyzing for each its organizational structure, degree of party control, relative prestige, and influence on policy matters. We begin with the most notorious of the three, the KGB.

Regional and Local Politics in the USSR

Western analysis of Soviet politics invariably focuses on the institutions at the pinnacle of the Soviet system—the CPSU Central Committee and the Politburo. For the average Soviet citizen, however, the machinations of these organs are remote and often irrelevant. It is at the regional and local levels that Soviet citizens most frequently come into direct contact with their political system. Regional and local governments are responsible for a wide range of services that directly affect citizens: the provision of housing, health care, education, the supervision of industrial production, the operation of stores and commercial enterprises, and cultural and recreation facilities.

Socialist Legality and the Soviet Legal System

Two legal systems exist in the Soviet Union today, each functioning quite independently and bearing little resemblance to the other. The first, the one about which the average American citizen knows the least, is the legal system that, day in, day out, maintains law and order, enacts and enforces the law, and adjudicates the disputes that inevitably arise among citizens and institutions in modern societies. Existing alongside this legal system is an arbitrary and repressive system used to punish critics of the regime. To call the latter an apparatus for the administration of justice distorts the concept of justice beyond all recognition. In this second legal system, which is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 13, law and legal institutions are used in an arbitrary and brutal manner to suppress political, national, and religious dissent.

The Politics of Culture

The arts in the Soviet Union serve a political as well as an aesthetic purpose. Music, literature, the visual arts, film, theater, as well as the mass media reflect the official policies and goals of the regime. Yet, at the same time, the arts are a mirror of the society and its people; the arts reflect social trends, human emotions, and the complexities of Soviet society. From the founding of the Soviet regime, these two functions of culture and the arts have coexisted in an uneasy contradiction. A dualism exists between the regime’s need for art in service to the State and the intellectual community’s need for artistic self-expression. An earlier chapter noted the existence of a similar duality in the Soviet legal system between the competing currents of rule of law and the suppression of dissent. Another chapter analyzed the intricate interrelations of the “first” and “second” economies. In the arts and cultural fields, the dual forces have resulted in a division between “official” and “unofficial” art. The arts have also been an important field upon which battles over larger political issues have been waged. These battles illustrate the political leadership’s need for the arts and the media in order to mobilize the population as well as the intelligentsia’s ability to affect policies. This chapter will examine the Soviet arts and the media, noting in particular the contradictions between the “official” and “unofficial” realms of art and policy.

The Economy and the Workers

The Soviet Union represents the first major experiment in devising a centrally planned socialist economy. The development of a Marxist economy, however, did not occur immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. In fact, prior to the Revolution, few if any socialists had seriously considered how to organize and plan an economy; they were too preoccupied with overthrowing the existing capitalist system. Some elements of the new Marxist economic order were predictable, however. State ownership of the means of production would replace private ownership, and the State would dictate allocations of investment capital and labor resources, as well as set prices. Centralized state planning was not a fundamental tenet of Marx and came to be a prominent feature of the Soviet economy only in 1928.