How The Soviet Union is Governed

...Hough does not claim that the sea-change in Soviet politics is complete...

...Lacking the legitimacy that elections confer, the "new class" at the top of the Soviet system must win acceptance by living according to the egalitarianism it preaches...

...Hough, interestingly, does not predict the withering away of the party...

...For Hough money is, like participation, a universally applicable index...

...The new book does not...

...Hough's theme is that we need to study the Soviet Union much as we would any other state-that is, freed of our ideological phobias...

...Neither reaction will greatly interest Hough, whose central purpose is to address such questions as participation, public opinion, and pluralism...

...One simply cannot accept the significance he attributes to the growth of voluntary societies and clubs in the Soviet Union, for they have no serious political aims...

...This is always true of political power to some degree, but the grass-roots politics he detects is a fiction...

...He does not ask whether a higher estimate would have made it past the Soviet censors...

...The Soviet Union is a regime whose egalitarian public ideology inconveniences both the mighty and the meek: The mighty must affect asceticism, the meek must pretend to participate...

...He wants to pose questions that understandably have not always been the meat of Soviet studies...

...Although Hough claims to be interested in comparing political systems, in practice this boils down to minimizing differences among them...

...Solzhenitsyn has insisted that all would benefit by casting off its distorting norms, and Western writers have long expected a decline in the party's power relative to that of other Soviet institutions...

...This view surely minimizes both the challenges to which the party's, rule will be subjected and its ability (not to say need) to respond in traditional ways...

...For him its position is secure because in a modern society, in which large institutions come into conflict over allocations of resources and power, somebody has to mediate...

...Yet even here he has to stifle his "co-author" more than he admits...

...What is the role of the individual, or of the public as a whole, in the policy process...

...Hough's revision does not stop at this credulous reading of the Soviet present...

...For him the very relationship between state and society is being transformed...

...secret police in the 1920s and early 1930s have shrunk to three short bland paragraphs...

...In the same spirit Hough scales down the number of deaths caused by Stalin's purges (while granting that even with this low estimate Stalin remains a monster...

...But' Hough goes further...

...What is the balance of power among Soviet institutions...

...This even-handed method turns up extraordinary results...

...In the past the Communist Party has by foul means kept others unfit to mediate among themselves...

...And one cannot deny that policy-making has become more bureaucratic, complex, and diffuse...

...In his reading, the past decade's narrowing of income differentials in the Soviet Union is evidence of popular power...

...By honestly comparing the Soviet Union with other systems we may comprehend the changes that have taken place since Stalin, whose mode of rule has too long governed our mode of analysis...

...In all countries, says Hough, the powerful want the privileges that come with income, and if they do not get them in the Soviet Union, that implies a limit on their power...

...Where Fainsod and others saw power in the Soviet Union exercised from the top down, Hough sees it operating from the bottom up as well...

...All the same, Hough's reasons for thinking the party will continue to dominate Soviet politics are uncom-pelling...

...How does the party preserve its dominion...

...As he himself notes, they are organized around such shared concerns as hobbies...

...Some will call these matters of emphasis or shading...

...Yet the time is ripe to re-classify the Soviet Union, and Hough has a new term for it: "a parliamentary system of a special type...

...This coercive purpose disappears from Hough's view...

...The party will be able to govern, Hough thinks, because it has proved itself to be functional...

...In a modern political system authoritarianism becomes unnecessary...

...His authority, in part, is the claim of a Soviet demographer that deaths of men in their early thirties increased only negligibly in the years of the terror...

...This is all the more impressive because he understands as well as anyone in this country the complexity of Soviet policymak-ing...

...This reassessment of participation is striking, because it is wholly unnecessary to an argument that Soviet politics have changed...

...After all, one of the most- common themes of writings on Soviet society is the widespread craving among individual citizens to create some, realm of privacy for themselves...

...Hough's treatment of the individual's influence is wishful, but no more so than his analysis of the power of the "public as a whole...

...It cannot, for example, be thought merely a matter of regrettable space constraints that Fainsod's half-dozen pages on the growth of the Stephen Sestanovich is assistant professor, the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research...

...Obviously "citizen participation'' does not mean the same thing in all regimes...

...HOW THE SOVIET UNION IS GOVERNED Jerry Hough & Merle Fainsod / Harvard University Press / $18.50 Stephen Sestanovich Jerry Hough, long known for the view that the Soviet Union is becoming pluralist, has revised (and re-titled) the late Merle Fainsod's How Russia is Ruled, long the reigning text on Soviet politics...

...The comparable passage in the new book finds that Khrushchev's "strong insistence upon popular participation in political life suggested a dedication to democratization as he (and Lenin) conceived it...

...He concedes that "the secret police have not, of course, withered away in the Soviet Union," And, he notes, "clearly the relationship between the government and the individual remains much more authoritarian than in Western parliamentary democracies...

...It would be one thing for Hough to claim (what is true enough) that terror intrudes far less into Soviet politics and everyday life today than it did 30 years ago...

...His book will stand or fall on its treatment of the power of the individual, of society, and of the Communist Party...

...He knows the means that are available to those below the top and away from the center to have their way and to influence the choices of their superiors...

...Of Khrushchev's efforts to increase participation through innovations like the so-called "comrades' courts," he felt that they aimed "to mobilize the forces and pressures of social coercion as a supplement to and substitute for police coercion...

...The fact that someone with a yen for political involvement can take part in existing institutions of the Soviet state and party does not suggest that Soviet society is becoming a source of political initiative...

...The careful scholarship and balanced judgment of the old book, while sometimes putting a student to sleep after a heavy meal, deserved their authority...

...Yet this is precisely what a serious comparison of political systems would show to be false...

...In the future these means will be superfluous...

...Yet even the traditional local institutions of the Soviet system take on democratic meaning in Hough's eyes: "Many of the kinds of citizen involvement in university and business committees and in neighborhood groups and organizations that were strongly advocated by the New Left in the late 1960s have long been a part of the Soviet scene...

...There are also departures from Fainsod in the depiction of the Soviet past...

...Others may fume that in over 650 pages there is no mention of The Gulag Archipelago...

...In the previous edition, for example, Fainsod wrote of the differences in kind between the political participation of Soviet and Western citizens...

...Not once does he breathe a word of the many covert ways in which the Soviet upper class obtains and enjoys its privileges...

...His investigation of political pecking orders in both the state and the party, and between them, is easily the most interesting part of the book...

...Will bobbies replace the KGB any time soon...

...Isn't this a reflection of how fruitless they find the "public participation" that Hough touts...

...Income distribution can be a sham indicator of privilege, just as participation can be a sham indicator of power...

...Both in turn cherish the privacy in which they routinely circumvent these public lies...

...There is every sign that-among classes within society, among regions of the country, and among sectors of the economy-the consensus that has supported the party and that has, to a large degree, made liberalization possible will come under stress...

...Society is no longer merely the object or target of state policy but to an increasing extent its source...

...He finds that "unwritten constitutional restraints of the type found in Great Britain are slowly beginning to develop in the Soviet Union...

...Hough's''political mediation" is not automatic but has to rest on consensus or force...

...An exploring these three topics Hough is to some extent mapping new terrain...

...If Communism is such a nuisance, how to explain its persistence...

...It is unreasonable to expect that these conflicts will give way only to further liberalization...