How The Soviet Union is Governed
Hough, Jerry & Fainsod, Merle
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...
...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...
...For him the very relationship between state and society is being transformed...
...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...
...This is all the more impressive because he understands as well as anyone in this country the complexity of Soviet policymak-ing...
...Yet even here he has to stifle his "co-author" more than he admits...
...This even-handed method turns up extraordinary results...
...This coercive purpose disappears from Hough's view...
...secret police in the 1920s and early 1930s have shrunk to three short bland paragraphs...
...This is always true of political power to some degree, but the grass-roots politics he detects is a fiction...
...But' Hough goes further...
...And one cannot deny that policy-making has become more bureaucratic, complex, and diffuse...
...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...
...An exploring these three topics Hough is to some extent mapping new terrain...
...In the past the Communist Party has by foul means kept others unfit to mediate among themselves...
...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'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...
...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...
...Yet this is precisely what a serious comparison of political systems would show to be false...
...This reassessment of participation is striking, because it is wholly unnecessary to an argument that Soviet politics have changed...
...Hough, interestingly, does not predict the withering away of the party...
...Others may fume that in over 650 pages there is no mention of The Gulag Archipelago...
...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...
...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 a modern political system authoritarianism becomes unnecessary...
...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...
...For Hough money is, like participation, a universally applicable index...
...Will bobbies replace the KGB any time soon...
...There are also departures from Fainsod in the depiction of the Soviet past...
...Both in turn cherish the privacy in which they routinely circumvent these public lies...
...In the previous edition, for example, Fainsod wrote of the differences in kind between the political participation of Soviet and Western citizens...
...It is unreasonable to expect that these conflicts will give way only to further liberalization...
...Society is no longer merely the object or target of state policy but to an increasing extent its source...
...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...
...What is the role of the individual, or of the public as a whole, in the policy process...
...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...
...His book will stand or fall on its treatment of the power of the individual, of society, and of the Communist Party...
...Although Hough claims to be interested in comparing political systems, in practice this boils down to minimizing differences among them...
...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...
...He wants to pose questions that understandably have not always been the meat of Soviet studies...
...Income distribution can be a sham indicator of privilege, just as participation can be a sham indicator of power...
...What is the balance of power among Soviet institutions...
...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...
...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...
...Hough does not claim that the sea-change in Soviet politics is complete...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In his reading, the past decade's narrowing of income differentials in the Soviet Union is evidence of popular power...
...In the future these means will be superfluous...
...He does not ask whether a higher estimate would have made it past the Soviet censors...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Hough's''political mediation" is not automatic but has to rest on consensus or force...
...He finds that "unwritten constitutional restraints of the type found in Great Britain are slowly beginning to develop in the Soviet Union...
...The careful scholarship and balanced judgment of the old book, while sometimes putting a student to sleep after a heavy meal, deserved their authority...
...How does the party preserve its dominion...
...Isn't this a reflection of how fruitless they find the "public participation" that Hough touts...
...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...
...Not once does he breathe a word of the many covert ways in which the Soviet upper class obtains and enjoys its privileges...
...The new book does not...
...If Communism is such a nuisance, how to explain its persistence...
...The party will be able to govern, Hough thinks, because it has proved itself to be functional...
...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...
...As he himself notes, they are organized around such shared concerns as hobbies...
...Hough's revision does not stop at this credulous reading of the Soviet present...
...Obviously "citizen participation'' does not mean the same thing in all regimes...
...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...
...Some will call these matters of emphasis or shading...
...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...
...Neither reaction will greatly interest Hough, whose central purpose is to address such questions as participation, public opinion, and pluralism...
...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...
...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...
...All the same, Hough's reasons for thinking the party will continue to dominate Soviet politics are uncom-pelling...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
