Who Are the Rulers in Russia?
Kaufman, Adam
What is this historical monstrosity, this illegitimate child of the mating between a "socialist-utopian" revolution and the murky past of Russia? Students of Stalinism rack their brains, trying...
...In the same year there were 175 state and provincial committees, elaborate apparatuses whose employees numbered in the thousands...
...A second example of such conflict may be seen in the persistence of religious life in Soviet society, and concretely in the position and influence of the Orthodox Church...
...4. At the last Party Congress in October, 1952, from among 1,192 delegates 282 indicated that they were engineers and 68 that they were agricultural specialists (agronomists, veterinarians, etc...
...5. David J. Dallin, "The Real Soviet Russia," p. 119...
...In effect, writers assume that Russia has experienced the liberating revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...
...It comprised at the beginning of the war from 10 to 11 million people, about 14 per cent of the active population...
...Tension was created and the workers reacted...
...The official social standing, the prestige of even the ablest engineer, both in and outside his place of work, depends exclusively on his party membership card, on the "confidence put on him by the Party...
...We know also that certain positions in Soviet industry, transportation, and agriculture are reserved for Party members...
...According to a law promulgated by the Stalinist authorities, fifty per cent of the profits beyond the planned profits are divided among the managerial 'personnel and only the remainder of this "director's fund" may be used for housing or recreation for the workers...
...The draft of the new Constitution...
...Gradually the Party lost its ideological character of a fellowship of determined "builders of socialism" and became more and more conscious of what in fact it is: the association of "bosses," "captains of industry," and "community leaders," securely entrenched in political and economic privileges...
...Who are these people, what is their social and economic position, their occupation, and income...
...If some of these reserve officers are workers, they are the exceptions within their group...
...and finally of some elements from among the workers and peasants...
...They are in a certain way institutionalized groups, in the sense that with few minor exceptions the members of these two groups belong to the top echelon of the Communist Party...
...The urban population consisted primarily of pauperized plebeians, destitute artisans, traders, white collar workers and only a small proportion of industrial workers...
...III Russian society is state-organized...
...Similarly, the introduction of the so-called "director's fund" leads to a further alienation of even the Party proletarian, let alone the one who is outside the Party, from the managerial personnel...
...Without a clear answer to this question, we cannot develop an exact picture of the Russian system of social stratification...
...Our theory does not imply that society in the Western meaning of the word does not exist at all in Soviet Russia...
...Gone are those days when on the basis of a relatively egalitarian and "plebeian" society the Party was able to preserve its splendid "Jacobin" isolation from any "vested interests" in the society...
...Of 1,192 delegates, 59.5 per cent had completed a higher education and 7 per cent had some higher education ; 18.7 per cent were high school graduates and only 14.8 per cent had elementary and unfinished high school educations...
...This theory, advanced by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (Burnham also applied his theory to other tech 146 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 nologically advanced societies) is to some extent also defended by Solomon M. Schwarz, co-author of Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture...
...After a few years of experimentation this loudly publicized achievement of "socialist culture" was quietly eliminated...
...At this level the 36 district and the 544 town committees may also be mentioned...
...This was done by Dr...
...said Stalin, "proceeds from the fact that there are no longer any antagonistic classes in society, that society consists of two friendly classes, of workers and peasants, that it is these classes, the laboring classes, that are in power, that the guidance of society by the state (the dictatorship) is in the hands of the working class, the most advanced class in society...
...There are today twenty-five People's Commissariats for industry, many headed by young engineers, some of whom rose to these positions directly from the office of plant manager...
...Nevertheless, it does not follow that the engineers and managers may be considered the ruling group...
...But this industrial revolution of the twentieth century is quite different from its predecessors...
...From Ivan the Terrible through Catherine and Peter the Great, people of humble origin in the entourage of the Court were made nobles for services rendered the Czarist regime...
...Soviet shops and factories were run without stop twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week...
...Nor is the distinction between "higher" and "lower" bureaucrats of much help: it offers no principle of qualification by which to determine "higher" and "lower...
...This means that it consists not only of distinct groups which are the products of the social division of labor and varying patterns of life, but that these groups can be placed in an hierarchical order...
...Again we arrive at the only possible answer to the question, Which is the leading, ruling group in Russian society...
...The Soviet state has not been able to envelop the Soviet society completely...
...This can be proved even on the basis of the scheme elaborated by Inkeles...
...The bulk of the Russian peasantry consisted of "medium" peas 144 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 ants, and even during the later years of the NEP the differentiation within the Soviet village developed rather slowly...
...In actual fact we know very little of the impact of this "underground society" on the activity of state and Party, but we may safely assume that it at least limits interference...
...For example, at the railroad station Moscow-Yaroslav in Moscow, where over a thousand workers were employed in 1948, there were 110 members of the Party...
...but what gives it a specifically totalitarian character is that it must maintain its monopolistic status...
...Some students of the Soviet Union evade this question with the excuse that the social and economic order of post-revolutionary Russia is still in flux, in a state of transition which makes it impossible to discern its main contours...
...Directors of machine-tractor stations, large factories, supervisors of railroad stations, county and state planners, executives in the huge net of Soviet state trade—all must be Party members...
...8. Harry Schwartz, "Russia's Soviet Economy," p. 542...
...The place of the bourgeoisie is occupied by the Party, a strictly-disciplined, highly-organized, closely-knit political group functioning as the collective agent of the technological transformation and acquiring political and organizational monopoly such as the bourgeoisie never attained...
...Wives and children very often had their days off at different times...
...6. Alex Inkele.s, "Social Stratification and Mobility in the Soviet Union: 1940-50," in American Sociological Review, August, 1950, p. 467...
...They constitute no less than fifteen per cent of the Party membership...
...Below sea level lies the hidden part of the society, the "underground society," never mentioned in official literature...
...Here we may say that history repeats itself...
...In terms of status and prestige the Communist Party has consciously extended the power of hierarchy through the creation of military and civil orders, the conferring of titles and money prizes, and the huge publicity campaigns for Stakhanovites...
...Even more negligible was the social weight of the Nepmen, the new bourgeoisie which arose during the 1920's as a result of the New Economic Policy.] 2. J. Stalin, "Problems of Leninism," p. 549...
...Who are the "rulers" and what is the relationship between ruler and ruled...
...After 1930 the percentage of workers belonging to the Party decreases rapidly...
...As a result of the "plebeian" October revolution, Russian society became levelled, relatively uniform and primitive in structure...
...It is a state-Society, in which the population is not only state-controlled but also state-organized...
...A large percentage of this group belongs to the Party and accounts for not less than fifteen per cent of the Party membership...
...Strict hierarchy of command and a revived professional esprit de corps in the army...
...Strangely enough, almost all studies of the Russian Communist party have been directed toward analysis of its ideological development, its statements and resolutions, what its leaders think or want to make others believe they think about the role and character of the Party...
...Schwarz writes: It is characteristic of recent developments that young engineers are increasingly promoted not only in industrial plants but everywhere, and especially in Communist Party offices and general administration...
...The more the Party has forced upon the nation those economic conditions indispensable for the building of socialism, the further the nation has drawn from the social and ethical norms without which socialism is impossible...
...2 (Emphasis added) . Taking its cue from Stalin, Soviet official dogma elaborated a theory according to which the difference between city and country on the one hand, and manual and intellectual work on the other, hinder the establishment of a classless society...
...The Soviet Party is organized territorially on four levels...
...Little wonder that on the basis of such stratification Inkeles concluded that the Soviet Union possesses a virtually complete open-class system, characterized by a high degree of social mobility...
...inequalities in educational opportunities—all add up to social differentiation greater than in most democratic countries...
...At the same time, in keeping with the egalitarian tendency of the revolution, the party tried not to make of itself a privileged caste, limiting the income of its members to that of the skilled workers and in its general attitude trying to orient itself toward the rank and file of the working class...
...With the change of its social content the Party has become more and more vulnerable to the effects of the unavoidable laws of class struggle...
...We may consider the latter of working class character...
...The percentage of officers in specialized branches, political police, frontier guards and militia, is higher than in the army proper...
...148 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 In the explanation of his scheme Inkeles says that he took as criteria for his classification mainly a combination of the following factors: "occupation, income and the possession of power and authority...
...We must remember that this 48.6 per cent includes not only workers but also engineers, supervisors, managers, the bureaucratic overhead only remotely related to the productive sphere...
...On November 25, 1936, Stalin "proclaimed" socialism in Russia, announcing the "abolition of exploitation of man by man...
...Here we discern three different, basic theories with regard to the problem of the leading, or, as some prefer, the ruling group in Russian °ociety...
...Second, and more important, he proceeds from the false assumption that Stalinist society can by its nature be compared with the free, open and more or less democratic societies that we know...
...When the party line of this period emphasized the "danger of the kulaks" it did so for obvious political reasons...
...The same applies to some elements of Groups c, d, and e insofar as they enjoy the prestige of Party membership...
...This last group cannot amount to more than, at most, thirty per cent of the Party membership, and, probably, it comes to a good deal less...
...Although Russian society conforms to this definition, the problem of stratification in the Soviet Union remains complicated and controversial...
...7 But I do not see how one can accept this view, which violates our entire empirical, experiential sense of what Russian society is like...
...It remains true, however, that the profession of engineer has a high rating in the Soviet political system...
...3 This was written in 1943, but the development of the following years does not seem to substantiate the theory...
...A certain amount of free play between the institutional, formal power of those who rule and the amorphous, inarticulate informal reaction of those who are ruled, is evident in Soviet society as elsewhere...
...One part of it is above the surface and is discussed in Soviet literature and official sources...
...Groups a and b are distinguished on the basis of a political factor— possession of power...
...This it tries to accomplish by the disintegration of all those social forces which come within the area of its environment, the atomization of any social or political grouping that might threaten it...
...A thorough analysis of the Soviet state-organized society can lead only to the conclusion that the Party with its seven million members constitutes a monopolistic, self-perpetuating elite-group which, if not entirely the ruling class and the upper stratum of Soviet society, is at least the incubator in which the Soviet ruling group develops and becomes increasingly selfconscious...
...This mobility, according to Inkeles, "equals that in the United States and possibly surpasses it...
...We know from Soviet sources that 86 per cent of Soviet army and navy officers are Party or Komsomol members...
...But these principles of division are not consistent throughout the whole scheme...
...Like any ruling group, the Party cannot avoid a contradictory relationship to the non-Party elements of society...
...But in the process of this economic transformation, the Party also changed its own social content...
...The English, American, and German industrial revolutions were led by industrial pioneers, captains of industry, entrepreneurs who in time developed a group consciousness based on community of interest...
...Even the death of Stalin, for a quarter of a century the indisputed dictator, brought no fundamental changes in the Soviet social system...
...A direct and exact answer to this question is impossible since the social composition of the Party membership is a closely guarded secret, the latest data concerning this problem having appeared in 1931...
...The official party doctrine was formulated by no less an authority than Stalin himself...
...That this system of remuneration creates the deepest cleavages between the working class and the Party officialdom, goes without saying...
...G. Strumilin, "Rassloienie Sovetskoy Derevni...
...We are therefore table to estimate that not less than 800,000 officers belong to the Party...
...Inkeles' scheme fails in two ways to take sufficiently into account the peculiarities of the Russian stratification system...
...During the first Five-Year Plan an uninterrupted process of production was introduced into Soviet industry...
...Thus we must look elsewhere for the elucidation of problems dealing with Russian social structure, namely to the scholarship outside the Soviet Union...
...And although its members have, on the whole, less political power than English or even American Cabinet members, this development strengthens considerably the social consciousness of engineers in leading positions in industrial plants...
...Maneuvering between a pauperized urban and a flattened rural population, the Bolshevik Party was able to preserve its "Jacobin" character, that is, with the disintegration and atomization of all the classes it could maintain a relative independence from any of them...
...Expulsions, banishments, purges and political trials become the institutionalized means for perpetuating the Party's social monopoly...
...The state overwhelms the society to such a degree, so entirely suppresses and controls it, that we can, in a sense, hardly speak of Russian society proper...
...It is self-evident that the role and influence of the rank-and file workers in the Party is even smaller than their numerical strength...
...In 1950 an attempt was made to elaborate a "synthetic" bureaucraticintelligentsia theory by differentiating the whole Soviet population into ten principal groups and putting them in an hierarchical order according to their role in society...
...By what political, social or economic principle of measurement does one decide who in Russian society is part of the ruling bureaucracy and who is not...
...This is the opinion of Harry Schwartz, 8 Louis Fischer and many others...
...Two examples may be cited...
...They number in the hundred thousands...
...The pre-revolutionary mobility in Russia was largely a product of Czarist absolutism...
...Each worker had a day off after five days of work...
...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 155 But it also-proves that through this "Jacobin" method a socialist, class-less and state-less society cannot become a historical reality...
...How different the picture has been since the decisive triumph of Stalinism, everyone knows...
...From this, however, it does not follow, according to Stalin—and this is certainly a novelty and apostasy from the well-established thesis of Marxian socialism—that Soviet society has become classless...
...Not only does Russian society no Ionger suffer from a transitional, let alone a revolutionary vagueness and fluidity, but its structure appears to be that of a well-established, definite social system...
...The remaining fifty per cent consists partly of professionals, teachers, agronomists, technicians, doctors, engineers...
...At the sixteenth congress of the Party held in 1930, only 17.7 per cent of the delegates were workers...
...Alex Inkeles of Harvard 6 who concluded that Soviet society may be divided into the following ten groups (numbers in parentheses indicate rank order of the group) : a) ruling elite (1) b) superior intelligentsia (2) c) general intelligentsia (3) d) working class aristocracy (4) e) white collar (5.5) f) well-to-do peasants (5.5) g) average workers (7) h) average peasants (8.5) i) disadvantaged workers (8.5) j) forced labor (10) As we see from this scheme Inkeles discerns in Soviet society four subgroups of intelligentsia, three of workers, two groups of peasants and one group on the bottom of the social pyramid—the millions of prisoners in the labor camps...
...Nonetheless, despite the compelling evidence of social differentiation, the whole problem of stratification in Russian society is far from properly formulated...
...In the village radical agrarian reform brought about a similar levelling...
...In order to elucidate our methodological approach, an historical parallel may be drawn...
...Another theory, advanced mainly by Trotsky and those who wrote under his influence, emphasizes the "bureaucracy" as the ruling group in Russia...
...All the Russian social scientist could do was rationalize in the realm of myths and fictions created by the party for the perpetuation of its power...
...3, 1928...
...The sociological function of these means of control is far more important than their ideological rationalization, and not less so since "ideology," as the Communist Party now uses the term, has only a utilitarian character...
...During the last war, the Party and the state were forced to grant substantial concessions to the faithful, whose number in the Soviet Union is even now estimated as between fifty and seventy per cent of the population...
...This can be seen from a study of the social origin and occupation of delegates at the Party congresses...
...Thus, the social composition of the Party 152 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 membership becomes the crucial question in the study of Soviet social stratification...
...If one were rigid enough to hold to a formal definition of "bureaucrat" as synonymous with "state employee," even workers in the state-owned Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 147 industries would have to be considered bureaucrats—an obviously absurd conclusion...
...and in turn it is only this neglect that makes it possible for Stalinist society to be considered as a society free from those crippling legal barriers which enforced the static social relations of quasi-feudalism...
...In the army alone there are, according to some conservative estimates, 500,000 officers in active service...
...Here everything is planned, controlled, consciously organized...
...In Russia the driving force of the industrial transformation is quite different...
...Meissner estimated that this ruling group of "intelligentsia" includes about 20 per cent of the Soviet population...
...As the only political group in a totalitarian state, the Party must preserve unity, continuity and distinctiveness...
...Soviet literature and propaganda exalted full blast the economic, cultural, and social advantages of this kind of organization and of the leisure time of Soviet working men...
...Thus, while a worker can raise his weekly pay only by intensifying his efforts and producing more, in accordance with the "average-progressive" rates for his piece work, the managerial personnel may sometimes even double its salary simply by raising the rate of exploitation of the workers...
...We find here a blatant contradiction, one statement utterly incompatible with the other...
...Engineers today constitute approximately one-third of the Council of People's Commissars...
...The practical result of this reform was a certain disintegration of Soviet family life...
...These take place outside the state society and even run counter to the goals 150 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 of the Party planners and schemers...
...Of these 110 men only fifteen were workers, the remainder being higher technical personnel and white collar employees.10 This seems to be a typical example of the social composition of a primary Party unit...
...Taking as a criterion of economic differentiation the taxable income of the peasantry, Strumilin estimated that only 3.1 per cent of the agricultural population could be considered as well-to-do and this stratum concentrated in its hands 11.4 per cent of the land under cultivation and only 7.2 per cent of the total livestock...
...7. Ibid., p. 479...
...The fourth large group consists of state employees...
...From a socialist point of view, the historical importance of the Russian events is very great, though in a negative way...
...It is directly the opposite of what Marx considered the causal relation between economics and politics in capitalist society, namely, that the political structure is a dependent variable of the economic order...
...156 • DISSENT • Spr;ng 1954...
...The highest level is the Central Committee of the All-Soviet Party, which likewise employs an enormous staff of functionaries...
...In the last two and a half decades Russia has been undergoing an industrial, technological revolution...
...This cleavage—the bulk of the toiling classes on the one side and the new upper strata as formed in its political organization, the Communist Party, on the other—will certainly open a new chapter in the social and political history of post-revolutionary Russia...
...Owing to the bureaucratic and centralized character of the state apparatus, the number of state employees is exceptionally high and their role in the Party correspondingly great...
...Some engineers even entered the government of the USSR...
...According to these data 68.2 per cent of the membership was of working class origin but only 48.6 per cent was currently engaged in the productive sphere...
...They also employ tens of thousands of instructors, accountants, writers, and others...
...This nobility, in contradistinction to the old feudal nobility, the boyars, formed the bulk of the Russian upper stratum before the revolution...
...Sociological study of Russia may prove more fruitful...
...Some spontaneous processes, and very important ones, occur in Soviet society...
...In general, it may be estimated that the average wage of the Party membees is at least twice as high as the . vrrage wage of Russian workers...
...The third level consists of sixteen Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 153 Central Committees of the so-called Union Republic...
...It simply means that whenever changes do take place * References appear at the end of the article...
...At the party conference in 1941, at which the ruling elite was certainly well represented, more than 25 per cent of the delegates indicated that their profession was engineering...
...Planned Economy, No...
...11 The first theory states that the ruling group consists mainly of "engineers," "technocrats," "managers," of specialists and experts, of people who because of their "know-how" are promoted to the top of the Soviet social pyramid...
...graduated categories of state employees reminiscent of the Czarist civil service...
...The seven million members of the ruling party are, generally speaking, "the bosses," the "community leaders," the "captains of industry," those who direct the business of the Russian economy and the Russian state...
...Here spontaneity plays its role...
...Many students of Russia, in analyzing its economic and social order, emphasize, with good reasons, its militaristic and quasi-feudal character...
...According to Stalin, two classes and one separate social group still remain in Soviet society—the working class, the peasants and a group of intelligentsia...
...A Chairman of a kolkhoz, of whom there are now about 100,000, must be a Party member or candidate...
...The economic and social position of Soviet engineers depends entirely on their relationship to the ruling party...
...Malenkov as well as Kosygin, Pervukhin and Saburov, all members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, are graduates of academic technical schools...
...How then can this rigid, totalitarian "feudalism" of the Soviet state with its trend toward a rigid structure of frozen "estates" be reconciled with an open-class system characterized by a high degree of social mobility...
...No doubt, the ideological development of the Party is important, but of far greater importance is the role of the Party as an institution...
...inequalities in wage policy in the state industries...
...Group j is by definition excluded from Party membership and Groups f, g, h and i include Party members only in rare and exceptional cases...
...But the apodictical proclamation of socialism, backed by the whole might of the omnipotent, autocratic state, left no chance for the Soviet social scientist to find out for himself how friendly the relationships between different social groups and classes actually were...
...In the literature dealing with the problem of Soviet social stratification we can, generally speaking, discern beside the official doctrine, several basic theories...
...It is this overwhelming and largely unprecedented fact that all the above-mentioned Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 149 theories concerning the ruling class in Russia tend to neglect...
...a state-society in which social groups are formed and molded by state decision...
...The managerial sector of Soviet industry, trade communication and agriculture, is much larger than the comparable group in the United States...
...But for answering our main question, Which groups are the ruling groups of Soviet society?, Inkeles' scheme is of little help...
...The transformation of a predominantly agricultural country into a highly developed technological society with a huge urban population, such as took place in the Western world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is now occurring in Russia...
...The same applies, in a negative sense, to the last group, the population of the labor camps—the outcasts totally devoid of power...
...It has proved that it is possible by using the omnipotent power of a "Jacobin" vanguard party to accelerate the industrial development of a backward country and to do this without the traditional methods of capitalist economic activity...
...Working from the premise that the political stratification of Soviet society is fundamental and should be superimposed upon any other type of stratification, we conclude that the Communist Party not only plays the greatest role in the formation of the Soviet social structure but that the Party itself becomes the core of the top and upper strata of Soviet society...
...IV Soviet social structure may be likened to an iceberg...
...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 151 This ruling group is the monopolistic Party, the only organized political power possessing unlimited initiative in all domains of Soviet life...
...These are the fundamental questions with which we shall here be concerned...
...10...
...In this conflict between the will of the Party-state and the spontaneous resistance of the working people, the workers won...
...partly of the kolkhoz bureaucracy, Stakhanovites and shock workers...
...This is the state-organized society, the rigorously institutionalized social forms and social relationships as molded by the Party and its state...
...But they represent only a small part of the Party apparatus...
...The Soviet Union also has about two million officers in reserve, the bulk of whom are Party members occupying key positions in industry, transportation, administration and the like...
...and where this is impossible, to reduce a potentially coherent social group to an amorphous mass...
...It is hard, however, to make out just what is meant here by "bureaucracy," a term that seems to evade precise sociological definition...
...How vaguely the concept "bureaucrat" is used may be seen by two extreme examples...
...According to the most conservative estimates, between five and eight per cent of the Party membership is on the Party payroll...
...It is quite evident from Inkeles' characterization of the ten groups he singles out that only Group a, consisting of a few hundred people, Group b, consisting of a few thousand, and some elements of Groups c and d may be considered the ruling group in Russia...
...These technicians and engineers direct the Soviet industrial revolution, which places them in a position where they become the recognized ruling group...
...At the same time that Trotsky held that the ruling clique in Russia consisted of a few hundred thousand prominent party and state employees, another student of Russia and a partisan of the "bureaucratic" theory, David Dallin, wrote: "The highest class is that of state employees...
...Engineers, like other groups in Soviet society, are subordinated to the party hierarchy...
...The bloody Moloch of the great "purge" in the years 1936-38 chose most of its victims from the ranks of Soviet engineers and plant managers, and even now the position of engineers and technicians who do not belong to the party remains insecure...
...If a worker sits in a Party cell beside the chief director of the factory it is hardly to be wondered at that in such a gathering of "big shots" he feels abashed and cautious...
...The higher the category of the state employee, the more probable is his Party membership...
...Historically speaking, the rise of a new upper stratum in Russian society through political organization is not new in Russian history...
...1. The leading Soviet economist S. G. Strumilin investigated for the year 1927 the role played by the "kulaks" in Soviet agriculture...
...Despite an enormous flood of anti-religious propaganda, despite persecutions and repressions, religion in Russia has far from disappeared...
...See Partyinaya Rabota na Transporte, 1948, p. 12...
...In October, 1952, there were 4,866 county organizations in the Soviet Union, each maintaining a paid staff of functionaries...
...This does not mean, of course, that the system lacks vitality, that its dynamic is exhausted...
...Sometimes we find fragmentary information in the Russian press which supports this analysis...
...The in-between groups (c-i) are, however, of an exclusively economic nature...
...self-criticism and self-abasement as means of enhancing Party prestige...
...Students of Russian society have approached this problem primarily through study of its economic system, but with little success, and mainly because in Russia the relation between economics and politics "stands on its head...
...State capitalism, a modern Asiatic despotism, socialism, or as the late Marxist theoretician, Rudolf Hilferding, held, a totalitarian society without precedent and free from the economic laws and trends of development which characterize the non-Stalinist world...
...What groups and classes, if any, constitute Russian society...
...At the seventeenth congress of 1934, the workers amounted to only 9.3 per cent...
...In our investigation of Soviet social stratification we must consider political stratification as well...
...This creates a complex system of devices and techniques of party social control: an elaborate system of Party initiation, the institution of systematic verification of Party loyalty...
...Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1945...
...partly of non-commissioned officers, foremen, supervisors...
...5 Similarly, the German political scientist, Boris Meissner, advanced the theory that the leading group in Soviet Russia consists of cadres of "intelligentsia," state employees and professionals, who are neither workers nor peasants...
...We know, for example, that at the nineteenth congress of the Communist Party about 300,000 of the Party cells were represented, a great percentage of whose secretaries were paid functionaries of the Party...
...V By its policy of forcing hrough an industrial revolution and creating a "primitive accumulation" through coercion, the Stalinist Party brought into existence a highly differentiated and stratified society in Russia...
...Students of Stalinism rack their brains, trying to find new labels for a new historical phenomenon or to fix it with old labels...
...We know that the Party has about seven million members and candidates...
...Its tendency toward selfisolation from the masses conflicts with the need for cadres to accomplish state tasks in both the political and economic realms...
...However, all the evidence indicates that as a result of the FiveYear Plans and over-all collectivization of the Russian peasantry, Soviet society has become thoroughly settled...
...11...
...9. In an indirect way the percentage of workers attending the last Party Congress held in October, 1952, may be deduced from the educational census of the delegates...
...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 145 in the Russian social order, those changes (barring the possibility of another world war) will not for the predictable future disturb the fundamental quality of the present social structure...
...123-4...
...Serious students of the Soviet Union would generally agree that Soviet society is autocratically ruled, yet the crucial question—which social group rules?—provokes varying responses...
...Nor is his feeling likely to be lessened 154 • DISSENT • Spr'ng 1954 by the fact that the manager will be making from three to six times as much as an ordinary worker...
...A second large group of Party members consists of Party functionaries, people who work for the Party organization...
...This detailed stratification system correctly reflects, by and large, the relative position of different strata of Soviet society...
...The dominant power within this state is the Communist Party, a monopolistic organization unlimited in its political and economic powers and activities: nothing, literally nothing, is beyond its province...
...In advancing the theory that Russian society is a state-organized society in which the monopolistic Party is the ruling group it seems necessary to make one qualification...
...It would thus appear that no less than fifty per cent of the Party membership consists of state and Party bosses, industrial managers, organizers of Soviet agriculture and army officers...
...What is this historical monstrosity, this illegitimate child of the mating between a "socialist-utopian" revolution and the murky past of Russia...
...1 Like all historically known societies, Russian society is stratified...
...Unfortunately, the social scientist in the Western world must limit his study to that part of Soviet society which is Party molded and Party organized, the state society...
...Propaganda and police repressions may delay the inevitable process of alienation of the Russian workers and peasants from the Party but in the long run they cannot stop it...
...For the Party congress in 1939 no data is available9 Although Soviet statistics are of little direct help, we can quite accurately estimate the percentage of workers by eliminating other Party groups...
...It is Party membership which determines the ruling and leading role that these groups play in society...
...First, he underestimates the role of the Communist Party as creator and molder of Soviet social stratification...
...3. Gregory Bienstck, Solomon M. Schwarz, Aaron Yugow, "Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture," pp...
...Groups a and b in Inkeles' scheme, with few exceptions, are made up of members of the Party...
Vol. 1 • April 1954 • No. 2
