Mesmerized by the Power Struggle
JUDY, RICHARD W.
Mesmerized by the Power Struggle THE POLITICS OF TOTALITARIANISM By John A. Armstrong Random House. 458 pp. $7.50 Reviewed By RICHARD W. JUDY Former Fellow, Russian Research Center,...
...it is merely to acknowledge that problems exist...
...Now we have John Armstrong's The Politics of Totalitarianism...
...The point is that the Party is the chief instrument by which its leaders manipulate Soviet society...
...Headed by a group of eminent scholars and financed by the Ford Foundation, the Program is currently engaged in bringing out a series of four books on Soviet history...
...decentralized industrial administration, Zhdanov shchina vs...
...it resists in countless ways...
...The Zhdanovshchina, Soviet postwar policy in Eastern Europe, and the maneuverings of Stalin's underlings are treated in the section devoted to the dictator's latter years...
...There is evidence that Khrushchev and his associates recognize the challenges posed to Party rule by a population rapidly moving in the direction of education, affluence and decreased isolation from the West...
...And friction at the contact points between the manipulator and the balky manipulated is the mother of policy...
...Only fools or knaves would deny the importance of power considerations in Soviet politics...
...Not surprisingly, the Great Purge receives the most attention...
...Unfortunately, Armstrong's book is impoverished by the absence of such analysis...
...But while the Party leadership recognizes that permanent revolution from above is the prime justification for the Party's continuing power monopoly, it would be rash to insist that the leaders are entirely cynical about the social ideal that they wish to attain...
...light, centralized vs...
...Policy that furthers Party goals in certain areas may reverse them in others...
...About a third of the book is devoted to the period between the 17th Party Congress in 1934 and the 18th Party Congress in 1939...
...Official Soviet publications, accounts of former Soviet citizens, captured Party archives, scholarly works, unpublished Western and Soviet dissertations, newspapers, journals and magazines are all food for Armstrong's prodigious talent for digesting source materials...
...To say this is not to predict collapse of Party rule...
...Aside from those who merely covet comfortable satrapies, Communists generally like to think of the Party as the central nervous system of the Soviet social organism...
...It follows, therefore, that particular policy positions are embraced or assailed in accordance with their usefulness as means to power...
...The post-Stalin era and the struggle for succession comprise the final third of the book...
...Last year it gave us the first one, Leonard Shapiro's The Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...It is odd that a book entitled The Politics of Totalitarianism should have failed to analyze the Party as a manipulative system...
...coercion—Armstrong treats them all as pawns in the power struggle...
...Contemporary Russia is not the pre-industrial, illiterate society upon which Stalin first fastened his totalitarian grip...
...Enriched by the author's own research on Ukrainian nationalism and the Soviet bureaucratic elite, the book is especially valuable for its analysis of organizational and personnel changes in the Party...
...Soviet society, it should be added, is not passively plastic in the hands of its manipulators...
...Only a deep analysis of policy problems can reveal the dynamics of societal manipulation...
...By now it is a commonplace that Soviet power is no traditional dictatorship or oligarchy...
...Armstrong's book suffers from his failure to discuss these challenges and how the Soviet leadership has attempted to meet them...
...After an estimable account of the 18th Congress and an analysis of the contrasting backgrounds of the pre-Purge and post-Purge cadres, Armstrong moves on to World War II...
...The Party today faces the challenge of maintaining totalitarian rule in a rapidly changing society...
...Heavy industry vs...
...Since by this logic policy questions have little intrinsic value for the Party leaders or apparatus, Armstrong accords policy scant attention...
...Whatever else it may be, the Party is a vehicle ridden to power and privilege by its leadership...
...A total of 1,585 footnotes in 347 pages of text is, after all, above par even for Sovietologists, a breed renowned for its footnote fecundity...
...It is called "totalitarian" for good reason: Unlike garden-variety authoritarianism, Soviet power seeks total control over all segments of society...
...But Armstrong, it seems to me, has been mesmerized by the power struggle...
...And by studying the Party in isolation from Soviet society, he has made Party history conterminous with Kremlinology...
...The drive for power, Armstrong tells us, is overwhelmingly the dominant motive among the Soviet leaders...
...Ideology and economics, on the other hand, are accorded only a brief glance...
...This ideal presupposes that the body politic be directed and manipulated toward a preconceived goal...
...The Party apparatus, the argument continues, deems desirable only those policies that promote its influence and authority in Soviet society...
...Armstrong's book is a competent chronological account of major developments within the CPSU since 1934...
...Here special emphasis is given to the Party's role in partisan warfare in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe...
...7.50 Reviewed By RICHARD W. JUDY Former Fellow, Russian Research Center, Harvard University The Research Program on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is an organization consecrated to stripping the mystery from the Russian enigma...
...the thaw," incentives to the peasants vs...
...Because of the grim nature of the struggle for power," he writes, "the individual contestant subordinates all other considerations to his effort to win...
...Comintern activities during the popular front era are also treated in some detail...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
