To this hard core, composed of the heads of some eighty major government institutions, we must add the members of the Politburo, the heads of the party apparatus (at central and republican levels), and party secretaries in the regions and the capitals – a select group of some 1,000 people (of whom slightly fewer than half were Central Committee members). All of these were top players, mindful of the interests of the 2.5 million people who underpinned them. If the ‘ruling elite’ is what we are interested in, then the first figure (1,000) is the relevant one; but if the ‘ruling class’ is the subject of our study, then the second (2,500,000) is appropriate. A number of intellectuals, scientists and artists belonged here – some in the narrower circle, most in the wider one. But this is beyond the scope of our immediate concerns.
THE ‘ENVIRONMENT’ IN WHICH THE RULERS WERE FORMED
When wading through the mass of files and documents relating to the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat, one is struck by the intensity of the contacts between state bureaucrats and party bureaucrats within each apparatus. A factory manager, who might also be a bureaucrat in the formal as well as the pejorative sense, was in daily contact with people from other social groups – workers and technicians. By contrast, top leaders encountered workers only during official visits; typically, they made a speech and the workers applauded. The poverty of such contacts is normal for rulers, as is the fact that their milieu mainly consists of bureaucrats and that the whole politico-administrative process unfolds within it. Inside the party apparatus itself, from the Politburo to party cells, personnel issues took up a lot of time, together with minor economic and administrative details. General issues were reserved for a very small number of figures. Such was the environment and activity in which Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev were immersed; and this was what shaped them. An in-depth knowledge of the nuts and bolts was a sign of their mastery, and they exhibited it to impress their audience or interlocutors.
On the other hand, the capacity to deal with major problems – normally a leader’s main task – was utterly lacking in most of them. They devoted most of their time to resolving budgetary and salary issues, and signing the tens of thousands of decrees drafted by various agencies. Such activities pertain not to the remit of political leadership in the proper sense, but to that of a pernickety inspector who deludes himself that he is the master of the situation (when real mastery consists in a profound grasp of broader realities). Their subsidiary skills (shrewdness, cunning, the ability to construct a clientele) mainly served their personal power games. Behind them and this ‘passion for control’, which consumed their best efforts and skills, we can discern the waning of their political power and their highly coveted ability to control all the levers. We may note in passing that in 1966 a very powerful state control agency, whose running costs outstripped those of the Health and Culture ministries combined, was disbanded by Brezhnev simply to counter the influence of its highly ambitious head, Shelepin.
The leaders’ formation by their milieu was closely bound up with the Soviet principle that the national economy was state property. This was the source of the bureaucracy’s monopolistic power and of the only type of leadership such a state was capable of producing.
The administrative strata themselves underwent changes as a result of the country’s ongoing urbanization. Their educational level, professionalism, living standards and cultural habits were so many factors that necessarily impacted on intra- and inter-bureaucratic functioning. Even if the impression persisted that the general-secretary was absolute master (full stop!), the system was no longer a genuine autocracy. The general-secretary could dominate the party apparatus (though he was also heavily dependent on it), but the actual exercise of power and policy implementation took the form, as has been said, of extended bargaining between different government agencies. The latter were adept at manipulating the formal and informal lines of authority. Their rights, official and unofficial, went on expanding, to the point where their objections, counter-proposals and demands had become a component of political and administrative procedure, acquiring a quasi-constitutional status that we know too little about. For example, we have already seen that the centre was incapable of compelling the ministries to comply with planning procedures. In numerous respects, they acted exclusively in accordance with their own interests.
Given that nothing could be done without the ministries and other such agencies, events, or, more precisely, the powerful contradictory trends that were at work, forced the system’s rulers to adapt not only to changing social realities, but also to the ‘sociology’ of the bureaucracy itself. Various trends characteristic of the bureaucratic universe can be identified as ‘system-making’. After all, the state and its leading administrative personnel had become almost indistinguishable.
The formation of the complex structures of this stratum is a crucial phenomenon. As we have seen, its numbers exceeded 2 million in 1970, to restrict ourselves to the most sensitive posts. Their power allowed them to dictate acceptance of their insatiable drive for higher living standards, more perks, ever more power, and also toleration of a degree of corruption. They were the mainstay of the system. Hence another trend can be discerned, leading to the de facto amalgamation of these upper echelons of the state and party to form a single power complex. The most important ministers were members of the Central Committee, and some (KGB, Foreign Affairs, Defence) had a seat in the Politburo. Paradoxically, what facilitated this amalgamation was the procedures of the nomenklatura. Restored after the war to put the administrative monster in its place, it rapidly revealed its other side, which pointed in the opposite direction. If the whole elite was composed of ‘nomenklaturists’ – all of them high-ranking officials, but often also high-ranking party functionaries – the question of who actually controlled whom is not without point. Nomenklatura appointees and the apparatuses under them were running the state: this became the overarching reality of the Soviet polity.
In these circumstances, what exactly was the role of the party or, more precisely, of its leadership? Evidently, it was a powerful apparatus that relied on the governmental administrative machinery to rule the country. But the impression that the former controlled the latter, because the bureaucracy was its nomenklatura, is misleading. The Politburo and its apparatus were also an administration and, by this token, formed part of a much larger bureaucracy. The state administration had employees and workers; the party had employees and members. To insist that these members controlled nothing would be superfluous. Since this ‘party’ possessed some curious features, it is appropriate to put quotation marks around the term.
FROM A ‘ONE-PARTY’ TO A ‘NO-PARTY’ SYSTEM
However paradoxical at first sight, we are going to explore the hypothesis that the ‘ruling party’ did not in fact hold power. This seems surreal, but Soviet history is replete with myths and shams, misnomers and deliria. Thus, such resounding slogans as ‘collectivization’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘communism’, ‘democratic centralism’, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and ‘vanguard’ had little to do with reality, at least most of the time.