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Comparing the Incomparable: Politics and Ideas in the United States and the Soviet Union
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
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This is a strange enterprise and an incautious one. What do we find reasonably to compare in two systems so contradictory to each other's basic premises? Are they not mirror images, opposite in every particular? Even so, while living and teaching at Moscow University in 1979, where during the spring semester it was my task to offer a course of lectures and small group instruction on American history to some forty students majoring in the subject (and to their faculty), comparative reflections were irresistible. Tracing parallels between the two countries is a risky undertaking for someone who is an Americanist and must rely upon the scholarship of others for the Soviet dimension, but what is intended here is an essay of suggestion only.
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- Reflections on Political Theory
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984
References
Appreciation is here expressed for fellowships received for the year 1982–83 from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which made my research and the writing of this article possible. I wish also to thank James H. Billington, Director of the Wilson Center, for his encouragement of the notion of such a Foundation, which made my research and the writing of this article possible. I wish also to thank James H. Billington, Director of the Wilson Center, for his encouragement of the notion of such a project; colleagues at the Wilson Center for their comments, both oral and written (Michael Lacey, Gail Lapidus, Cyril Black, Lawrence Levine, Otis L. Graham, Jr., and Timothy Colton); and the Wilson Center's Program in American Society and Politics and George Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies for co-sponsorship of a colloquium on the initial version of this study on 13 January 1983. My debt to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, and to the United States Information Agency for sending me to teach in the Soviet Union under the Fulbright program, is very great indeed.
1 See Kelley, Robert, “American Historians at Moscow University, USSR, 1974–1983,” AHA Perspectives, 21 (09 1983), 10–13.Google Scholar
2 Basic works in the older “totalitarian” tradition are Friedrich, Carl J., Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1954);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).Google Scholar In Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P.Huntington's later work. Political Power: USA/USSR (New York, 1964),Google Scholar the word “totalitarian” was avoided, and the reality of political factions in the top–level elite was discussed. The major breakthrough toward the “interest group” concept was made by a Canadian political scientist, H. Gordon Skilling, in a paper given in 1965. The fleshing out of these ideas was realized in a multiauthored work he and Franklyn Griffiths edited, a classic now widely regarded as having laid the foundations for this approach: Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, 1971).Google Scholar For a criticism, see Odom, William E., “A Dissenting View on the Group Approach to Soviet Politics,” World Politics, 29 (07 1976), 542–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the rise of the environmental movement, see Kelley, Donald, “Environmental Problems as a New Policy Issue,” in Soviet Society and the Communist Party, Ryavec, Karl W., ed. (Amherst, Mass., 1978), 88–107.Google Scholar
3 Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (New York, 1983), 4.Google Scholar
4 For general discussion of the literature of the new political history, see introductory essay to Kelley, Robert, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics (New York, 1979).Google Scholar
5 Anthropologists tell us that culture is not an epiphenomenon of material forces. Rather, it is self-generated. It originates in the realm of consciousness as an autonomous dimension of existence, rooted in feelings and emotions. See Hatch, Elvin, Theories of Man and Culture (New York, 1973).Google Scholar
6 Royce, Anya Peterson, Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity (Bloomington, Indiana, 1982), 1–3;Google ScholarArmstrong, John A., “An Approach to the Emergence of Nations,” ch. 1 of his Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982), 3–13;Google ScholarRothschild, Joseph, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York, 1981), 15–16, 248.Google Scholar
7 Shils originated the “center and periphery” concept in a 1961 publication. For its present somewhat rewritten formulation, see his The Constitution of Society (Chicago, 1982).Google Scholar He uses the concept in connection with ideology, but would probably find acceptable the usage here, in connection with culture groups. (I am grateful to Ronald P. Formisano of Clark University, who brought Shils's concept to my attention in a paper upon which it was my responsibility to comment at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in December 1982.) Formisano also uses it intriguingly in his The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s to 1840s (New York, 1983).Google Scholar
Main, Jackson Turner, Political Parties Before the Constitution (Chapel Hill, 1973),Google Scholar relies upon a typology denominated “locals” and “cosmopolitans.” In his latest book, Paul Kleppner speaks of “metropole” and “periphery.” See Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, 1870–1980 (New York, 1982).Google Scholar The tendency is to see these dichotomies in strongly geographic terms, which returns us to the “sectional” hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, now half a century old (see his The Significance of Sections in American History (New York, 1932)), which was a form of geographical determinism. For this reason I have chosen the usage “core culture” or “host culture,” as referring more to the mind, values, ways of living, and the beliefs to which Shils refers.Google Scholar
8 See summarizing chapters in Kelley, Cultural Pattern in American Politics; idem, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969).Google Scholar
9 An earlier and somewhat different version of the historical analysis which follows appeared as Kelley, Robert, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” The American Historical Review, 81 (06 1977), 531–62.Google Scholar
10 Handlin, Oscar, “Yankees,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Thernstrom, Stephan, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 1028–30;Google ScholarSmith, Chard Powers, Yankees and God (New York, 1954), 3–4.Google Scholar For further exploration of the Yankee phenomenon, see Bushman, Richard L., From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).Google Scholar
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12 See Kelley, , Cultural Pattern in American Politics, chs. 1–3.Google Scholar
13 An excellent window into the Yankee mind in politics is provided in Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture. For the Whig mentality of Henry Clay's time, see Daniel Walker Howe's penetrating study, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979).Google Scholar See also Kelley, , Cultural Pattern in American Politics, chs. 4–6;Google ScholarFormisano, Ronald P., The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971).Google Scholar
14 Lipset, Seymour Martin and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York, 1967), 14, 18–19.Google Scholar
15 Kelley, , Cultural Pattern in American Politics, ch. 8.Google Scholar
16 Curry, Leonard P., Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, Tenn., 1968);Google ScholarVeysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965);Google ScholarGaston, Paul M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970).Google Scholar
17 A case study in Yankee elitism and economic attitudes in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is N. W. Stevenson's study of a powerful United States senator, Nelson W. Aldrich (New York, 1930).Google ScholarDegler's, Carl N.The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974),Google Scholar and Maddex, Jack P. Jr.'s, The Virginia Conservatives, 1867–1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics (Chapel Hill, 1970),Google Scholar highlight the Southern elite which shared Yankee economic attitudes and elitism. For the general phenomenon, see Mayr, Otto and Post, Robert C., eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, D.C., 1981).Google Scholar
18 Kleppner, Paul, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979);Google Scholaridem.Who Voted?; Jensen, Richard, The Winning of the Midwest, 1888–1896 (Chicago, 1971);Google ScholarMcSeveney, Samuel, The Politics of Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1892–1896 (Oxford, 1972).Google Scholar
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21 For twentieth-century voting patterns, and the “colonial” and “metropole” usage, see Kleppner, Who Voted?
22 Bibliographical citations relating to the foregoing paragraphs may be found in Kelley, , “Ideology and Political Culture,” 548–55.Google Scholar
23 The Whig attitude toward disorder is well explored in Grimsted, David, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” The American Historical Review, 77 (04 1972), 361–39,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in Howe, Political Culture of American Whigs. For a later period, George M. Fredrickson has explored similar attitudes in The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965).Google Scholar On other points covered, see also Formisano, , Birth of Mass Political Parties; Remini, Robert V., Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York, 1981);Google ScholarBlodgett, Geoffrey, “The Political Leadership of Grover Cleveland,” typescript, 3.Google Scholar
24 The three preceding paragraphs, necessary to sketch in broad patterns of ideas and relationships, are so diffuse as to defy bibliographical citation within reasonable compass. What they contain seems essentially in the public domain. I have discussed the question of loyalty and the Democrats in chapters on Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland, and in a summarizing chapter, in The Transatlantic Persuasion. Hofstadter's, RichardAnti-lntellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963),Google Scholar and his The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1965),Google Scholar speak to the themes discussed, as does Davis's, David BrionThe Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, 1971).Google Scholar We do not, however, have a history of the intellectual class in America, nor an account of its relationship to politics. A revealing recent study of the McCarthy period is Reeves, Thomas C., The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York, 1982).Google ScholarLynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen M., Middletown in Transition (New York, 1937), provides us a window onto the feelings of local Republican businessmen toward the New Deal, its ideas, and intellectuals.Google Scholar
25 The foregoing paragraph and the discussion which follows draw upon a diverse literature. See Katz, Zeb, Rogers, Rosemarie, and Harned, Frederic, eds., Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York, 1975),Google Scholar esp. Pipes, Richard, “Introduction: The Nationality Problem,” 1–5,Google Scholar and Spechler, Dina Rome, “Russia and the Russians,” 9–20;Google ScholarShabad, Theodore, “Ethnic Results of the 1979 Soviet Census,” Soviet Geography: Review & Translation, 21 (09 1980), 440–88;Google ScholarPubMedd'Encausse, Hélène Carrère, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York, 1979);Google ScholarKrejčí, Jaroslav and Velímský, Vítězslav, “USSR: Federation as a Holding Company,” ch. 9Google Scholar of Ethnic and Political Nations in Europe (New York, 1981), 112–38;Google Scholar See also Gail W. Lapidus's essay, “Multinationality and the Survival of the Soviet Political System: Stabilizing and Destabilizing Factors”(paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,New York,3–6 September 1981),Google Scholar as well as Goldhagen, Erich, ed., Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union (New York, 1968),Google Scholar and Allworth, Edward, ed., Ethnic Russia in the USSR: The Dilemma of Dominance (New York, 1980).Google Scholar
26 Pipes, , “Introduction: The Nationality Problem,” 3.Google Scholar
27 See sources cited in note 25 above, and Bilinsky, Yaroslav, “Expanding the Use of Russian or Russification?” The Russian Review, 40 (07 1981), 317–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Armstrong, , Nations before Nationalism, 149;Google ScholarAllworth, Edward, “Ambiguities in Russian Group Identity and Leadership of the RSFSR,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 23.Google Scholar
29 Armstrong, , Nations before Nationalism;Google ScholarVakar, Nicholas, The Taproot of Soviet Society (New York, 1961), 18.Google Scholar
30 Hingley, Ronald, The Russian Mind (New York, 1977), 161–62.Google Scholar
31 Quoted in Gilison, Jerome M., The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore, 1975), 1.Google Scholar
32 Gilison writes, “This book is a study of recent attempts by Soviet writers to answer ther question 'Whither goest thou, Russia?' that has peculiarly plagued the Russian intelligentsia for centuries. The messianic tradition has not completely died, although the emphasis has shifted from mystical, pan-Slavist, and religious visions to a ‘scientific’ framework, ostensibly derived from the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin… [W]e know that the old dream of Russia uniting the world in a common understanding of its destiny is still alive within the new concept of communism, but we know little else.” Ibid., 1–2.
33 Armstrong, , Nations before Nationalism, 295;Google ScholarDunlop, John B., “Ruralist Prose Writers in the Russian Ethnic Movement,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 80–87;Google ScholarAllworth, , “Ambiguities in Russian Group Identity,” 20–22;Google Scholaridem, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., xiii–xiv.Google Scholar
34 Dina Rome Spechler writes, “During the first years after the Bolshevik revolution… [a]ll opposed Great Russian chauvinism in principle, and some actually fought it in practice… They were contemptuous, and perhaps even ashamed, of the history of Great Russian domination and oppression in the Empire. Lenin, for example, detested Russian chauvinism and declared that he would fight a ‘war to the death against it.’ He opposed enforced use of Russian in Soviet schools and supported education in local languages.” “Russia and the Russians,” in Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities, Katz, , Rogers, , AND Hamed, , eds., 14.Google Scholar
Lowell Tillett discusses “The Question of Great Russian Chauvinism” in his The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, 1969), 19–21.Google Scholar See also Pospielovsky, Dmitry V., “Ethnocentrism, Ethnic Tensions, and Marxism/Leninism,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 125–26;Google Scholard'Encausse, , Decline of Empire, 23;Google ScholarHingley, , Russian Mind, 159.Google Scholar
35 Tucker has explored this theme in Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973),Google Scholar and in his essay, “Stalinism as Revolution from Above,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, Tucker, Robert C., ed. (New York, 1977), 94, 104–5.Google Scholar
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37 Tucker, , “Stalinism as Revolution from Above,” 96–97;Google ScholarSzporluk, Roman, “History and Russian Ethnocentrism,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 41–54;Google ScholarBarghoorn, Frederick C., “Four Faces of Soviet Russian Ethnocentrism,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 55–66;Google Scholard'Encausse, , Decline of Empire, 27–35.Google Scholar
38 Tillett, , Great Friendship, 4.Google Scholar
39 d'Encausse, , Decline of Empire, 36.Google Scholar Krečí and Velímský use the figure 17 million war dead, observe that they were mostly Russians and Ukrainians, and state that Soviet war casualties were 45 percent of total casualties in World War II. See their Ethnic and Political Nations, 115.Google Scholar
40 Gilison, , Soviet Image, 4–5 ff.,Google Scholar speaks of Khrushchev's Utopian communism, and of his “perpetual, undaunted optimism, a deep faith in the destiny of the system he led, and the certainty that any goal could be reached.” Stephen Cohen notes the great post-1953 reforms stemming from Khrushchev—limited steps toward local initiative in economics, a major push toward social welfarism in housing and other mass needs, the ending of terror, the freeing of millions of prisoners, the opening up of public life to the circulation of “opinion,” legal reforms, and the revival of party, as against one-man, rule. He writes, Insofar as this was official reformism, or reform from above, Nikita Khrushchev was its leader, and his overthrow in 1964 marked the beginning of its political defeat… [I]n terms of his overall administration, Khrushchev was, as Russians say, a great reformer.” “The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union,” in The Soviet Union since Stalin, Cohen, Stephen F., Rabinowitch, Alexander, and Sharlet, Robert, eds. (Bloomington, Indiana, 1980), 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Linden, Carl, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership (Baltimore, 1966).Google Scholar
41 d'Encausse, , Decline of Empire, 38–44.Google Scholar
42 Ibid., 272–73; Lapidus, “Multinationality.”
43 Medvedev, Roy, On Socialist Democracy (New York, 1975), 82.Google Scholar
44 d'Encausse, , Decline of Empire, 44, 121–23;Google Scholar Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “The Search for Russian Identity in Contemporary Soviet Russian Literature,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 88–97.Google ScholarSzporluk, , “History and Russian Ethnocentrism,” 41–46;Google ScholarBarghoorn, , “Four Faces of Soviet Russian Ethnocentrism,” 57–64;Google ScholarFedyshyn, Oleg S., “The Role of Russians among the New, Unified ‘Soviet People,’” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 149–58;Google ScholarBilinsky, , “Expanding Use of Russian,” 317–32.Google Scholar Shipler writes extensively of what he terms “The Lure of Russianism,” in Russia: Broken Idols, 323ff.Google Scholar
45 Rasiak, Ruslan O., “‘The Soviet People’: Multiethnic Alternative or Ruse?” In Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 159–71.Google Scholar
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47 For the domination by Russians of top-level security, personnel, industrial, agricultural, and party ideological positions in the ethnic republics, see Hodnett, Grey, Leadership in the Soviet Republics: A Quantitative Study of Recruitment Policy (Oakville, Ontario, 1978).Google ScholarSpechler, , “Russia and Russians,” 11,Google Scholar reports, “Russians … hold a disproportionate number of important posts in non-Russian republics outside the political hierarchies: in higher education, largescale agriculture, … new industries in traditionally rural areas, … and key industries… Most jobs requiring education or skills [in the cities of Central Asia] have been given to Russians, and many nonskilled positions as well.” See also William Boris Kory, “Spatial Diffusion of Russians in the USSR,” in Ethnic Russia, Allworth, , ed., 285–93.Google Scholar
48 d'Encausse, , Decline of Empire, 127–36.Google Scholar
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51 This notion, which on occasion I raised with Soviet students and faculty colleagues at Moscow University, was of course instantly rejected by them. In small group discussions, the students, both graduate and undergraduate, found the idea of “parties” within The Party absolutely inadmissible. Marxism-Leninism, they pointed out, holds that parties are a product of class conflict, and since classes, they said, had been eliminated in the Soviet Union, parties and their national system were mutually incompatible.
Nikolai Sivachev, who was a leading figure in the Party at the university and who became in time a member of the Mossoviet (Moscow City Council), dismissed almost with irritation the entire “group theory” approach that Western scholars were, as he put it, always trying to apply to Soviet politics. Interest groups, he said, did not exist. Were there not enduring groupings that persisted within the Party? No, was the adament reply, none. Each issue, the students assured me, was dealt with rationally and scientifically, on its own terms, not in terms of predispositions and prior alignments. When I inquired in amusement if the Soviet regime had been able to make human nature, regnant in the rest of the world, halt at the Soviet borders, they were uncharacteristically not amused, so intent were they upon dispatching the spectacle of parties within the party.
52 Medvedev, , On Socialist Democracy, 99.Google Scholar On Medvedev's career, see the lengthy account in Shipler, , Russia: Broken Idols, 152ff;Google Scholar and also Slusser, Robert M., “History and the Democratic Opposition,” in Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, and People, Tökés, Rudolf L., ed. (Baltimore, 1975), esp. 346–51.Google Scholar
53 See “A Note on Self-Published (Samizdat) Sources,” in Dissent in the USSR, Totes, , ed., xiii–xiv.Google Scholar
54 Slusser, , “History and Democratic Opposition,” 330–53.Google Scholar
55 Shipler, , Russia: Broken Idols, 14, 325–26, 358, 370;Google ScholarRogger, Hans, “Amerikanizm and the Economic Development of Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:3 (07 1981), 382–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
56 Shipler, , Russia: Broken Idols, 358.Google Scholar
57 Kelley, , “American Historians at Moscow University,” 12.Google Scholar
58 Shipler, , Russia: Broken Idols, 286; see also 112.Google Scholar
59 Barghoorn, , “Four Faces of Soviet Russian Ethnocentrism,” 55–56.Google Scholar I am aware that this “essentialist” position, which holds that current Russian ideas and political culture are explained in part by essential cultural values derived from the tragic Russian past, is disputed. See the sweepingly anti-historical and anti-essentialist views of Alexander Dallin in “The Domestic Sources of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in Domestic Context, Bialer, , ed., 356–60.Google Scholar
60 Medvedev, , On Socialist Democracy, 50–53.Google Scholar
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 53.
63 Ibid., 53–56.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 56–57.
66 Ibid., 57, 276.
67 On this crucial point, there are a number of sources. North American scholars categorize Soviet political groupings in various ways. In a detailed analysis, Dallin in effect agrees with Medvedev while reversing his usage. That is, he refers to Medvedev's right wing as the “left,” and to Medvedev's left as the “right.” This is an understandable point of difference, since communism is normally regarded by Americans as being on the far left of the political spectrum, and hard-line members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would therefore seem logically to be the farthest left; fascism and nazism are spoken of in the West as being on the far right, and certainly capitalism and “right” are normally treated as synonymous. See Dallin, , “Domestic Sources of Soviet Foreign Policy,” 335–408, esp. 344 and 392n.Google Scholar
My view of the matter agrees with Medvedev's, on the ground that, within a given nation, the right is the most conservative with relation to the dominant system in existence within that country—that is, with relation to the Establishment—while the left is the most reform oriented in that context. Furthermore, my view is that “right” refers to the dominant core culture that runs the country and shapes the nation's institutions according to its values and goals, while “left7rdquo; refers to the political world of the outgroups.
Cohen has elaborated the most convincing analysis in his “Friends and Foes of Change,” 11–31. “I propose to argue,” he writes, “that the fundamental division between these ‘two poles’ in Soviet life is best understood as a social and political confrontation between reformism and conservatism in the sense that these terms convey in other countries.” Once more we encounter the thesis that the Soviet Union is not an entirely special case which can be analyzed within none of the customary categories we use when discussing Western countries. The groupings Cohen has worked out, within the reformer-conservative framework, confirm those Medvedev has developed.
Other sources which say congruent things, in differing terminology and with varying content, are Griffiths, Franklyn, “Ideological Development and Foreign Policy,” in Domestic Context, Bialer, , ed., 19–48;Google ScholarHeer, Nancy Whittier, “Political Leadership in Soviet Historiography: Cult or Collective?” in The Dynamics of Soviet Politics, Cocks, Paul, Daniels, Robert V., and Heer, NancyWhittier, eds. (Cambridge. Mass., 1976), 11–27;Google ScholarRakowska-Harmstone, Teresa, “Toward a Theory of Soviet Leadership Maintenance,” in Dynamics of Soviet Politics, Cocks, , Daniels, , AND Heer, , eds., 51–76;Google Scholar and Skilling, H. Gordon, “Conclusions,” in Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, Skilling, and Griffiths, , eds., 395–98.Google Scholar
68 Statement made during the course of Black's formal comment on my paper, “Comparative Reflections on Politics and Ideology in the Soviet Union,” presented in a colloquium at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 13 January 1983.
69 I am in debt to Professor Black for pointing out and developing, during the comment cited in note 68, this distinction between structure and function. Structurally, for example, two languages may be widely dissimilar, but their internal elements may be seen to perform similar functions, making them comparable.
70 On McKinley, see the discussion in Jensen, , Winning of the Midwest, 269–308,Google Scholar and H. Wayne Morgan's broad portrait, William McKinley and His America (New York, 1963).Google Scholar
71 For Ronald Reagan's powerful Orlando, Florida, address on 8 March 1983, boldly restating the cultural crusade of his party, see The New York Times, 9 March 1983.Google Scholar
72 For general trends in American economic development, refer to Brownlee, Elliot, Dynamics of Ascent: A History of the American Economy (New York, 1978).Google Scholar
73 Holubnychy, Vsevolod, “Some Economic Aspects of Relations among the Soviet Republics,” in Ethnic Minorities, Goldhagen, , ed., 50–120.Google Scholar
74 Shipler, , Russia: Broken Idols, 72–76.Google Scholar
75 Hough, Jerry, “Party ‘Saturation’ in the Soviet Union,” in Dynamics of Soviet Politics, Cocks, , Daniels, , AND Heer, , eds., 117–53.Google ScholarFriedgut, Theodore H., Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar gives us a detailed exploration of what the Khrushchev reforms (calling for a vast expansion in locally administered governing agencies and citizen activism within them) has in practice meant. “If the findings [of this book] were to be summed up in a few lines,” he writes, “their essence would be that more and more Soviet citizens are becoming more and more involved as actors within the developing framework of local government… [The citizen's] influence of policy is indirect, often marginal, but cumulative in that he is needed, and participates in the ultimate determination of success or failure of policy implementation at local levels. After a great leap forward of enthusiasm for widespread direct citizen administration of local affairs under Khrushchev, the main thrust of participation under the present leaders has been to mobilize the Soviet citizen in support of state administrators” (p. 289).
76 Rogger, , “Amerikanizm,” 382–83.Google Scholar
77 Ibid., 383. See also Bailes, Kendall E., “The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:3 (07 1981), 421–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
78 It should perhaps be pointed out that, contrary to general American understanding, not everyone in the Soviet Union is called a “Communist.” This term refers specifically to members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, to believing activists who are expected to be working energetically for the eventual creation in the Soviet Union of a genuinely communist society, the present condition being there referred to as “socialist.” Many people are not Communists: those who believe in God, for example, who by definition cannot be Marxist-Leninists, or that undetermined number of people, not members of the Party, who are simply citizens of the Soviet Union and are politically passive and ideologically indifferent.
79 Buchanan, Thompson, “The Real Russia,” Foreign Policy, 47 (Summer 1982), 26–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
80 Slusser, , “History and Democratic Opposition,” 348.Google Scholar On this cast of mind, see also Shipler, , Russia: Broken Idols, 278–82, 294.Google Scholar
Medvedev argues at length in On Socialist Democracy that opposition is a legitimate activity, but it is clear that he is pleading not simply with right–wingers, but with reluctant party-democrats. Medvedev quotes a well–known advocate of more democratic procedures in the Soviet Union's public life, Valentin Turchin (who has since emigrated to the United States), who in a samizdat manuscript urged everyone to speak out honestly with their views and start an open dialogue, but warned them not to form an active opposition. “‘This is not a political programme or an “opposition platform.” I wish to warn our intelligentsia and particularly the young against setting up any kind of “opposition.” There is nothing more disastrous for society, when instead of thinking in terms of truth, duty, and freedom, people begin to think only of the interest of “us” and “them.” This inevitably serves further to encourage hatred and the breakdown of communication and trust.” On Socialist Democracy, 343–44, n. 13.Google Scholar
81 “The World of Soviet Psychiatry,” The New York Times Magazine, 30 January 1983, pp. 20–26, 50.Google Scholar
82 Russia: Broken Idols, 246.Google Scholar
83 G. Boffa is quoted in Medvedev, , On Socialist Democracy, 345,Google Scholar n. 17. (The work from which his words are taken, After Khrushchev, is available in the United States only in Italian.) Vakar, The Taproot of Soviet Society, locates the habit of unanimity in the village; see also Hingley, , Russian Mind, 122: “The compulsory unanimity of the mir's [the village commune's] decisions has been transferred,” he writes, “to the totalitarian electoral system.”Google Scholar
84 Zuckerman, Michael, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970), 93–96.Google Scholar
85 Hofstadter, Richard, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), viii–ix.Google Scholar
86 Ibid., 2–12, 18–29, 102, 167, et passim.
While in Moscow, I spent a morning talking with Roy Medvedev (with the aid of David Shipler, then Moscow correspondent for The New York Times, who served as translator), my purpose being to discuss his writings on Soviet politics and to tap his reactions to some comparative observations. When I told him of the findings of Zuckerman and Hofstadter, he paused to look quietly at me for a moment, then said to Shipler that they had given him hope. That a principled anti-partyism persisted in the United States through the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century likewise caught his interest.
It should be understood that Medvedev takes a salty view of the West, is not an enthusiastic “Westernizer” like those who occupy the shadowland of non–Marxist dissidents to the left of him, and has strong objections to the Western way of living. It seems to him selfish and excessively materialistic—common Russian criticisms. “You don't need all those things,” he said in exasperation, gesturing about him at the sufficiency of his small, book-crowded study. Many years before, in 1901, the sage of Iasnaia Poliana, Leo Tolstoy, used almost identical language to an American visitor, deploring America's obsession with material things, with “mills and railroads and the like.” Quoted in Rogger, , “Amerikanizm,” 405.Google Scholar
87 See Black, Cyril and Burke, John, “Organizational Participation and Public Policy,” World Politics, 35 (1983), 393–425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar They take the view that most Western scholarship on political participation has a culture-bound “narrow conception of politics” which hampers abilities to gain a valid grasp of Soviet affairs. The usual conception gives “a central place to the role of individuals acting directly through democratic institutions…. [Democratically elected legislatures play an almost exclusive role.” However, in societies with “other heritages of political values and institutions and … at differing stages of development, … direct individual participation is not a significant feature of policy making” (pp. 394–95). Rather, the politically active people in such societies characteristically act through groups and organized institutions to bring influence upon policy making, as appears to be the case in the Soviet Union.
Operating from a related premise—that though the legislatures in communist societies differ drastically in structure and operations from those in the West, their persistence must mean that they perform a real function—Peter Vanneman has recently found in a re-examination of the Supreme Soviet that, despite its unfailingly unanimous votes, which produce derision in the West, it does operate in such a way, in its internal procedures, as to have a significant role in Soviet policy making. In fact, he describes the Supreme Soviet as being in an evolutionary process which is bringing it to a modest level of real functioning as a legislative body. See Vanneman, Peter, The Supreme Soviet: Politics and the Legislative Process in the Soviet Political System (Durham, N.C., 1977).Google Scholar
88 A final comment within a different comparative framework may be made. When we find ourselves reflecting on a country in which the chief legislative body meets infrequently and legislates little, and that little in response to what the government asks it to consider; in which the ideal everywhere praised is to rally around the ruling authorities unanimously; in which critics of the regime and system are denounced, hounded, searched out by secret police, and prosecuted for sedition if they persist in criticizing the government; where condemned persons are exiled, and jurisprudential rights as stated in the law are by official hostility, delay, indifference, and Byzantine procedural complexity made extremely difficult to secure in practice; where politics takes place almost entirely within a closed elite, and the idea that opinion in the public at large should be solicited and followed is ridiculed, government being thought properly a mystery assigned to and comprehended by only the ruling elite: In such a case, the view provided historians by their habit of scanning centuries prepares them for the fact that we are looking not simply at the twentieth—century Soviet Union, but-as an abundant historiography now demonstrates—at eighteenth-century Great Britain as well.
89 Billington, , Icon and Axe, 593–94.Google Scholar