2 Explaining Political Transformation in the Soviet Union

Notes 2 Explaining Political Transformation in the Soviet Union 1‘O programme sotsial’nogo razvitiia sela’, Pravda (13 April 1989), 2. 2 Judith Pallot, ‘Rural Depopulation and the Restoration of the Russian Village under Gorbachev’, Soviet Studies, vol. 42, no. 4 (1990), 655–74. 3 Michael Cox, ed., Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, the Death of Communism and the New Russia (London: Pinter, 1998). 4 For a more nuanced account of the literature than space here allows see George Breslauer, ‘In Defense of Sovietology’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 8, no. 3 (1992), 197–238. 5 Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956) and the 2nd edition, revised by Friedrich (1965); Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1972); Robert Borrowes, ‘Totalitarianism: the Revised Standard Version’, World Politics, XXI, no. 2 ( January 1969), 272–94; Carl. J. Friedrich, Michael Curtis, and Benjamin J. Barber, Totalitarianism in Perspective: Three Views (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969). 6 The most eloquent representative of the application of pluralist ideas to the Soviet Union was Jerry Hough with his notion of ‘institutional pluralism’. Jerry Hough, ‘The Soviet System: Petrification or Pluralism’, in The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Although Hough later came to disown this term, it received the qualified support of a number of other scholars: Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy: Specialists in Policy Making (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1978) and Stephen Fortescue, The Communist Party and Soviet Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan (now Palgrave Macmillan) in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1986). See also the notion of ‘bureaucratic pluralism’ in Darrell P. Hammer, USSR: the Politics of Oligarchy (Hilesdale, IL: Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 1974), pp. 223–56. 7 Martin Malia, ‘From Under the Rubble, What?’ Problems of Communism XLI, 1–2 (January–April 1992), 89–106. 8 Peter Rutland, ‘Sovietology: Who Got it Right and Who Got it Wrong? And Why?’ in Michael Cox, op. cit. (1998), pp. 32–50. 9 Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: a Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). 10 Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 5. 11 Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR 1985–1995 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1997), pp. 41–60. 12 Hillel Ticktin, ‘Soviet Studies and the Collapse of the USSR: in Defence of Marxism’, in Michael Cox, op. cit. (1998), pp. 73–94. 13 Jack Synder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) and William Curtis Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 198 Notes 199 14 Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: a Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing Co., 1995). 15 Philip G. Roeder, Red Sunset: the Failure of Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 16 Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 17 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: the Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 110–12. 18 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–3. 19 John Gooding, ‘Perestroika as revolutions from within’, Russian Review, vol. 51, no. 1 (January 1992), 36. 20 Kotkin suggests that it was the attempt to reform the system, coupled with the growing freedom of speech and publication that was the system’s undoing. Kotkin, op. cit. (2001). 21 Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 22 Hillel H. Ticktin, ‘Review of the Gorbachev Factor’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (1997), 319. 23 Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 134. 24 Vladimir Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How it Collapsed (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), p. 178. 25 Roeder, op. cit. (1993), p. 19 and Solnick, op. cit. (1998), pp. 17–20. 26 Archie Brown, ed., New Thinking in Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). 27 Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Chapters 1–4. 28 Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: the Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 29 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas’, International Security, vol. 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000), 5–53. 30 Dallin has argued that six processes together lead to the collapse of the USSR. Alexander Dallin, ‘Causes of the Collapse of the USSR’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 8, no. 4 (1992), 279–302. 31 Brown has identified different political processes underway in the period, which while interconnected did not necessarily completely overlap – the move from a ‘command polity’ to political pluralism, end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Archie Brown, ‘Transformational Leaders Compared: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin’, in Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsov, eds, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), p. 11. 32 Thomas F. Remington, ‘Sovietology and System Stability’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 8, no. 3 (1992), 240–1. 33 Peter H. Solomon, Jr., ‘Against Premature Closure’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 9, no. 3 (1993), 278. 34 H. Gordon Skilling, ‘Interest Groups and Communist Politics’, World Politics, vol. 18, no. 3 (April 1966), 435–50 and H. Gordon Skilling, ‘Interest Groups and Communist Politics Revisited’, World Politics, vol. 36, no. 1 (October 1983), 1–27. 200 Notes 35 Specialists are understood as those who engaged in activities designed to generate, organise or manipulate advanced technical or social knowledge. The professional and possibly personal identities of specialists are usually defined by their particular relationship to ‘specialised’ knowledge. See also Chapter 5, note 1 and Chapter 8, note 64. 36 V. Bunce and J.M. Echols III, ‘Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era: “Pluralism” or “Corporatism”?’, in Soviet Politics in the Brezhnev Era, ed., Donald R. Kelley (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 9–12; V. Bunce, ‘The Political Economy of the Brezhnev Era: the Rise and Fall of Corporatism’, The British Journal of Political Science, vol. 13 (1983), 129–58; A. McCain, ‘Soviet Jurists Divided: a Case for Corporatism in the USSR?’, Comparative Politics, vol. 15, no. 4 (July 1983), 443–60; Blair Ruble, The Applicability of Corporatist Models to the Study of Soviet Politics: the Case of Trade Unions (Pittsburgh, PA: Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 303, 1983); and Charles E. Ziegler, Environmental Policy in the USSR (London: Frances Pinter, 1987). 37 M.P. Gehlen, ‘Group Theory and the Study of Soviet Politics’, in The Soviet Political Process. Aims, Techniques and Examples of Analysis, ed. S.I. Ploss (Ginn, Waltham, MA: 1971), pp. 40–1. 38 Richard Judy, ‘The Economists’, in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 209–51; Richard B. Remnek, eds, Social Scientists and Policy Making in the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1977); Solomon, op. cit. (1978); and Ronald J. Hill, Soviet Politics, Political Science and Reform (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980), Neil Malcolm, Soviet Political Scientists and American Politics (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1984). 39 Leslie Holmes, The Policy Process in Communist States: Politics and Industrial Administration (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981); John Löwenhardt, Decision Making in Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1981); Blair Ruble, ‘Policy Innovation and the Soviet Political Process: the Case of Socio- economic Planning in Leningrad’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 26, no. 2 (June 1982), 161–74; Peter A. Hauslohner, Managing the Soviet Labor Market: Politics and Policy-Making under Brezhnev, unpublished PhD dissertation (Michigan University, 1984); Fortescue, op. cit. (1986); Jerry F. Hough, The Struggle for the Third World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1986); Ziegler, op. cit. (1987); Thane Gustafson, Crisis Amid Plenty: the Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 40 Löwenhardt has highlighted the dilemma of those attempting to prove that group activity took place. He notes that while Milton Lodge demonstrated that certain elites could be considered as groups in the sociological sense, he failed to address the problem of their influence. On the other hand, Joel Schwartz and William Keech came close to proving a

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