Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev

227 Pages·1987·5.342 MB·English

by  Robert C. Tucker

Robert Tucker
C.
Political Culture and Leadership
in Soviet Russia
By the same author:
Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1961; revised edition, 1972)
The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change
(New York: Praeger, 1963; Pall Mall Press, London, 1964; revised
edition, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971)
The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1969)
Stalin As Revolutionary 1897-1929: A Study in History and Personality
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973; English edition, London:
Chatto and Windus, 1974)
Politics As Leadership (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press,
1981)
Edited works:
The Lenin Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975)
The Marx-Engels Reader (Second edition; New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1978)
Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 1977)
Political Culture and
Leadership in
Soviet Russia
From Lenin to Gorbachev
Robert C. Tucker
Professor of Politics Emeritus
Princeton University
w . w .
NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright© 1987 by Robert C. Tucker
First American Edition, 1987
All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2801 John Street,
Markham, Ontario L3R IB4.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tucker, Robert C.
Political culture and leadership in Soviet Russia.
Includes index.
I. Political culture-Soviet Union. 2. Political leadership-Soviet Union.
3. Soviet Union-Politics and govemment-1917- I. Title.
JN658I.T82 1987 306' .2'0947 87-11025
This book was written under the auspices of the Center of International Studies, Princeton
University.
ISBN 0-393-02 489-X
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 37 Great Russell Street, London WCIB 3NU
1234567890
Contents
Preface Vil
1. Culture, Political Culture, and Soviet Studies 1
2. Leadershio and Culture in Social Movements 12
3. Lenin's Bolshevism as a Culture in the Making 33
4. Between Lenin and Stalin: The Breakdown
of a Revolutionary Culture 51
5. Stalinism as Revolution from Above 72
6. Swollen State, Spent Society: Stalin's Legacy
to Brezhnev's Russia 108
7. To Change a Political Culture: Gorbachev and
the Fight for Soviet Reform 140
Conclusion 199
Index 210
y
In memory of
Raisa and Konstantin Pestretsov
Preface
While rich in specialized research, Soviet studies in the West
are remiss in their failure so far to produce a general interpret
ation of Russia's historical experience in the seventy-year
aftermath of the revolutions of 1917. This book aims to fill that
gap.
Two ideas-political culture and leadership-form its
analytical underpinnings. As here defined, a culture is a
society's customary way of life, comprising both accepted
modes of thought and belief and accepted patterns of conduct.
Political culture is everything in a culture that pertains to
government and politics. In Soviet Russia, very little does not
so pertain.
Cultures being matters of habit and its transmission through
a society's agencies of acculturation, they are relatively persis
tent through time although they do undergo changes, especially
in the modern age. Movements under reform leadership can
hasten cultural change when the need for it grows strong. And
from time to time, in various societies, situations arise, on
occasion through wars, in which socio-political revolutions
occur. As distinct from coups or palace revolutions, these
involve rapid and radical change in the society's way of life; as
socio-political revolutions, they are cultural ones. Russia's
Bolshevik Revolution belongs to this type.
In no instance of a revolution is the break with the past
culture total. No matter how culturally innovative a revolution
may be-in the sense of creating new institutions, beliefs,
rituals, ideals and symbols-the national cultural ethos lingers
on in many ways, and more persistently in some areas of life
vii
viii Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia
than in others. In time a process of adaptation occurs whereby
elements of the nation's pre-revolutionary cultural past are
assimilated into the revolutionary new culture, which thus takes
shape as an amalgam of the old and new. This helps to explain
why countries that undergo Communist revolutions tend to
diverge in later developmental directions, for no two national
cultural pasts are alike.
In Soviet studies the cultural approach has been slower to
mature than some of us expected when we embarked on it in the
later 1960s as the earlier 'totalitarian paradigm' lost its hold on
many scholarly minds. This may be because it has to be com
bined with something else in order to yield the useful results
that it can yield. For all by itself, culture or political culture
does not do anything; people do. Thus analysis must take
account of the culture-bearing human beings who act in ways
that either help a culture to persist through time or to change,
as the case may be. In particular, it must consider the minds and
motives of those people who acquire political power or
influence as leaders.
The study of leadership as a process has only recently begun
to take its proper and central place in political science. This
book is informed by a conception of the functions and forms of
leadership that was set forth in the present writer's Politics as
Leadership (1981) and is briefly summarized in chapter two
below. It combines a cultural approach in Soviet studies with an
examination of the parts that leaders have played in cultural
change or, as in Brezhnev's time, its obstruction. Such a
strategy is all the more apposite when one's subject is Russian
Communism, which has been a leader-centred movement and
polity from its revolutionary birth under Lenin at the opening
of this century to the struggle for cultural renewal that has
begun in Gorbachev's Russia as the century approaches its
close.
The lengthy final chapter on the contemporary period is
partly the product of a 'field trip' to Moscow that the writer was
fortunate to take in May-June 1986 under a grant from the Inter
national Research and Exchanges Board. It provided the
opportunity to discuss political culture and leadership in
theoretical terms with scholars in the Soviet Academy of
Sciences' Institute of State and Law, and to observe at close
Preface ix
hand, if only for a short time, the extraordinarily interesting
spectacle of a Soviet Russia in process of cultural change after
the Brezhnev era's stagnation and growing crisis. This process
was apparent in official words and acts, in meetings of film
makers and of writers, in new plays and films showing in
Moscow's theatres, in press articles and thoughts expressed in
formal and informal conversation.
The effort in the final chapter, written since then, to capture
the content and texture of ongoing change-and resistance to
change-became, in some measure, a test of the fruitfulness of
the concepts advanced, and the soundness of positions taken, in
earlier chapters written before Gorbachev's advent to power. It
is for the reader to judge how helpful those concepts and those
accounts of earlier periods have been in interpreting the
present-day struggle over reform of the Soviet political culture
handed down from the Leninist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist
past.
Chapter one, originally prepared for a conference on political
culture held in 1971 by the American Council of Learned
Societies' Planning Group on Comparative Communist
Studies, appeared in Political Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 2
(June 1973), 173-90. Chapter two, save for introductory remarks
that I have added, is a shortened version of a chapter in the
writer's Politics As Leadership (Columbia, Mo. and London,
1981). Chapter three appeared in Bolshevik Culture: Experi
ment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed Abbott Gleason,
Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington, Indiana Univer
sity Press: 1985), 25-39. An earlier version of chapter four was
distributed by the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian
Studies as an occasional paper, 'Stalinism versus Bolshevism?
A Reconsideration,' along with comments by Professor Peter
Reddaw"Y· Chapter five appeared in Stalinism: Essays in
Historical Interpretation, ed Robert C. Tucker (New York, W.
W. Norton: 1977), 77-111. Chapter six appeared in Foreign
Affairs, Winter 1981/82, 414-35; and an abbreviated version of
Chapter seven appeared in World Policy Journal, Spring 1987.
In editing the previously published essays for inclusion here, I
have pruned some to minimize repetition. My thanks go to the
various publishers for permission to reprint them.