Participation and Soviet Politics

Participatory Politics

The participation of citizens in the activity of their governments is one of the principal themes in contemporary political studies. Indeed, for some scholars, the "participation revolution" is both empirically and normatively the outstanding characteristic of twentieth-century political development.

"In all the new nations of the world, the belief that the ordinary man is politically relevant — that he ought to be an involved participant in the political system — is widespread. Large groups of people who have been outside of politics are demanding entrance into the political system. And the political elites are rare who do not profess commitment to this goal."

Particularly in cases of radical and violent political change, a common phenomenon in our century, when the most passive and repressed elements of the population may be swept up in the flood of politics, it is the rich variety of participatory institutions that catches and defines the zeitgeist. Parties emerge and burgeon overnight. Meetings, parades, and demonstrations attract the passerby everywhere. Newspapers, manifestoes, and petitions express the clamor of the newly raised vox populi, not as a sedate dialogue, but as an unbounded babel. Paris in 1789 and Portugal in 1975 witnessed such storms. So did Russia in 1917.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Russia had a narrowly restricted political class. Barriers of residence, religion, nationality, and property kept the majority of citizens from participation in affairs of state. Neither by tradition nor by education could the mass of the population have been considered inclined toward determining its own political system. Despite the czar's concessions of a consultative assembly and limited party activity after the 1905 revolution, the regime carried on a continuous battle to prevent the broadening of public political participation.

Nevertheless, when the word flashed across Russia in February 1917 that the czar had fallen, not only the open and hidden leaders of the various established political streams took part in making the new state, but thousands of peasants, soldiers, clerks, workers, and schoolchildren poured into politics. What they understood of politics is beside the point. Uninformed, arbitrary, and contradictory as they may have been, they were destroying the old political system and trying to create in its place something that they supposed would be quite new. For millions of Russians in Petrograd's factories, in Siberian villages, and in the trenches of World War I, politics seemed for the moment something real, urgent, and worthwhile.

By its very nature, however, revolutionary participation must be a short-lived phenomenon, and is better suited to demolition than construction. A new state power eventually arises and attempts to structure participatory institutions of society according to the values of the new regime. The authorities cope as best they can with the persisting influences of the former society as well as with the inevitable deviations from the pure revolutionary ideal, deviations arising from the exigencies of power and the dynamics of political organization. Such has been the history of many Political systems, and it is largely from this perspective that our study of political participation in the Soviet Union will proceed.

But no less important than the explosion in the participation of citizens in government has been the growing intrusion of government into the lives of citizens. This intrusion is often accomplished by the coopting of the citizen into various aspects of governmental activity, and in any case multiplies the points of citizen-regime contact, raising the citizen's awareness of authority, and stimulating further the growth of pressure for participation. The symbiosis between totalistic governmental activity and the participation of Soviet citizens in that activity is another focus of this study.

Comparison and Definition

The forms and functions of participation vary greatly from system to system as well as over time. The cultural revolution in China and student ferment in the United States shared some common characteristics but were very different in Political significance and efficacy. Many of the forms of electoral politics in Great Britain are similar to those of the USSR, yet both the importance and the function of elections in the two systems are quite different. Nevertheless, the evaluation and understanding of each act of political participation within the perspective of its own system adds to our knowledge of the polity studied and the complexities of politics in general.

If we wish to study political participation in a manner that will permit eventual comparison among different political systems, then both the definition of political participation and the mode of inquiry must be such that we can embrace the whole range of participation and focus on its most significant forms in each particular system. In non-Communist states this focus has, with some important exceptions that we will discuss below, been largely on party membership and electoral activity. Presumably this is because of the importance of inter-party competition and electoral politics in effecting periodic redistributions of political power in Western European and North American states. In addition, the main thrust of research has been behavioral. Once again, this focus stems from the premise that the legal and institutional frameworks of politics within the systems studied are established and stable. In the Soviet system, where neither of the above factors has quite the same significance, institutions must figure larger in our analysis, and elections must play a smaller part.

Analysis of participation in non-Communist systems has focused on the individual and his activity rather than on the political system. The central question posed has been: "How and why do people get involved in politics?" Both Lane and Milbrath use this question as a subtitle. If we were to choose a subtitle for the present work, it would be: "How and why do Soviet politics involve the people?"

In defining participation for their study of American politics, Verba and Nie restrict the scope of political participation, excluding "ceremonial" and "support" participation as well as citizen participation in the implementation of government policy. This is largely consistent with Robert Sharlet's distillation of definitions from earlier works. Sharlet proposes as a definition "political participation relevant to the functional inputs of the policy-making process."

In examining this formulation we may ask whether such a narrowing of the definition of political participation is either necessary or fruitful. It may be applicable with reference to the American polity, but excludes too many relevant political phenomena for the comparative study of political systems that differ greatly in their degree of development and mode of operation. The full cycle of political functions consists of inputs, conversions, and outputs. Verba and Nie not only restrict themselves to the input side of the cycle but consider only demand inputs, consciously excluding the types of input categorized as supports. In the end, Sharlet, following a similar approach, finds (as does the present author) that in the Soviet context such restrictions hamper, rather than facilitate, the analysis of participation.

In a transitional society whose regime is attempting to restructure civic and political values, supportive inputs, and particularly those of a nonmaterial nature, are prominent in politics. Indeed, measurement of the qualitative and quantitative differences in the mix of demands and supports can be one part of determining the differences between political systems. Similarly, it may be claimed that the near-exclusive focus on the input side of the political cycle is related more to the traditional approach to the study of participation than to the functional requirements of participation research. Parties and interest groups jockeying for advantage in the political process quite rightly attract the scholar's attention in America, though even in this context the wisdom of making them a near-exclusive focus may be challenged. Even in a developed, pluralist political system the importance of policy implementation by administrative organs, and the relation of the citizens to such activity, should not be excluded from participation studies.

Recent emphasis in America on community organization and participation is gradually restoring what has been a neglected dimension in the study of participation — the involvement of the citizen in regime outputs and the growing involvement of all types of regimes in the administration of society.

The provocative insights of Philip Selznick's pioneering study of public involvement in the administration of TVA programs are a model for studying this aspect of participation in America. Selznick proposes a series of conclusions that appear to transcend the American context and have great suggestive power for study of political participation in the USSR. "The rise of mass man," he writes, "or at least the increasing need to take into account and attempt to manipulate the sentiments of the common man, has resulted in the development of new methods of control. These new methods center about attempts to organize the mass, to change an undifferentiated and unreliable citizenry into a structured, readily accessible public."

Organization of the public is achieved by coopting voluntary associations into the work of government agencies. This provides officials with a reliable communications system by which information, requests, and responses may be brought to every segment of the population; a system with untapped reserves of administrative capacity, with specialized knowledge of local conditions, and ultimately with a legitimacy flowing from citizens' active involvement in government programs and citizens' identification both with the program and with the apparatus administering it. Most important in the Soviet context is Selznick's conclusion, repeated many times, that cooptation brings a sharing of "the responsibilities and burdens of power, rather than power itself."

Voluntary community associations are invoked to strengthen existing governmental agencies that by themselves may lack historical roots or popular authority, thus impairing their capacity to implement governmental policy. Selznick points out that it is the local agency's performance which determines the ultimate impact of any centrally initiated program. This judgment would not be unacceptable to a Soviet official or scholar, for every student of Soviet public administration is taught the dictum, ascribed to Lenin, that "local practice is the proving ground of central leadership."

It is precisely the mobilizing and socializing aspects of participation brought out by Selznick that appear to have importance for the study of the Soviet Union, which has a political system that is still evolving, and is faced with a persisting incongruence of values between regime and society. Much discussion centers about the question of whether voluntarism is an essential ingredient of political participation. It is on this point that Verba and Nie exclude what they consider "mobilized participation": parading, voting in ceremonial elections, working in regime-organized development projects. This may be a correct approach for a largely homogenous and well-socialized public, but can we dismiss such activities in a system in which participation is one of the energizing mechanisms of the political system, as we will try to show in the Soviet case? Describing the mobilizing agencies of the Soviet system, Sharlet contends that there is no basis for individual volition in Communist systems and that, though apathy is possible, effective withdrawal is not a choice for the Soviet citizen. These are challenging hypotheses worth examination, for, if upheld, they will tell us much about the persistence of totalitarianism and the accuracy of the totalitarian model of Soviet society.

An alternative approach to understanding the importance of the Soviet citizen's participation is suggested by Selznick's findings. He blames the failure of some TVA programs on officials who failed to create a desire for solution of local problems among the population of a particular area. The failure to create a desire for change among citizens may also burden the system with a paralyzing, apathetic inertia. We should remember that in culture and outlook the mass of Soviet citizens may still be influenced by their peasant origins, and resistant to externally imposed change. In an essay on peasants and politics, Teodor Shanin writes: "Enormous numbers of government decrees and orders all over the world have been voided of effect by the peasant's spontaneous, stubborn, and silent non-fulfilment." The avoidance of such a situation by stimulating socialized voluntary activity while controlling the possibility of dissent is a large part of the Soviet concept of political participation.

The essential point in the relation of voluntarism to participation is not whether the initiative for a given political activity comes from the participant, but whether such an act is, in fact, compulsory. In agreement with Townsend, we can exclude compulsory acts from participation, that is, those acts, nonperformance of which draw state-invoked coercive sanctions, as distinct from social pressures. Although participation of a mobilized subject in politics may be quite different in quality than that of the spontaneous citizen, it has nonetheless an impact on the political system, fulfilling functions which influence the performance and development of that system. Moreover, while Selznick notes the need to differentiate between substantive participation involving responsibility in the determination of policy and administrative involvement that carries no such responsibilities, he notes that organizational activity, once initiated, tends to gain a momentum of its own, so that the initiator may be pressed by relationships and demands beyond the limits of his original intentions. This raises interesting and important questions as to possible sources of change within the Soviet political system.

Studying the place of participation in the Soviet political system, it would appear that as important as the quantitative aspects of participation may be, they are far from telling the whole story. Even the answers to the questions raised by Hough regarding the quality and effectiveness of the Soviet citizen's participation do not complete our evaluation of Soviet political participation, though they are surely an important aspect. In addition to the quantitative and qualitative aspects of Soviet political participation, it is important that we understand the structural and operational features developed to facilitate the mechanisms and processes of political participation in Soviet communities.

In summary, the concept of political participation used here will be broader than that which has generally served for the study of non-Communist systems. It will encompass the involvement of citizens in any activities relating to public affairs, including the expression of ceremonial supports and assistance in the administration of communities or the implementation of regime policies. In the Soviet context, such ceremonial supports, organized in the form of public parades or rallies, lectures and agitation meetings at place of residence or work — in fact the whole election campaign — are an integral part of participation. Assistance in the administration of public affairs, and work facilitating the implementation of regime policies, are organized within specific groups of public activists and fit well with Verba and Nie's "cooperative activity" mode of participation. The three criteria — all of which must be present if an activity is to be judged as political participation — are that the activity should be community oriented; that it should be voluntary, in the Soviet sense that it is unpaid and performed (at least theoretically) in addition to the citizen's professional employment; and that it should be nonobligatory.

By applying such a definition to the USSR and using it to interpret institutions and political phenomena within their own context, we may learn a great deal about the state of development of the Soviet political system and the dynamics of that development. On a comparative basis we can construct something resembling a topographical map of political participation, showing which functions in the particular system are served by a high component of participation and which by more restricted components. In each particular cluster of participatory activities we can then begin to delineate the modes, intensity, frequency, and duration of participation; the proportion of conflictual as compared to cooperative activities; the nature and objects of petitioning and contacting, and other similar details of the nature of participatory activity.