Eugene Huskey - Executive Power and Soviet Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Soviet State

EXECUTIVE POWER AND SOVIET POLITICS

Contemporary Soviet/Post-Soviet Politics

PERESTROIKA-ERA POLITICS
THE NEW SOVIET LEGISLATURE AND GORBACHEV'S POLITICAL REFORMS
Robert T. Huber and Donald R. Kelley, eds.

SOVIET CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
FROM DE-STALINIZATION TO DISINTEGRATION
Robert Sharlet

EXECUTIVE POWER AND SOVIET POLITICS
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SOVIET STATE
Eugene Huskey, editor

CRACKS IN THE MONOLITH
PARTY POWER IN THE BREZHNEV ERA
James R. Millar, ed.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN SOVIET OFFICIALDOM
COMBATING CORRUPTION IN THE SOVIET ELITE, 1965-1990
William Clark

The Rise and Decline of the Soviet State

Edited by Eugene Huskey

First published 1992 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Executive power and Soviet politics:
the rise and fall of the Soviet state/
Eugene Huskey, editor
p. cm. (Contemporary Soviet/post Soviet politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56324-059-9 (cloth)
ISBN 1-56324-060-2 (pbk.)
1. Executive powerSoviet Union.
2. Soviet UnionPolitics and government19451991.
I. Huskey, Eugene, 1952
II. Series.
JN6540.E94 1992
354.4703'22dc20
92-8452CIP

ISBN 13: 9781563240607 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9781563240591 (hbk)

Like other projects conceived at the end of the Soviet era, this book had a long and difficult gestation. Its appearance is a tribute to the patience and flexibility of the contributors, whose topics underwent a dizzying transformation in the final months of 1991.

In editing and preparing the manuscript for publication, I was assisted at Stetson University by the staff of the DuPont-Ball Library and by Michael Connelly, Don Gast, Kim Simonds, and Judy Usher in the Department of Political Science. It is a pleasure to acknowledge their work. I am also grateful to the Knight Foundation and the Jessie Ball duPont Fund for financial support.

DeLand, Florida
May 1992

Note on Transliteration and Usage. The transliteration system used here is that of the Library of Congress. Exceptions to that system have been made in the case of surnames widely used in the Western press (thus, Yeltsin rather than El'tsin). The term 'government' has several meanings in English. Government is capitalized here when it refers to the institution ( pravitel'stvo, Sovet ministrov, Kabinet ministrov ) that sits atop the state's executive agencies.

Eugene Huskey

By the summer of 1991, Gorbachev's policies of glasnost' and demokratizatsiia had fundamentally transformed the central institutions of the Communist Party and the Soviet legislative system. But the central executive institutions of state, known collectively as the Government ( pravitel'stvo ), remained largely unreconstructed. The Government's vast network of ministries and state committees, which had always functioned as the institutional core of the Soviet political and economic system, continued to employ the population, to administer the economy and society, and to function as a key source of information and influence in the shaping of policy. The reforms of the Gorbachev era revealed that remaking the party's "power over words" was easier than remaking the Government's "power over things."

The Government became, in effect, the last line of defense against a new order. In August 1991, leading members of the Government launched a coup to reassert executive authority amid the decline of the Communist Party and the rise of social movements and independent-minded legislatures. Although support for the coup came from conservative elements in party and legislative bodies as well as officials in the machinery of Government, it was the Government's Cabinet of Ministers that served as the coup's "general staff." Ranking members of the Government emerged as the central figures in the short-lived junta, the State Committee for Extraordinary Events. Standing behind the junta's constitutional prop, Vice-President Gennadii Yanaev, were the prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, the minister of defense, Dmitrii Yazov, the minister of internal affairs (MVD), Boris Pugo, and the head of the Committee on State Security (KGB), Vladimir Kriuchkov. The failure of the coup crippled the Government's economic and repressive institutions, which had given cohesion to the Soviet Union. Without respected or effective institutions of state in the center, the Union soon became ungovernable, and, in December 1991, 11 of the former republics of the USSR regrouped into a loose confederation known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. For the moment, the Commonwealth has eschewed the formation of its own Government, leaving the development of state executive institutions to the constituent states.

The August 1991 coup is only the latest illustration of the centrality of the Government to an understanding of Soviet politics and society. Yet the scholarly literature (and much journalism) on the Soviet Union in the last quarter century has neglected the state's executive institutions, leaving a legacy focused on the party, parliament, and political movements to the virtual exclusion of what in American political science would be called public administration. How does one make sense of the neglect of the Government in such a state-centered political system? Three explanations seem to be in order.