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...