How do Soviet politicians rise to power? How are national and regional regimes formed? How are conflicting political interests brought together as policies are developed in the Soviet Union? In Patronage and Politics in the USSR, first published in 1991, Professor John Willerton offers major insights into the patronage networks that have dominated elite mobility, regime formation, and governance in the Soviet Union during the past twenty-five years. Using the biographical and career details of over two thousand national leaders and regional officials in Azerbaijan and Lithuania, John Willerton traces the patron-client relations underlying recruitment, mobility, and policymaking. He explores the strategies of power consolidation and coalition building used by Soviet chief executives since 1964 as well as the institutional links and policy outcomes that have resulted from network politics. The author also assesses the manner and extent to which leaders in politically stable and less stable settings, spanning different national cultural contexts, have relied upon patronage networks to consolidate power and to govern. Finally, Professor Willerton explores how, in a period of dramatic change, patron-client networks may have given way to institutionalised interest groups and political parties.

This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution. Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics - patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns.

Based on extensive original research, this book tells the astonishing story of early Soviet Abkhazia and of its leader, the charismatic Bolshevik revolutionary Nestor Lakoba. A tiny republic on the Black Sea coast of the USSR, Abkhazia became a vacation retreat for Party leaders and a major producer of tobacco. Nestor Lakoba became the unquestioned boss of Abkhazia, constructing a powerful local ethnic "machine" that became an influential component of Soviet patronage politics, provoking along the way accusations of nepotism, corruption, blood feuds, embezzlement, racketeering, and extrajudicial murder on a scale that shocked even hardened Communist Party investigators. Lakoba and his group faced a series of trials, investigatory commissions, and tribunals over allegations of malfeasance, yet they were repeatedly able to convince their powerful patrons of their irreplaceability, until at last they were destroyed through a public show trial during the peak of the Stalinist Terror. Through the prism of tiny Abkhazia, this book provides invaluable insights into the nature of the early Soviet system and the governance of Soviet national republics.

This volume analyzes various aspects of the political leadership during the collapse of the Soviet Union and formation of a new Russia. Comparing the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin, the book reflects upon their goals, governing style, and sources of influence—as well as factors that influenced their activities and complicated them too. Contents Introduction Archie Brown Transformational Leaders Compared: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin Archie Brown Evaluating Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders George W. Breslauer From Yeltsin to Putin: The Evolution of Presidential Power Lilia Shevtsova Political Leadership and the Center-Periphery Struggle: Putin's Administrative Reforms Eugene Huskey Conclusion Lilia Shevtsova

The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An exposé of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, Propaganda State in Crisis ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.

From 1957 onwards, the "Pugwash Conferences" brought together elite scientists from across ideological and political divides to work towards disarmament. Through a series of national case studies - Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, the US and USSR – this volume offers a critical reassessment of the development and work of “Pugwash” nationally, internationally, and as a transnational forum for Track II diplomacy. This major new collection reveals the difficulties that Pugwash scientists encountered as they sought to reach across the blocs, create a channel for East-West dialogue and realize the project’s founding aim of influencing state actors. Uniquely, the book affords a sense of the contingent and contested process by which the network-like organization took shape around the conferences. Contributors are Gordon Barrett, Matthew Evangelista, Silke Fengler, Alison Kraft, Fabian Lüscher, Doubravka Olšáková, Geoffrey Roberts, Paul Rubinson, and Carola Sachse.

Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.

Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (1983) examines the system of nomenklatura, the semi-secret network of quasi-bureaucratic rules and personal relationships through which careers in Soviet politics were managed. Other Communist countries took the USSR as their prototype and their patronage relationship systems are included in this study.

First published in 1982, this book explores how Khrushchev and Brezhnev manipulated their policies and personal images as they attempted to consolidate their authority as leader. Central issues of Soviet domestic politics are examined: investment priorities, incentive policy, administrative reform, and political participation. The author rejects the conventional images of Khrushchev as an embattled consumer advocate and decentraliser, and of Brezhnev’s leadership as dull and conservative. He looks at how they dealt with the task of devising programs that combined the post-Stalin elite’s goals of consumer satisfaction and expanded political participation with traditional Soviet values.

In Stalinist Russia, the idealized Soviet man projected an image of strength, virility, and unyielding drive in his desire to build a powerful socialist state. In monuments, posters, and other tools of cultural production, he became the demigod of Communist ideology. But beneath the surface of this fantasy, between the lines of texts and in film, lurked another figure: the wounded body of the heroic invalid, the second version of Stalin's New Man. In How the Soviet Man Was Unmade, Lilya Kaganovsky exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, she examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body, which appears with startling frequency. Kaganovsky views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Because the communist state was "full of heroes," a man could only truly distinguish himself and attain hero status through bodily sacrifice-yet in his wounding, he was forever reminded that he would be limited in what he could achieve, and was expected to remain in a state of continued subservience to Stalin and the party.Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr'ev's The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin's The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding and dismemberment in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.