Abstract
It may seem rather soon to reassess a subject of which one has recently completed a book-length study.1 Nor, indeed, do I feel that there are more than a few substantial points on which I would as yet wish to undertake a major revision of the general treatment of Soviet political culture presented in my Political Culture and Soviet Politics. Given the breadth of a subject of this kind, however, particularly when (as in the definition I prefer to use) patterns of political behaviour as well as political beliefs and values are subsumed within the concept of political culture, there are inevitably aspects of the subject on which new evidence now exists, points that may have been neglected in the earlier discussion, and issues in the analysis of Soviet political culture that require fuller consideration and perhaps some adjustment of emphasis. In this chapter I propose to focus on two such issues, both of which are central to my own work on Soviet political culture as well as to that of most other scholars who have written on this theme. These are the distinctiveness of the pre-revolutionary Russian political culture, and the extent to which its chronological successor — the political culture of the contemporary USSR — may usefully be regarded as a continuation of that earlier political culture rather than as a radical break with it.2
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Notes and References
Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London and New York, 1979).
Lucian Pye, ‘Culture and Political Science: Problems in the Revaluation of the Concept of Political Culture’, in Louis Schneider and Charles M. Bonjean (eds) The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1973) p. 68.
Robert C. Tucker, ‘Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 2 (June 1973) pp. 173–90 (Tucker argues more generally, however, for a ‘cultural approach to politics’: ibid, p. 181).
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (London, 1975). A distinction similar to that proposed here is suggested in David J. Elkins and Richard E. B. Simeon, ‘A cause in search of its effect, or what does political culture explain?’, Comparative Politics vol. 11 no. 2 (January 1979) pp. 127–45, esp. p. 131.
Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds) Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London, 1977; 2nd edn, 1979 [subsequent references are to this edition]).
Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds) Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, New Jersey, 1965).
Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford, 1969).
Maurice Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class, rev. edn (New York, 1970).
Marc Szeftel, The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906. Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy (Brussels, 1976) chs. 5 and 6, examines this issue thoroughly.
A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow, 1956) p. 161; similarly vol. 12 (Moscow, 1957) p. 171. The extent to which the political development of Lithuania presented an alternative model is considered in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (Harmondsworth, 1977) pp. 38–40.
William G. Rosenberg, ‘The Russian Municipal Duma Elections of 1917: A Preliminary Computation of Returns’, Soviet Studies, vol. 21, no. 2 (October 1969) pp. 131–63, at p. 163;
John L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution. A Study in Mass Mobilization (London, 1976) p. 324.
Paul Dukes, October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution (London, 1979) pp. 6–12. I am grateful to Paul Dukes for some helpful bibliographical advice on this section of the paper.
Rene David and John E. C. Brierley, Major Legal Systems in the World Today, 2nd edn (London, 1978) p. 25 and more generally pp. 21–9.
John A. Armstrong, The European Administrative Elite (Princeton, New Jersey 1973) ch. 1 and p. 276.
Marc Raeff, ‘The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment’, in J. G. Garrard (ed.) The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973) p. 31.
Dieter Nohlen, Wahlsysteme der Welt (Munich, 1978) p. 37. There is a helpful general discussion of these matters in F. H. Hinsley (ed.) The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. XI: Material Progress and World-Wide Problems 1870–1898 (Cambridge, 1962) pp. 25–32 and 254–62.
Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism (New York, 1956) pp. 160–1;
Leonard Schapiro, Rationalism and Nationalism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (New Haven and London, 1967) pp. 8–9.
Eugene N. and Pauline R. Anderson, Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967) pp. 251 and 269–70; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917 (Oxford, 1967) p. 629.
Donald W. Treadgold, The West in Russia and China. vol. 1: Russia, 1472–1917 (Cambridge, 1973) p. 250.
Maureen Perrie, ‘The Popular Image of Ivan the Terrible’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 56, no. 3 (April 1978) pp. 275–86.
Leopold H. Haimson (ed.) The Politics of Rural Russia 1905–1914 (Bloomington and London, 1979) pp. 225–7; the quotation is at p. 227.
Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (London 1970) pp. 48–52.
Marc Ferro, October 1917 (London, 1980) p. 84;
Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army (Princeton, New Jersey 1980) p. 364;
Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London, 1975) p. 300 (from which the quotations are derived).
P. E. Lyubarov and A. S. Rud’, ‘Proletariat i Gosudarstvennaya Duma’, in L. M. Ivanov (ot. red.) Rossiyskiy proletariat: oblik, bor’ba, gegemoniya (Moscow, 1970) pp. 186–7, 192–3 and 202.
Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (London, 1972) pp. 115 and 121.
Graeme J. Gill, Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution (London, 1979) pp. 30–1; the quotation is at p. 31.
Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) pp. 4–5.
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 (London, 1974) chs. 8, 11 and 12.
S. G. Pushkarev, ‘Russia and the West: Ideology and Personal Contacts before 1917’, Russian Review, vol. 24, no. 2 (April 1965), pp. 138–64, at pp. 153–4.
Ilya Ehrenburg, Eve of War 1933–1941 (London, 1963) p. 195.
V. V. Smirnov, ‘“Kruglyy stol” po problemam politicheskoy kul’tury’, in D. A. Kerimov (ed.) Politicheskie otnosheniya: prognozirovanie i planirovanie (Moscow, 1979) pp. 125–33;
similarly William Smirnov, ‘Political Culture as a Factor of Progress’, in V. Semenov et al. (eds) Political Theory and Political Practice (Moscow, 1979) pp. 199–206.
David Lane and Felicity O’Dell, The Soviet Industrial Worker (Oxford, 1978).
Herbert Goldhammer, The Soviet Soldier (London and New York, 1975) ch. 7; and Sovetskaya Armiya-shkola ideyno-nraystvennogo vospitaniya molodezhi (Moscow, 1979) pp. 19–20, 31–42 and 73.
Quoted in Rudolf L. Tökés (ed) Opposition in Eastern Europe (London, 1979) p. 97.
Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, ‘Soviet Politics: From the Future to the Past?’, in Paul Cocks et al (eds) The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge Mass., and London, 1976) pp. 337–51, at pp. 337 and 340.
Roy A. Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism (Oxford, 1979) pp. 184–5.
Boris Shragin, The Challenge of the Spirit (New York, 1978) pp. 132, 70 and 110.
Igor Kon, Sotsiologiya lichnosti (Moscow, 1967) pp. 322–3.
F. Nesterov, Svyaz’ vremen. Opyt istoricheskoy publitsistiki (Moscow, 1980) as quoted in the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. 33, no. 14 (6 May 1981) pp. 5–6.
Mikhail M. Zoshchenko, Nervous People and Other Satires (London, 1963) p. 368.
John A. Armstrong, Ideology, Politics and Government in the Soviet Union, 4th edn (New York, 1978) p. 6 (Armstrong is in fact generally favourable to a political culture approach: see p. vi).
Frederick C. Barghoorn, Politics in the USSR, 2nd edn (Boston, 1972) p. 18.
James G. Kellas, The Scottish Political System, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1975) p. 2 and ch. 7.
Jack V. Haney, ‘The Revival of Interest in the Russian Past in the Soviet Union’, Slavic Review, vol. 32, no. 1 (March 1973) pp. 1–16, provides a useful survey. On related developments in literature, particularly the derevenshchiki see Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism (London, 1980) esp. ch. 3.
Peter H. Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order (New York, 1976) p. 7.
N. S. Timasheff, ‘The Impact of the Penal Law of Imperial Russia on Soviet Penal Law’, American Slavic and East European Review, vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1953) pp. 441–63.
Theodore H. Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton, New Jersey, 1979) pp. 103 and 132.
G. P. van den Berg, ‘Elements of Continuity in Soviet Constitutional Law’, in William E. Butler (ed.) Russian Law: Historiai and Political Perspectives (Leyden, 1977) pp. 215–34.
See also T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government (Cambridge, 1979) ch. 15;
T. H. Rigby, ‘Some historical reflections’, in Walter McK. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney (eds) Russian Officialdom (London, 1980) which emphasises the ‘fundamental continuity’ of official institutions (p. 16 and elsewhere).
E. H. Carr, ‘The Legacy of History’, in Socialism in One Country 1924–1926, vol. 1 (London, 1964) ch. 1, at p. 4. This masterly chapter defies adequate summarisation.
Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth, 1979) p. 181.
David Holloway, ‘Decision-making in Soviet Defence Policies’, in Christopher Bertram (ed.) The Prospects of Soviet Power in the 1980s (London, 1980) p. 90. (the quotation is from Brezhnev’s Vozrozhdenie in his Leninskim kursom, vol. 7 (Moscow, 1979) p. 62).
Max Hayward and Leopold Labedz (eds) Literature and Revolution in Soviet Russia 1917–62 (London, 1963) pp. 23–4.
Dmitry Pospielovsky, ‘A Comparative Inquiry into Neo-Slavophilism and its Antecedents in the Russian History of Ideas’, Soviet Studies, vol. 31, no. 3 (July 1979) pp. 319–42, at pp. 300–1.
Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels (London, 1973) pp. 272–3.
George Fischer, Soviet Opposition to Stalin. A Case Study in World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1952) p. 88.
Gabriel A. Almond et al., Crisis, Choice and Change. Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston, 1973) ch. 1.
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© 1984 Archie Brown, Mary McAuley, John Miller, David W. Paul, H. Gordon Skilling, Stephen White
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White, S. (1984). Soviet Political Culture Reassessed. In: Brown, A. (eds) Political Culture and Communist Studies. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17716-5_4
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