Executive Power and Soviet Politics

Eugene Huskey

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315486550
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Politics

Ever since the behavioral revolution reached Communist studies more than 2 decades ago, Western scholarship has tended to ignore the powerful and unwieldy institutional structure of the Soviet government. Today, suddenly, it is clear that the dramatic political and legislative reforms of the Gorbachev years will remain incomplete as long as the issues of state bureaucratic power and executive prerogative are unresolved. This volume, brings together original studies of the Soviet executive under Gorbachev by specialists including Barbara Chotiner, Stephen Fortescue, Brnda Horrigan, Ellen Jones, Wayne Limberg, T.H. Rigby and Louise Shelley. Among the topics covered are the major economic, national security and law enforcement ministries, the presidency, the cabinet and questions of presidential-ministerial, presidential-presidential, legislative-executive and party-state relations.

The State in Imperial Russia and the USSR

1
The Government in the Soviet Political System

T.H. Rigby

Before 1917

When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 they were successors to a system of strong, centralized government whose origins went back to sixteenth–seventeenth century Muscovy. The princes of Moscow, having "gathered in" all the Russian lands under their primacy and fought free of the Tatar yoke, were now masters of the largest Christian state in the world and the only Orthodox state free of infidel domination. Small wonder, then, that they saw themselves as the proper heirs to the imperium of Byzantium (the second Rome) and beyond that the first Rome, and asserted the title and authority of Caesar (Tsar). This claim was brutally enforced by Ivan IV (1530-84) and consolidated in the following century by the first Romanov tsars. Meanwhile a ramshackle bureaucracy grew up, drawing partly on the legacy of Tatar administration, to help run this great empire now stretching from the Polish frontier to the Pacific.

While the essentials of this autocratic and increasingly bureaucratic system remained unchanged up to the early twentieth century, its details were progressively altered under the influence of Western ideas and models and of socio–economic changes. In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great sought to rationalize its administration along Prussian and Swedish lines, and the process was taken further a century later by Alexander I's reformist adviser Mikhail Speransky (1772-1839). By now the earlier "colleges" (kollegii), or boards, on the main branches of government had been supplanted by a group of ministries (initially for foreign affairs, war, navy, interior, justice, finance, commerce, and education), and the quasi–patrimonial pattern of regional administration had been replaced by a system of provincial governors coming under the Interior Ministry.¹

The most significant development in the nineteenth century was the necessary recourse of the autocracy to instruments of policy consultation and administrative coordination, and the tendency of these to acquire a life of their own, which was suggestive of a possible evolution towards a parliamentary–cabinet system of government. Here Russia was following similar developments in the autocratic empires of Prussia–Germany and Austria–Hungary. Like them, it saw repeated conflicts between reformers influenced by Western ideas and examples and reactionaries anxious for their own privileges and the emperor's sacred prerogatives. The elements of such a parliamentary–cabinet system, albeit more oligarchical than democratic, were specifically envisaged in the reform plans worked out under Speransky in the early years of Alexander I's reign. There was to be a hierarchy of elective assemblies (dumy) capped by a State Duma, meeting annually to consider legislation and other measures introduced by ministers (although the appointment of ministers would remain the sole prerogative of the emperor). Meanwhile a proto–cabinet already existed in the form of the Committee of Ministers (Komitet ministrov) established in 1802.²

By now, however, the impetus for reform was running out. Speransky's proto–parliamentary State Duma was rejected and all that came of these institutional reform proposals was the creation, in 1810, of an appointive State Council (Gosudarstvennyi sovet) of elder statesmen to advise the emperor on current legislation. As for the Committee of Ministers, it gave early promise of evolving into a cabinet, especially while Alexander was preoccupied with the war with Napoleon, when under the chairmanship of Count N.I. Saltykov, it exercised something like full collective responsibility for domestic government. After 1815, however, falling under the influence of Alexander's reactionary adviser, Count A. A. Arakcheev, and lacking a wider institutional framework from which it might have gained support, it declined in importance and came to deal mainly with second–order administrative matters. Under Alexander II it was overshadowed for a time by a new body called the Council of Ministers (Sovet ministrov). Functioning unofficially from 1857 and given official standing in 1861, the Council of Ministers served initially to coordinate the work of various ad hoc commissions preparing proposals for reform in the confused, quasi–revolutionary atmosphere following the Crimean War; but it also involved itself in interministerial coordination and reviewed the annual reports of ministers and their proposals for major legislation. Its subsequent decline appears to have been set in train by the restoration of social order and discipline, and was accelerated by the weakness of its institutional autonomy and identity, due to Alexander's chairing its meetings and to the overlap of its functions and membership with those of the Committee of Ministers.

Moribund during the 1870s, the Council of Ministers was suddenly revived in 1881, in the wake of Alexander II's assassination. In order to ensure that the Government maintained a common front in the face of the "nihilist" threat, it was resolved that no minister should make recommendations to the emperor without the collective agreement of members of the Council. This ostensibly modest procedural innovation evidently had the initial approval of the new emperor, Alexander III, but its radical implications were soon perceived by at least some astute observers. For such a unified and collectively responsible ministry would be able to deal from a position of strength with the emperor, who would be constrained to give it a wide scope for independent action, so that gradually it would come to see itself as responsible to the public at large as much as to the emperor. As Anatole Leroy–Beaulieu put it, "the Tsar would find himself reduced almost to the role of a constitutional monarch, [even] without a constitution or parliament."³

While this development was laying the potential groundwork for the cabinet component of a cabinet–parliamentary system, there were changes in the State Council that opened new prospects for the parliamentary component. Shortly before Alexander II's death he had authorized a "Supreme Commission" chaired by the relatively liberal General M.T. Loris–Melikov to reorganize the administration and prepare proposals for overhauling the whole system of central government. The latter envisaged bringing under the State Council certain policy–formulating commissions composed of elective members and experts as well as government officials, and the adding of fifteen elected members to the State Council itself. Alexander approved the former, and the latter, which had the strong support of the majority of ministers, was about to be approved at the time of his death. It was at this point that K.P. Pobedonostsev, the reactionary adviser to the new emperor, Alexander III, struck the first of many severe blows against reform. He persuaded the tsar to issue a proclamation, without informing his ministers in advance, which asserted the full force of the autocratic principle, "against all encroachments." Loris–Melikov resigned, and for over 20 years no more was heard of a collectively responsible Council of Ministers or a partly elective State Council.⁴

On the face of it, the tsar's prerogatives remained as untrammeled and Russia as far from a system of responsible government at the end of the nineteenth century as it had been at its beginning. The repeated emergence and curtailment of proto–cabinet and proto–parliamentary institutions, however, followed a spiral rather than a circular pattern. At each stage new institutional experience was gained. The growing size and complexity of the bureaucracy, which reflected accelerating socio–economic and cultural change, heightened the need for effective institutions of administrative coordination, policy advice, and consultation. Thus, despite the reactionary animus of the fin de siècle court, the Committee of Ministers was reactivated as a partial substitute for the discredited Council of Ministers, while the State Council, far from fading into insignificance, subjected many governmental proposals to close scrutiny, delaying the enactment of quite a few measures and even causing some of them to be dropped.

The institutional changes following the 1905 Revolution brought Russia much closer to a cabinet–parliamentary system of government. A bicameral legislature was created, the partly reformed State Council constituting the upper house and a new fully elective assembly (Duma) constituting the lower. The Committee of Ministers was abolished and the Council of Ministers revived, now chaired by a "prime" minister. The change was seen by many as portending a genuine cabinet, exercising collective responsibility for the whole work of government.

These reforms marked the end of tsarist absolutism, but its legacy severely crippled both "parliament" and "cabinet." The amended Fundamental Laws of 1906 reasserted the autocratic powers of the emperor. Each minister was directly responsible to the emperor rather than to the Duma, which possessed only the power of interpellation. When the Duma and State Council were not sitting, laws could be enacted subject to the legislature's subsequent endorsement. The monarch's "sovereign commands" (vysochaishie poveleniia), countersigned by a single minister without submission to either State Council or Duma, served virtually as an alternative channel of legislation. Nicholas II made full use of these powerful vestiges of the autocratic system. The powers of the Council of Ministers were further curtailed by its division into so called "Council" and "non–Council" ministers. Under its statute the ministers responsible for defense and foreign affairs, as well as the imperial court and domains, were not required to refer matters to the Council except where this was stipulated by "sovereign command" or where other ministries were affected.

While both Russian and Western scholars differ over how radical the reforms of 1905-06 proved in practice, one can hardly rate the system of government they ushered in as better than semi–constitutional and semi–responsible. Yet the trajectory seemed plain, and its inexorability seemed confirmed by the collapse of the monarchy in March 1917 and the creation of a "Provisional Government" chosen by and collectively responsible to a multiparty legislature.⁵

But then, eight months later, came the dénouement; power passed to a revolutionary dictatorship committed to "smashing" and "sweeping away" the whole existing political and administrative order and constructing a new "proletarian" one on the resultant tabula rasa. Have I, then, spent the first pages of my chapter outlining the buildup to a mere might–have–been? The answer is no: the evolution of Russian government before 1917 is very pertinent to the topic of this book. The most obvious reason is that, whatever their intentions, the Bolsheviks ended by drawing heavily on structures and processes inherited from the Provisional Government and beyond that from the Imperial Government. Secondly, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" proved to be a formula for placing "power unlimited by any laws" in the hands of the Communist Party leadership, including absolute power over the formal origins of government, thus reviving in a new form the pre–1905 "untrammeled" prerogative ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The State in Imperial Russia and the USSR
• The State and the Economy
• The State and Security
• The State and The Future
• Index
• List of Contributors