From Higher Party Schools to Academies of State Service: The Marketization of Bureaucratic Training in Russia

Abstract

What does a postcommunist regime do with its bureaucratic inheritance? Without a replacement bureaucracy at hand, the political leadership in Russia had no choice but to govern through state employees whose values and patterns of behavior were instilled in the Soviet era. Given this reality, one might have expected Russian reformers—and their overseas supporters— to have developed an aggressive and comprehensive policy on retraining officials of state. But instead of a coordinated effort to educate new and existing personnel in a spirit of public, rather than state, service, one finds only a gradual and haphazard reform of bureaucratic training. In this article, Eugene Huskey argues that the driving force behind such training has been the market in higher and continuing education and not a conscious and consistent policy emanating from the presidency or other central institutions of state. The major player in that market is the system of state service academies, which inherited many of their faculty and facilities from the old Higher Party Schools of the communist era. But the market, taken together with the fragmentation of state power, has consistently undermined attempts by the academies to serve as the sole purveyors of training to the bureaucracy. What is as yet unclear is whether the marketization of bureaucratic education and re-education, which discourages the emergence of a coherent national approach to remaking the bureaucracy, is facilitating or impeding the modernization and liberalization of Russian officialdom.