Political participation in the USSR: YCL and CPSU

Abstract

RECENT Jewish emigrants from the USSR constitute a valuable and as yet largely untapped source for the study of Soviet political behaviour. This article on political participation in the YCL (Young Communist League-Komsomol) and the CPSU is based on an interview project conducted in Israel among a group of 46 former Soviet political activists (aktivisty), i.e., YCL and CPSU members who had served as part-time functionaries in these two organizations as well as in a number of other 'public' organizations such as electoral commissions, trade union committees, comrades' courts,' and detachments of people's guards (druzhiny). The interviews, consisting of 180 open-ended questions, were conducted in Russian and tape-recorded; each interview lasted approximately three hours. The interviewees were selected for their specialized knowledge of political participation in the Soviet Union, and do not comprise a representative sample of some parent population in the USSR or, for that matter, of Soviet immigrants to Israel. Some details on the composition of the interviewed group may be useful. Seven of the 46 were women and 39 had higher education; the largest occupational groups were engineers (13), teachers (6), scientists (5) and students (5), with a variety of other white-collar occupations represented by one or two members for each; the age distribution was: 20-29 (6), 30-39 (11), 40-49 (12), 50-59 (12), 60 and over (5); main areas of residence in the USSR were: Moscow (12), Leningrad (6), Odessa (4), Kishinev (3), two each came from Kiev, Khar'kov, Chernovtsy, Minsk, Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk, one each came from Kazan', Vilnius, L'vov, Tbilisi and Dushanbe, and four came from smaller localities. An interview project of this kind cannot pretend to the scientific rigour that is often claimed for more ambitious, broadly-based surveys conducted with the aid of a battery of carefully calibrated and highly structured questions. But in the study of the Soviet Union and other closed systems we often have to make do with evidence which is less than satisfactory. While the extent to which the findings reported below meet the criteria generally applied to such evidence must be left to the judgement of each reader, two points may help the reader to form a judgement and should therefore be briefly taken up.