Power and Institutional Decay in Soviet Politics

Abstract

This study has charted the development and subsequent collapse of the Soviet project to transform the village and those who lived in it. It is our argument that the key to understanding how the Soviet authorities lost their ability to formulate and implement a single, comprehensive and authoritative rural policy is the proliferation of new policy actors that appeared from the 1950s onwards. As specialist participation grew, a challenge to official policy emerged from a variety of sources. Eventually, under the weight of this assault, the institutional arrangements for developing and implementing rural policy broke down. The attempt to widen participation to assist rural policy development in the post-Stalin period, thus, had a paradoxical effect. New policy actors became part of the Soviet system because it was felt that they would be useful to perpetuate it; yet, in fact, they were generating a gradual erosion of that system, and contributing towards its transformation into something else.