Reading The Soviet Prefects Today

Abstract

Reading The Soviet Prefects Today Yoram Gorlizki (bio) Mary McAuley, my doctoral supervisor, once remarked that there were only two PhD-based books that changed the way we thought about communist politics. One, published in 1962, was Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power; the other, appearing later that decade, in the year of the moon landings, was Jerry Hough's The Soviet Prefects.1 After such high praise, I quickly tracked down a secondhand copy of The Soviet Prefects and read it. In its distinctive violet-red dustjacket, the book earned a prominent place on my bookshelf. It is there, at head height, so that it enters my field of vision most days I walk into my study—surviving the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, and the annexation of Crimea—that it has remained to this day. As with many great books, The Soviet Prefects (henceforth Prefects) works on a number of levels. Over the years, I have occasionally flicked through it and spotted the odd fact or line of argument that had somehow earlier eluded me. About a year ago, in connection with the end of a long-standing research project on Soviet regional leaders, I took a couple of days out of my schedule to read through the whole book again, from cover to cover. What struck me was the remarkable current resonance of the book and the thought that historians and social scientists may still read it with great profit today. In this short essay I try to explain why. Prefects does two things extremely well. In her contribution to this symposium Sheila Fitzpatrick rightly refers to Hough as a data man, a person who was fascinated by new and unprocessed information (535). Prefects became famous, among other things, for Hough's exhaustive use of the regional press, but he also drew on novels, literary criticism, specialist party gazettes, [End Page 563] economic journals, and a new and previously untapped source of biographical information—the various editions of Deputaty Verkhovnogo Soveta—to great effect. Yet what loomed larger for me on this most recent reading was how individual bits of data were carried along by a steady logic that courses relentlessly through the book. Keeping pace with it can be tiring, but it is also well worth the effort, for it reveals a gradually unfolding argument whose strength lies in its overall sweep rather than in any carefully selected segment. For this reason, this is not a book to skim or whose introduction or conclusion can be mined for a simple, serviceable summary. Second, while the book is very much a product of its time and is couched in the scholarly idiom of the late 1960s, it speaks to more general themes in social science that are relevant today. Although I elaborate on these below, let me say now that Prefects provides a theory of incentives, an understanding of the role of information, and a grasp of a particular form of institutional change. Because Hough later got tangled in a number of controversies it is as well at this stage to say a word about what Prefects is not. First, it is not a work of revisionism, however loosely that term is defined. He does not set out to dismantle or discredit a particular school or theory. Instead, he starts with a puzzle and, through persistent analysis and the careful deployment of evidence, tries to solve it. It is particularly important to note that the concept of totalitarianism—in any of its many guises—hardly features in the book, as either intellectual friend or foe. Second, Prefects is not a book about modernization or, as Hough puts it, the "impact of industrialization upon society" (276, 282). Hough is not arguing here that secular developments in Soviet society—such as the change in occupational structure, higher levels of education, or increased urbanization—were leading to a convergence of the Soviet Union with the West. This point requires emphasis because in their bid to dichotomize the field into competing camps, whose rival theories could be tested, some political scientists squeezed Prefects into a version of the modernization camp.2 On this...