Local Soviets Research Articles

The Great Revolutionary Contributions of the People of the Soviet Region

Abstract After the land revolution, all local soviets as well as the provisional Central Soviet government, which was established subsequently, gradually implemented a system in which all taxes were made progressive and were unified under one rubric. This system, which became the primary source of revenue for the Central Soviet government, was based on abolition of the various exorbitant taxes and irregular levies in force under the Guomindang and warlords—land tax, poll tax, and lijin transit tax.

Ukrainian cities: Weak Soviets and strong mayors

In Ukraine new local Soviets were elected in spring 1990. While these bodies are responsible for an increasing number of functions, we have little empirical information about their work. This article deals with the attitudes of the city soviet members to their work in the cities of Chernigov and Odessa. Almost all those who responded to the questionnaire respect administrative experience and let their more experienced colleagues show them the working procedures. Still, the ruling elite is relatively young, generally middle‐aged. The power of ail‐Union bodies apparently declined rapidly in the autumn of 1991. The same happened also in Chernigov and Odessa, although their trade was based on heavy manufacturing. In this situation the deputies find it difficult to identify where power lies. At least in both cities they admit that their own position is weak.

The Syntax of Soviet Power: The Resolutions of Local Soviets and Other Institutions, March-October 1917

During the last decade historians have considerably altered the landscape of our understanding of the February-October period of the revolution. By exploring the interaction between the mass elements of the Russian Empire's society and the revolutionary parties and institutions that strove to reconstruct the post-February Russian polity, a large group of scholars has established that Russia's lower orders were suspicious of dual power from the outset, had scant affection for the Provisional Government, and, it followed, tended to view the soviets as the sole defenders of their interests. Ronald Suny has described how, by recreating the social dimensions of the October Revolution, the new histories successfully portray it as a reflection of mass aspirations rather than as a coup; the Bolsheviks took certain actions, but hardly did so in a vacuum.2

A House Divided: A Roll-call Analysis of the First Session of the Moscow City Soviet

The March 1990 elections to republican and local Soviets in the USSR resulted in the transfer of power from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to the nascent democratic movement in a number of republics and localities. Among these was the Moscow City Soviet (Mossoviet). Of the 472 people's deputies elected to the Mossoviet, the clear majority were elected under the umbrella of the political bloc Democratic Russia. Running on a platform calling for the rejection of continued CPSU control of political life in the Soviet Union and Moscow, Democratic Russia's candidates won decisively in a majority of the electoral districts.

Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City

Throughout much of this century, cities around the world have sought to gain control over their urban destinies through concerted government action. Nowhere has this process of state intervention gone further than in the Soviet Union. This volume explores the ways in which local and regional political, economic, and cultural leaders in Leningrad determine the physical and socioeconomic contours of their city and region within such a centralized economic and political environment. The author examines four major policy initiatives that have emerged in Leningrad since the 1950sphysical planning innovations, integrated scientific-production associations, vocational education reform, and socioeconomic planningand that have been anchored in attempts to plan and manage metropolitan Leningrad. Each initiative illuminates the bureaucratic and political strategies employed to obtain economic objectives, as well as the bureaucratic patterns which distinguish market and non-market experiences. The boundaries for autonomous action by local Soviet politicians, planners, and managers emerge through this inquiry.

Letter from Latvia: surviving surveillance.

During my stay in Riga (one of the oldest cities in Europe' and capital of a country about the same size as the Republic of Ireland with a population of 2 5 million) I spoke at the Ministry ofHealth and at the First Children's Hospital. I was privileged to have Professor I Lazovskis (Juris's father and professor of internal medicine at the Latvian Medical Academy) as my interpreter. As we sat in the park near the opera house discussing the lectures, Professor Lazovskis commented that if he had been speaking English like this a year ago a KGB officer would probably have appeared to ask for an explanation. It is hard to comprehend the effect of this continual surveillance; until recently the BMJ arrived in Latvia with articles such as those by Ryan on Soviet health care2 removed. In one talk I presented some data about inequalities of health among children in the United Kingdom, illustrated by death rates by occupational class. The audience were unwilling to believe the data; it was too reminiscent of propaganda of the Breznev era, rejection of which has led to a belief that everyone in the West is very well off. Comparable data on child health in the Soviet Union are neither readily available nor reliable, at least in part because of the practice of setting central planning norms for medical' activities, and then applying pressure locally for them to be met. This can result in a divergence between actual and reported activity. castle ofBaron Von Wulf(now a secondary school) still brooding over its moat and outbuildings. These now form part of the collective farm, which with the squat local Soviet headquarters, cafe-restaurant, public library, factories for bread and cheese, and queues for these commodities in the shops make up the heart of the village. The polyclinic is staffed by Dr Lazovskis, a paediatrician, a gynaecologis-t, midwife, two nurses, a dentist and dental technician, a laboratory technician, a pharmacist and eight assistants, one notes clerk, washers up, oven lighters, and a chauffeur. Dr Lazovskis tried initially to meet the planned preventive targets for the 2200 adults of Cesvaine; 80% were to be screened annually and 200 were to be put on the chronic disease registers and seen four times a year. With the nurse he set up an intricate colour coded agesex and morbidity index with separate registers for chronic disorders. (At risk occupations such as teachers, health workers, library workers, milkmaids, and war veterans are all to be examined two to four times a year.) Every evening the nurse brought the lists up to date. The nurse wrote 5000 letters in one year to try to get the patients to come. Initially, they did come, but the queues were long and the computer returns took months to come back. When they did, a countrywoman might discover that she must visit the neurologist in the town 15 km away for her headaches, see the narcologist for her smoking habit, and consult the gastroenterologist for her dyspepsia. Gamely, she may have tried to consult, only to find that two doctors

RESTRUCTURING SOVIET AGRICULTURE: TOWARDS A SPATIAL DIMENSION

Recent Soviet reform legislation on agriculture (e.g., Land Law, Law on Property) is described and its implications for restructuring this troubled sector of the Soviet economy are surveyed. Collective, family, and individual contracting (and in some areas family farming on isolated farmsteads, or khutors) are altering the way collective and state farms are organized. Since provisions of the new legislation grant local soviets considerable authority in decisions on land tenure issues, the paper investigates how regional preferences and traditions in agriculture may reshape the rural landscape into one of greater diversity and increased spatial differentiation.

Soviet grassroots: citizen participation in local Soviet government

Soviet grassroots: citizen participation in local Soviet government

SOCIALIST FEDERALISM AND SPATIAL EQUITY: REVIEW OF A DISCUSSION

The proceedings of a wide-ranging discussion at the Institute of Geography, Moscow on current political and territorial issues in the USSR are summarized by one of its participants. The key thrust of the discussion centered on the need to find ways of increasing the involvement of Soviet political and other geographers in the analysis of critical questions of Soviet federalism: the incongruence of political-administrative boundaries with ethnic and economic regions; the search for a viable division of authority among Moscow, the republics, and local soviets; mitigation of growing regional inequality engendered by perestroyka and regional khozraschet (translated by Jay K. Mitchell, PlanEcon, Inc., Washington, DC 20005).

Soviet Grassroots: Citizen Participation in Local Soviet Government

Soviet Grassroots: Citizen Participation in Local Soviet Government

Soviet grassroots: citizen participation in local Soviet government

Jeffrey Hahn examines the degree to which citizens who are elected to local government in the USSR can successfully represent the interests of those who elected them. More specifically, how effectively do the mechanisms available for citizen participation in local government work in practice? What can elected deputies do to respond to the expressed needs and preferences of their constituents? Basing his conclusions on interviews with local deputies, observations of local soviets at work, and the analysis of a wide range of primary source material, the author finds that Soviet citizens do have some chances to participate meaningfully in local government and that a basis exists for the continued expansion of such participation. The elected deputy can and occasionally does play an active role as an ombudsman for those who choose to use opportunities for citizen input. Soviet Grassroots not only contributes to our empirical knowledge of political participation in the USSR but also provides a basis for speculation about the nature of political change in the Soviet system. If opportunities for effective participation in local government do exist, and they can be shown to have grown over time, then one precondition for the emergence of a civic culture in Soviet society already exists. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An Experiment in Competition: The 1987 Elections to the Local Soviets

For western observers, one of the most striking policy shifts articulated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985 has been his insistence on greater democratization (demokratizatsiia) and self-government (samoupravlenie). In his speech to the Communist party's Central Committee on 28 January 1987 he explicitly identified “the many-sided development of democracy and selfgovernment“ as a key component of what he meant by the reconstruction (perestroika) of Soviet society. His speech to the plenum dealt in large part with this theme. In it, Gorbachev startled his audience both at home and abroad with proposals for the introduction of a degree of competitiveness in the elections of party leaders, state officials, and enterprise managers.

Du projet à la pratique : la difficile naissance de l'économie coopérative en URSS

Putting theory into practice : the difficulty with the creation of the cooperative economy in the U.S.S.R. Perostroika or reconstruction, a historical necessity, can be seen economically speaking as the transformation from state monopolization of the factors of production towards a pluralistic form. New forms of production : tenancy, individual activity and cooperatives are encouraged from above and legitimized by law . But their development has met with resistance not only from the conservative red tape of the local Soviets but also from public opinion. The introduction of market forces into the planned economy goes against the ideology of the average Russian, conditioned over time to think that only state ownership corresponds with socialism whereas the cooperative, in the form of the collective farm for instance, is questionable. The restructuring must then take this attitude of mind into account within the party machine and within the population itself.

Local Soviets of People's Deputies and the Right to Labour

Local Soviets of People's Deputies and the Right to Labour

The Evolution of Local Soviets in Petrograd, November 1917-June 1918: The Case of the First City District Soviet

During the first months after the October Revolution, Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors who had supported the overthrow of the Provisional Government in the name of soviet power—power to ordinary citizens exercised through democratically operated Soviets—participated in revolutionary politics most actively and directly through city and district Soviets. The lowest rungs on the ladder of democratic councils established throughout much of urban Russia after the fall of the tsar, these Soviets became the new regime's primary institutions of urban local government. Their early history reveals much about the extent to which the revolutionary ideal of popular grass-roots democracy was attempted and realized at that time, as well as about the first stages of the process by which that ideal was undermined and Bolshevik party-controlled authoritarianism became irreversibly entrenched. This history can be illustrated by close examination of the evolution of one Petrograd district soviet—that of the First City District— between November 1917 and the full explosion of the civil war crisis in June 1918.

Interrelations Between Local Soviets and Law Enforcement Agencies

The question of interrelations between local soviets and law enforcement agencies is of both general theoretical and practical importance for the intensification and development of the struggle against criminal and other antisocial phenomena. The Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee the Twenty-seventh Party Congress voiced the demand to steadfastly raise the responsibilty of law enforcement and other agencies, strengthen state arbitration and the legal services in the soviets and in the national economy, and improve the legal education of the population. The use of the entire force of Soviet laws in the struggle against crime and other legal infractions, so that people in every population center feel the concern of the state for their peace and inviolability, so that they be assured that not a single law breaker will escape the punishment he deserves, is an unceasing task.1

More Power to the Soviets? Reform and Local Government in the Soviet Union

In recent years the chief emphasis of Soviet legislation on urban administration has been to expand the rights and responsibilities of city governments in planning and co-ordinating economic activities within their territory. Very little has been done, however, to enhance the power of city Soviets so that they might actually carry out these new responsibilities. The same problems that historically have plagued local Soviets continue to undermine their capabilities. Chief among these problems are the following:1. Insufficient powervis-à-visthe ministries; in most decisions concerning enterprises subordinate to all-union (Moscow-based) or republic-level ministries, the local soviet has little influence. With the exception of Khrushchev's short-livedsovnarkhozreform, which dismantled most of the central ministries and attempted to expand the power of regional authorities over economic decision-making, the branch principle of management has been dominant ever since the beginning of Stalin's industrialization drive. The most powerful actors are the ministries located in Moscow or in the republic capitals. A large percentage of the money invested in the construction of housing, cultural facilities and the urban infrastructure is not part of the budget of the local soviet. Instead, such facilities are financed out of funds that the ministries allocate to enterprises for these purposes. In the mid-1970s, ministries paid for and supervised the construction of 70 per cent of housing and 65 per cent of new kindergartens and nurseries. The result is that facilities are built according to the interests of the ministries rather than in response to more general, local needs.

Local Soviets in the Ukraine during the Years of the Great Patriotic War

From the very first day of the Great Patriotic War, local Soviets of all the Soviet republics contributed in every possible way to the use of all forces and means for the needs of defense of the Motherland and the defeat of the enemy. The Ukraine was one of the first to experience all the hardships of the fascist invasion: the death of people, the destruction of cities and villages, and the bestial cruelty perpetrated by Hitler's minions on the occupied territory. With the direct participation of the local Soviets of the republic, about 2 million people were mobilized into the ranks of the Red Army in the first months of the war alone, 657 fighting battalions were formed, sections of the People's Army numbering more than a million persons were created, and over 2 million citizens worked to build equipment for defense. The Soviets also used their efforts to organize the evacuation of the population, industrial enterprises, and various material goods from the territory near the front. By the end of 1941, mo...

Local political power and Soviet criminal justice, 1922–41

DURING the course of the first 65 years of Soviet rule, and especially since World War II, the USSR established an administration of justice whose operations were in the main orderly and in accordance with law.1 Though a considerable achievement, this line of development stopped short of a full legal order. For Soviet leaders continued to treat the law as an instrument of rule rather than as a value in its own right, and readily intervened in the work of justice agencies when it was expedient to so do.2 According to former Soviet lawyers in emigration, such interventions affected ordinary criminal cases as well as political ones and were conducted by politicians at all levels of the hierarchy.3 It comes as no surprise to the historian of Russia that the prerogative of the leaders should impede the development of law in the Soviet Union. The parallel between the position of law in the USSR and its position during the last years of the tsars is all too obvious.4 It is tempting to generalise further and suppose that political interference has been a characteristic feature of the administration of justice throughout the years of Soviet rule. While this proposition is probably valid, it does not imply that the influence of politicians in legal affairs has taken the same form or had the same meaning in all periods of Soviet history. In the course of research on Soviet criminal justice in the 1920s and 1930s, this author found that interventions by politicians were indeed frequent and systematic, to all appearances more so than in recent times. Even more striking, though, was the fact that as a rule influence by politicians in criminal cases and in the business of the courts and procuracy came not from the country's leaders but rather from politicians (especially party secretaries) in the provinces and localities. These intriguing findings called for an investigation of the place of local power in the development of Soviet justice. This paper provides such an investigation. It argues, first, that during the late 1920s and for most of the 1930s local power represented one of the primary obstacles to the development of an orderly and consistent administration of justice; and, second, that the efforts made by central authorities during the late 1930s to restrain local politicians from excessive meddling in the affairs of justice represented a crucial step in the building of effective legal institutions. Previous writers on Soviet law (Berman, Sharlet) argued correctly that the late 1930s represented a turning point in its history, but this was so, I contend, not only (or even primarily) because of the rejection of the legal nihilists and the reform of legal education.5 Equally important were the actions taken by the regime to restore and strengthen central direction of local justice and to reduce the influence of local politicians upon it. In documenting the importance of local power in one area of Soviet public life during the 1930s, the paper also supplies grist to the mill of those historians who treat the

Improving the Organization of Management

The planned development and improvement of organizational structures at the primary level of management and the gradual transition to a two-level system of management are of special significance in connection with the expansion of the rights and responsibilities of production associations and enterprises. No less important is the question of combining the program branch and regional aspects of planning and the further elevation of the role of local Soviets of people's deputies in the management of the comprehensive development of a territory.