Bureaucratic politics in the Soviet Union and in the

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Bureaucratic politics in theSoviet Union and in theOttoman EmpireCharles H. Fairbanks Jr. aa School of Advanced International Studies,Johns Hopkins University, 1740 MassachusettsAvenue, N.W. Washington, DC, 20036

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To cite this article: Charles H. Fairbanks Jr. (1987): Bureaucratic politics in theSoviet Union and in the Ottoman Empire, Comparative Strategy, 6:3, 333-362

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Bureaucratic Politics in the SovietUnion and in the Ottoman Empire

Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.School of Advanced International StudiesJohns Hopkins University1740 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.Washington, DC 20036

I. Introduction

The greatest monument to modern bureaucracy which our civili-zation possesses is the battlefield of Verdun. In that earth liemingled the bodies of some 420,000 Frenchmen and Germans.They are there because of a fundamental, universally recognizedcharacteristic of modern bureaucracy: that it works by evolvingstandard operating procedures or routines that enable large or-ganizations to address average, recurring situations that havebeen experienced before. When the situation is new, the recog-nized tendency of bureaucratic organizations is to try the sameroutine over and over again until it works, as was done by Gen-eral Joffre and by General Haig and (with a certain discernment)by General von Falkenhayn. These were all professionals, whohad a genuine m6tier, a craft that could be taught. (Politicians,on the other hand, tend to be mobile and flighty.) The mud ofVerdun and the Somme is the memorial left by that profession-alism, the other side of the administrative order, consistency,and fairness of which we are proud. When we remember that thewar the professionals could not win was the war that they hadalso triggered, with their mobilization plans and railway

Comparative Strategy, Volume 6, Number 30149-5933/87/020333-00$03.00/0Copyright © 1987 Crane, Russak & Company, Inc.

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334 Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.

schedules, the image of Verdun should force home on us theimmense seriousness of bureaucratic politics.

Bureaucratic politics is properly regarded as one of the mostimportant determinants of national security policy in Westernliberal democracies. But we lack an adequate sense of itssources—of the extent to which it flows from the very nature ofa complex society, from the Western liberal-democratic tradi-tion, or from conditions peculiar to the countries where it hasbeen most carefully observed—above all the United States.Thus we lack a sense of the limits of the patterns we find incontemporary bureaucratic politics. The bureaucratic-politicsliterature has an ambiguity that reflects this. Sometimes it im-plies that the power of bureaucracy over policy, and the conse-quent limits on the role of political leaders and of citizens, is akind of inescapable fate. At other times it gives prescriptions for"managing" or "controlling" bureaucracy, which would implythe contingent character of existing patterns.

Bodies of theoretical knowledge that might resolve these di-lemmas give less help because they have contradictory implica-tions that have not been adequately sorted out. On the onehand, modern social science in general has tended to emphasizethe dependence of the political on the non-political—the societyor culture—and the penetration of politics by subpolitical phe-nomena such as clientelism. This perspective would, in itself,imply that bureaucratic politics would vary enormously with thesociety and culture. On the other hand, writings on the specifictopic of bureaucratic politics have tended to assume that it isbasically similar in all modern, complex societies. Graham Al-lison, the founder of the bureaucratic-politics approach to for-eign policy, analyzed the Cuban missile crisis by assuming thatthe same organizational drives were present, and had about thesame degree of power, on both sides.1 He assumes that someonesuggested to Khrushchev the idea of placing missiles in Cubabecause he knows that in American bureaucratic politics op-tions are normally generated by staffs, and not by politicalleaders. (Khrushchev, on the other hand, says it was his ownidea.)

The following investigation is a very preliminary attempt to

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Politics in Soviet Union and Ottoman Empire 335

explore the different types of bureaucratic politics in differentsocieties, in order to shed light on what determines the char-acter of bureaucratic politics. First, I will try to briefly sketchthe distinctive features of bureaucratic politics in the OttomanEmpire under Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909).2 This casewas chosen for comparison with the Soviet Union because itdiffers so much from the U.S.S.R. in terms of culture, religion,ideology, social structure, and stage of economic developmentthat it lends itself to exploring the dependence of bureaucraticpolitics on these factors. This period of Ottoman history alsohas the advantage that a great deal of evidence is available fromTurkish memoirs and Western diplomatic documents. Next Iwill look at similar bureaucratic relationships and processes inthe Soviet Union, comparing this thoroughly modern systemwith the rather traditional Ottoman Empire. Since the featuresof American bureaucratic politics are well known, the UnitedStates can serve implicitly as a second society without the needto treat it in detail.

II. Ottoman Bureaucratic Politics UnderAbdul Hamid H (1876-1909)

In looking at the Ottoman Empire under Abdul Hamid II (1876—1909), we see a government whose functions were much simplerthan those of the states familiar to us. The overwhelming massof the subjects of the Empire were peasants or nomadictribesmen. Between the peasants and the Ottoman governmentthere were normally only two kinds of interaction: the taking oftaxes by the government and the taking of their sons as con-script soldiers. Between the government and the nomads eventhese two forms of contact were most often absent. The Ot-toman state was thus an "extractive" state, which took from thebulk of its subjects but gave little in return, except for what itprovided the Islamic community as the symbol of Sunni Islam'spolitical power—a connection between Sultan and subjects thatshould not be disregarded.

Among the familiar functions of government the Ottomangovernment did not exercise were those of welfare (except

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sometimes after natural disasters or famines), industrialization,and intervention in the subsistence economy. Law was largely(probably entirely in rural areas) the law of the millets or reli-gious communities (for the majority of Ottoman subjects, theIslamic law), which did not emanate from the state, and mostchildren who were educated at all were educated in the primaryyears in the religious schools maintained by the ulema (semi-in-dependent of the state), by the non-Muslim millets, or by foreignmissionaries. There was no attempt to remold society or to de-fine ideology. In general, the Ottoman government was far less"repressive" than the Soviet government in the sense of de-fining and limiting the behavior of individuals.

The Ottoman government did, more rarely, intervene in thelives of its rural subjects by seeking to establish its authoritymore firmly, to control the endemic violence between indi-viduals and groups, especially among the nomads, and to breakup potentially competing foci of political authority. But most ofthe means the state used to achieve these goals were means that"empowered" other groups in the society rather than "atom-izing" these groups. When there were massacres of real orfeared opposition groups, they were carried out not by the gov-ernment but by social groupings to whom the government gavepower, such as the Hamidiye irregular cavalry made up of cer-tain Kurdish tribes. Similarly, the government checked thepower of strong tribes by building up weak tribes. It obtainedthe support of tribal elders and landlords by permitting them(intentionally or not) to steal the peasants' or tribesmen's landduring the Western-inspired land registration program. Thus, bycomparison to modern states, the functions and organization ofthe Ottoman government were simple, and its relationship to thesociety was more remote than that of modern states, far moreremote than that of the Soviet state in particular.

During these years (1876-1909) the society and governmentwere still highly traditional. Since the 1820s Westernization hadbegun to affect the bureaucracy, but it naturally affected theformal organization of government more than the actual bureau-cratic process. Even the externals of official life remained ar-chaic during the period we are considering: official papers were

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still stored in bags rather than filing cabinets and there was nostandard table of salaries for officials.3 During the reign of AbdulHamid II, a strong Sultan, two contradictory tendencies af-fected the bureaucracy: recentralization of power in the Sultan(and particularly away from the Grand Vizier's office, the Sub-lime Porte) and further systematization and rationalization ofthe bureaucracy along Western lines. The bureaucratic politicsof this period thus represent a combination of traditional Ot-toman practices, autocratic centralization (traditionalistic insome ways and not in others), and Western-style bureaucracy.

Ottoman Clientelism

In attempting to define the phenomenon of modern bureaucracyas he experienced it, Max Weber declared that:

It is decisive for the specific nature of modern loyalty to an officethat, in the pure type, it does not establish a relationship to aperson [Weber's italics], like the vassal's or disciple's faith in feudalor in patrimonial relations of authority.4

Ottoman bureaucracy in the period we are considering wascharacterized, on the contrary, by relationships among officialsthat were personal, by the phenomenon called in social science"clientelism." Patron-client relationships had been a tradi-tional part of Ottoman official life for centuries, under the nameintisab ("connection"). As in the Soviet Union, dismissals ofhigher officials could result in extensive purges in the lower bu-reaucracy. Clientage was, at least during some periods, encour-aged by Sultans, who preferred to appoint to office those whohad extensive patron-client networks. Abdul Hamid seems tohave held these views.5 The British diplomat Drummond Hayreported of Syria that:

It has hitherto been customary, on the appointment of a new DruseKaimakam [local administrator], to dismiss all adherents of the out-going official.6

Ottoman officials transferred and promoted their own clients:

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Many of the old Yemen favorites of Ahmed Fezi Pasha [former Gov-ernor there] have been appointed to administrative posts in the vi-layet [province] since his excellency took over charge.7

These patron-client networks were anchored firmly in thePalace, as Tahsin Pa§a, who had an unrivaled position to under-stand the system as the Sultan's Chief Scribe, explains in hismemoirs:

Central authority at Yildiz [the palace] was Abdulhamid's policy.Everyone from viziers and ministers to office inspectors and secre-taries, to imams and local officials, had a room he visited at Yildiz, ahand he held, a protector he leaned on. People were distinguishednot by their official status, but by the names of their protectors.They would be called as "such and such Bey's man" and "so andso Pa§a's man" in the mabeyn [palace secretariat]. Viziers and min-isters also had such protectors. It was not embarrassing to say" . . . Pa§a's man," when talking about a vizier.8

In passing, a feature of Ottoman bureaucracy to be consideredshortly also emerges here: the replacement of the authority con-ferred by titles by personal authority.

The most important cause of patron-client connections, andtheir general effect, can be seen in the remark of a British ob-server that "an official is not the servant of Government, but ofthe man who obtained his appointment for him."9 At the sametime, this phenomenon was rooted in the society at large, as ahistorian explains:

Everyone to some extent "belonged" to the authority chain of aricher landowner. . . . The richer landowners acquired protectors inthe Palace and Sublime Porte by doing them favors, so that even thefinancial officers had to consider these relationships in their work.10

I can only pause to note here that the dynamics of a bureau-cracy in which patron-client relationships are very strong arecertain to be different from those in which "organizational pro-cess" is more important.

We turn next to the nature of relationships between officialsin the Ottoman administration, particularly those between

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higher and lower officials. We are dealing here with what iscalled in public administration "delegation of authority."

Delegation of Authority

As Tahsin Pas,a remarks, high Ottoman officials disliked dele-gating to subordinates their authority to make decisions and setpolicy. The British military attache" in Istanbul reported in 1907that:

Even in peace time troops sometimes receive orders direct from thePalace, and it occasionally happens that the War Office is ignorantof the position of certain units, only knowing that they have beenmoved from their original position by orders given over its head.11

Sultan Abdul Hamid chaired meetings of the Council of Min-isters personally, unlike previous Sultans. When the HejazRailroad was being constructed, he insisted on a reporting tele-gram every day from the management in the field, a Soviet-stylepractice that also illustrates the desire to supervise high-priorityprojects in detail.12

Cutting the Chain of Command

The last example cited shows the tendency of the Hamidiansystem to cut normal chains of command. The historian of Ot-toman bureaucracy Carter Findley concluded that under AbdulHamid "Ambassadors, provincial governors, and military com-manders were ultimately corresponding as much with the palacesecretariat as with the ministries to which they were nominallyattached."13

Treatment of Technical Detail

Part of the style of management we see emerging was top-levelinterference in matters of detail, whether military or financial.The historian E. Z. Karal reports the experience of the GrandVizier Said Pa§a:

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Since he [Abdul Hamid] treated the Grand Vizier and the Ministerof Finance as his private secretaries, he meddled in financialmatters by disregarding their authority and interfering in everything.During the Period of Despotism the budget was prepared by theMinistry of Finance and examined by a commission of ministers ap-pointed by the Sultan's decree; afterwards, it would be discussed inthe Council of Ministers to take its last form. In every stage of thispreparation, Abdul Hamid would interfere with his decrees and di-rect the work in progress according to his individual preconcep-tions.14

It is a more astounding fact that in the Army "The Sultan per-sonally approved the assignment and promotion of each officer,regardless of rank." There were roughly 17,000 officers in theImperial Army.15

Ad Hoc and Extradepartmental Organizations

Most historians of Abdul Hamid's reign have been struck by theproliferation of special commissions and organizations outsidethe regular bureaucratic structure, beginning with the four majorcommissions under the presidency of the Sultan: the HejazRailway Commission, the High Commission for Islamic Ref-ugees, the High Commission for Finance, and the Aid Fund ofthe Sublime Porte. There were many commissions composed ofthe directors of offices within a ministry, similar to Soviet "col-legia."16 Some commissions existed to monitor governmentalactivity in a long-term way, such as the Civil Service Commis-sion and the Commission to Register the Affairs of Civil Ser-vants.17

Many ad hoc commissions were specifically created to reforminstitutions or change the broad direction of policy, such as theReform Commission of 1879 to reorganize the palace service,the High Commission of Military Inspection, the 1882 commis-sion on fortification, and the 1886 military Commission for Reor-ganization.18 Ad hoc commissions to deal with specific newproblems or tasks, like the Hejaz railroad, were common.Among many special military commissions were the 1886 Com-mission to inventory personnel and equipment and a "Special

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Yemen Commission" at the palace, which directly controlledoperations there during the 1905 revolt of the Zaidi Shiites, cut-ting out the Ministry of War.19

In principle ad hoc commissions like the Yemen Commissionaddress the problem that appeared at Verdun and the Somme:that long-term bureaucracies and their routines are a "blunt in-strument" for solving specific problems with their individualfeatures. Of course, because most of the commissions werechaired in the Palace, they also served the purposes of avoidingthe delegation of authority and of creating parallel channels. Be-cause commissions often included bureaucrats of low rank, theyserved to cut the chain of command. In fact, all of the traits wehave just been discussing—cutting the chain of command, thetreatment of detail, and the use of ad hoc organizations—can beunderstood partly as ways of avoiding the delegation of au-thority.

Priority System

Certain policy issues, such as those handled by the commissionsunder the presidency of the Sultan, were set aside and given aspecial type of management; the crown estates (agricultural landwhich was the personal property of the Sultan) were anotherexample. In order to achieve these urgent goals, special mea-sures were carried out. In the case of the Hejaz Railroad, theseincluded the use of naval and military personnel as constructionworkers, paying them bonuses of three to four times theirnormal salaries, and the manufacture of rolling stock by the Im-perial dockyards. In this style of management, the energies of awide range of organizations were focused on one task for whichmost of them were not specialized. The result was much higherperformance in the high-priority areas. The Hamidian bureau-cracy was world-famous for sloth and corruption, but Europeandiplomats noted that it displayed a "wild energy" on the HejazRailroad, which emerged as "a record in railway construction."In fact the completed railroad was of high quality, was builtmore rapidly than comparable private efforts, and cost less permile.20

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All of these ways of management in the Ottoman Empire wetend to dismiss because we do not take the Ottoman Empireseriously as an entire system. Perhaps we do not take it seri-ously because we mentally pigeon-hole the Ottoman Empire as"the sick man of Europe," and our civilization is one that doesnot believe in the nobility of failure. However this may be, whenwe consider particular Ottoman techniques or habits of manage-ment, the ultimate fate of the Empire should not blind us tothose cases where it was successful. In the areas to which theSultan gave a high priority, the system showed some out-standing successes. We have already mentioned the HejazRailroad. Another success was the creation of a modern army,one that could block the military efforts of much more modernstates, of Italy in 1911-1912 and of Britain and France in1914-1917. During the reign of Abdul Hamid II, the militarysystem he created showed an outstanding success in the 1897war with Greece, when the Turkish troops routed the Greekarmy in a month.21 If this war is forgotten today, it is because theEuropean powers provided a "safety net" for Christian Greecethat they did not for Muslim Turkey after the Balkan Wars.

Another factor that could blind us to the achievements of theOttoman system is its scandalous failures in other areas. But it isthe very nature of the Ottoman priorities system to buy successin a few areas, by concentration of high-level energy, at the ex-pense of the success in other areas that could come from thedevelopment of modern bureaucratic norms and procedures andthe devolution of authority to lower officials that they require.And this "tradeoff" is in a broader sense characteristic of alltraditional societies: as compared with modern Western soci-eties they emphasize a few areas regarded as key ones (religionor kingship, for example) at the expense of areas that have lowerpriority (plumbing, for instance).

The Division of Labor and Parallel Authority

In Max Weber's famous analysis of bureaucracy, the first of the"three elements" that "constitute 'bureaucratic authority' " isexpressed as follows:

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There is the principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas, whichare generally ordered by rules, that is, by laws or administrativeregulations. . . . The regular activities required for the purposes ofthe bureaucratically governed structure are distributed in a fixedway as official duties.22

We need to compare with this "ideal type" of bureaucracy thereal Ottoman bureaucracy. A very striking feature of public ad-ministration in the late Ottoman period was the existence of anumber of parallel organizations (most often two) carrying outthe same or similar duties. According to Stanford and EzelShaw, the authors of the most complete history of this period ina Western language,

The secret police, stationed in the palace, was nominally under theauthority of the Ministry of Police but was in fact independent, withthe Sultan thus maintaining two police forces to spy on each otheras well as everyone else.23

Likewise, there were two budgets—one administered by theFinance Ministry and one by the Agricultural Bank—and twoGeneral Staffs in the army, one called the General Staff and onethe Second General Staff. Military engineering and fortificationswere handled both by subunits of the War Ministry and by aseparate Minister, the Grand Master of the Artillery—a tradi-tional office. Some of these formal dual hierarchies came intoexistence due to the needs of modernization and Western pres-sure, such as the Public Debt Commission "established outsidethe Ministry of Finance . . . as a separate Ottoman treasury withthe purpose of servicing the . . . Ottoman public debt."24

Other dual hierarchies of administration existed de factothrough informal means. This was, for example, the effect of thecreation of the Hamidiye irregular cavalry units in Eastern Ana-tolia.

The superior and protector of the Hamidiye commanders was ZekiPa§a, commander of the 4th Army Corps at Erzincan and brother-in-law of the Sultan himself. To the great annoyance of the civil offi-cials, Zeki Pa§a removed the Hamidiye from under their judicial

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competences and always protected transgressors. Thus there were,in fact, two parallel, and competing chains of authority from theSultan to the eastern provinces. Hamidiye units frequently brokelaw and order which the civil administration considered its concern,but usually they went unpunished.25

The inevitable consequence of different organizations withthe same or similar policy responsibility is that it becomes un-clear which officials have the right to make decisions on whatmatters, and this in turn creates some ambiguity among lowerofficials as to who judges their performance and thus to whomthey ultimately report. These ambiguities about the real lines ofcommand and responsibility in bureaucracy can be called"shapelessness," a term from the thirties revived by SewerynBialer to describe the Stalin system.26 Shapelessness, which vio-lates Weber's principle of "fixed and official jurisdictional areas. . . ordered by rules," was a very marked feature of the Ot-toman system.

Shaw and Shaw generalize about the preceding Tanzimat pe-riod that:

A long investigation of the situation concluded [in 1861] that thedifficulty was the old Ottoman tendency to create new institutionsto deal with new problems without destroying the old or relatingthem one to another.27

A common aspect of shapelessness was frequent changes ininstitutional arrangements which divided authority or made itslocation unclear. According to a British diplomatic report of de-velopments in the Ottoman Navy after 1902,

When Hassan Pasha died, a civilian, Djallal Pasha, was appointedMinister of Marine, all matters naval were passed through the handsof a Palace official, and so brought under the eyes of the Sultanhimself; no money is now spent without an Irade from His Majesty,and all payments are made by the Military Equipment Fund. TheMinister of Marine was thus made a nonentity, as also his SupremeCouncil.28

Historians of the Ottoman Empire have usually seen duplicate

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organizations and shapelessness as defects of the system, as asign of its failure to reach Western standards. The major studentof Ottoman bureaucracy, Carter Findley, writes that "the exis-tence of two channels of communication between the provincialauthorities and the center seems ironic." For Findley, the"overlapping systems" reflect the "warping and inhibiting ef-fect of the Hamidian despotism."29 In some ways this harshjudgment is surely correct. But it implicitly takes the modernWestern system of bureaucracy as a goal or standard. Allsystems of administration involve "tradeoffs." By its relativelylow degree of "shapelessness" modern Western bureaucracygains in some ways but loses in others. In fact, shapelessnesshas some advantages. By creating multiple channels for commu-nicating information to the people at the top and for carrying outthe policies desired by the top, it can make bureaucracy moreresponsive to the political leadership. By setting up a situationin which different organizations compete to carry out policy(and for the favor of the top leaders) it can cope with the alwaysdifficult problem of bureaucratic incentives. The price is lack oforder and consistency, duplication of effort, an opportunity forbureaucrats to evade responsibility, and the tendency of policyto become what Allison calls a "resultant," a melange of incon-sistent policies.

The fluid structure I have called "shapelessness" leads tofluid outcomes: it can have opposite effects in different circum-stances. Shapelessness can be used, as I just argued, to increasecentral control of bureaucracy. If no strong effort is made to useit in this way, it swings to the other extreme. When differentorganizations share authority over the same policy area in theabsence of a clear mediator, they are pushed to work out in-formal cooperative mechanisms to decide what to do and how todo it. Shapelessness can issue not only in centralization, but inthe formation of a consensus among lower-level bureaucrats, intheir collusion to shut out control from the top. This topic hasnot been studied in the Ottoman bureaucracy, but it is probablyvisible in the "rings" that Western diplomats frequently foundoperating in provincial government.30 Shapelessness and pa-tron-client relationships reinforce each other in creating such

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rings. Let us turn now to some consequences of shapelessnessin the Ottoman system.

One important facet of shapelessness was the establishmentof informal hierarchic relationships, for example when Karato-dori Pa§a was not the Foreign Minister but "supervised thework of the foreign ministry." In a slightly earlier period, thedirector of the police department and the director of the arsenalwere nominally the subordinates of the Minister of the Interiorand the Serasker [Minister of War], but really their equals.31

When such practices prevail, it is inevitable that the impersonalauthority conferred by official titles begins to be replaced bypersonal authority inherent in an individual person and in hisrelationships with other people. Patron-client relationships, ofcourse, tend strongly to the same outcome.

Breaking Rules

In his exposition of the ideal type of bureaucracy, Max Weberlinks the "fixed and official jurisdictional areas" to the fact thatthey are "ordered by rules."32 Up to a point this makes sense.Where there is shapelessness of jurisdictional areas, the rulesregulating bureaucratic conduct must necessarily be weakened.In fact, we find that Ottoman officials frequently violated lawsand administrative rules. A British consul reports his dealingswith the Public Prosecutor of the Sivas vilayet:

I assured Ahmed Effendi that I was perfectly aware of the provi-sions of the law in such cases—that they admitted of no ques-tion. . . . He could give me no satisfactory answer, so our interviewended. It was perfectly clear to me that the man is bound hand andfoot to the Vali [Governor], whose personal exertions, I understand,obtained for him the much-coveted post he now occupies. He has,indeed, since confessed that he is aware that he is acting illegally,but that he is not prepared to run counter to the express wishes ofthe Vali—his patron.33

The consul's next remark takes us back into the standards of theworld before Hitler and Stalin:

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I would beg your excellency to consider the deplorably low moralitysuch a confession reveals.34

Here the effects of patron-client relationships in decreasing therule-bound character of administration are clear. In other cases,Ottoman officials calmly violated not only the law, but specificdecrees sent from Constantinople:

The Vali [of Diarbekir] has extended protection to corrupt officials,and several well-known offenders have been appointed by him toposts under the Government—for instance, Hadji Daudh Effendiand Djezerehli Mustapha Effendi. This latter, although an order hadbeen issued by the Porte never to employ him again, has beennamed by the Vali to be Kaimakam of Kishta.35

Such blatant violation of orders from above presents us with aparadox. It would seem to flatly contradict the strong desire ofthe Sultan and other top leaders not to delegate authority, tocontrol lower officials in detail. But this contradiction can standin place of a summary of Ottoman bureaucracy: it was at oncefluid and disciplined. Perhaps these strangely contradictoryfacts were linked in a kind of vicious circle: that the very effortsto keep policy in the hands of the top leadership by the meanswe have noticed required informal methods of work at thebottom which tended to decide policy autonomously, reinforcingin turn the need at the top to concentrate authority.

HI. Distinctive Features of Soviet Bureaucratic Politics

None of the features of bureaucratic politics we have found inthe Ottoman Empire are a surprise in a traditional society. TheSoviet Union is a society modern in the broad shape of societyand in its goals, whether one takes these as the aspirations de-fined by formal ideology or the goal of economic developmentthat frequently seems to replace these aspirations in practice. Isthe shape of bureaucratic politics, then, utterly different? In thisbrief essay it is possible only to allude to some of the moststriking features of bureaucratic politics in the U.S.S.R., of anextremely complex reality with many contradictory tendencies,

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as they have emerged during a project studying Soviet bureau-cratic politics as a whole.36

Organizations Outside the Division of Labor

In the United States the major "players" in bureaucratic pol-itics are the executive Departments and the Bureaus and Officeswithin them. These organizations are characteristically definedby an area of the government's long-term activity—such as aregion of the world—rather than by a specific problem that hasrecently emerged. Organizations outside this structure, such asInteragency Groups, Working Groups, and Task Forces, are lessimportant, and tend to function as arenas for bargaining amongthe organizations whose representatives attend them.

In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, extra-departmentalorganizations are used more frequently; they often have widermembership and are probably more important in policy-making.The most frequent type is the rarest in the United States—thead hoc committee created to solve a specific problem—but wasvery common in the Ottoman Empire. According to VladimirPetrov,

. . . it has become standard practice in Moscow to create ad hoccommittees to develop specific policy questions. Convoked byBrezhnev's Secretariat, these committees include representatives ofthe Foreign Ministry, KGB, sometimes Defense and other minis-tries, and leading experts from the appropriate institutes of theAcademy of Sciences. . . .

Ad hoc organizations of the same type are formed from the topto the bottom of Soviet bureaucracy—from the Politburo to thelocal level.37 Under Gorbachev a campaign is going on to reducead hoc organizations whose mode of work is "bureaucratic,"but they continue to function and to be formed.

Delegation of Authority

Like the Sultan, throughout Soviet bureaucracy leaders are lesswilling to delegate authority than their American counterparts.The following press criticism is typical:

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Strangely, however, all responsibility for construction and installa-tion (at the Tomsk Pencil Factory) was entrusted to local organs.Instead of exercising careful supervision over the work, the RussianRepublic Ministry of Local Industry and its Chief Administrationfor School Supplies merely functioned as disinterested observers.And why has the Russian Republic State Planning Committee . . .remained silent?38

In the United States delegation of authority is a widely taughtprinciple of management; such Soviet discussions teach the pre-cise opposite.

Unwillingness to delegate authority is likely to make lowerofficials fearful of innovation and passive. High-ranking officialsare likely not to trust their subordinates to collect information,define options, and develop policy for them. This implies thatSoviet bureaucracy is less a bureaucracy in the sense usuallyanalyzed by modern social science—that is, an entity whosebehavior is more determined by regularities in the behavior oforganizations than by variations in the beliefs, tastes, andwhims of the individuals who head these organizations.

The Style of Soviet Bureaucracy

Probably related to the disinclination to delegate authority is adistinctive feature of Soviet bureaucracy not apparent in the Ot-toman case: the very generalized instructions in the press di-rected to lower officials (and obviously decided by higher offi-cials). These take the form of exhortations about the mode orspirit in which lower officials should go about their work: ex-hortations, for example, to display "exactingness," "activity,""rhythm," "criticism and self-criticism," "high work mood,"and now "openness."39

Cutting the Chain of Command

This practice is the obvious product of combining an unwilling-ness to delegate authority with a complex society and a modernstate structure, where information can only be obtained fromtechnically skilled specialists on the spot and the operational ex-ecution of policy depends on them as well. Cutting the chain of

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command is thus a means by which officials who want to behavelike traditional leaders in certain ways can circumvent the socialprocesses that seem to be diffusing policy-making into more andmore diverse and specialized channels.

The hierarchic chain of command is circumvented in the So-viet Union when top officials work directly with their lower-ranking subordinates, by making them members of ad hocworking groups, by on-site visits, or by issuing direct orderswithout going through channels. Like Sultan Abdul Hamid,Khrushchev sometimes issued orders directly to units of thearmed forces, bypassing his own Minister of Defense.40 This isnot only the custom, but a recommended pattern of manage-ment. The literature of Soviet officialdom is full of exhortationsto "have constant, day-to-day, very close contacts with people"and "follow in practice the principle of seeing everyone andknowing each individual."41

Top officials also deal directly with their low-ranking subordi-nates by way of multiple reporting channels that bypass inter-mediate levels of the bureaucracy. For example, in Soviet em-bassies, the KGB, GRU, and International Department of theCC have communications channels that bypass the Ambas-sador. Relations of clientage—to be discussed later—serve thesame function, since they are personal relationships that existregardless of intervening bureaucratic ranks.

Treatment of Technical Issues

While there are major variations from one policy area to an-other, and from one President or Cabinet officer to another,there is a tendency in American bureaucracy (except in crises)for top officials to decide policy only in general terms, leavingthe detailed implementation of policy to their subordinates, par-ticularly where technical issues are involved. To say this is, in asense, only to restate the point about the American taste fordelegation of authority. Since it is easy to reverse policy duringthe stage of implementation, or to predetermine in this way whatit will be in the future, leaving detail to subordinates is another"modern" factor limiting the free discretion of the highest offi-

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cials and creating a more continuous and perhaps more system-atic policy.

Soviet leaders at the Politburo level have a much greater con-cern with technical details. In the United States it tends to beseen as inappropriate for Presidential documents to discussissues in detail, while General Secretary Gorbachev on the mostsolemn public occasion, a Congress of the Party, will say that"Using the DON-1500 harvester combine . . . will make it pos-sible to . . . disengage about 40,000 machine operators. . . ."42

Khrushchev reports that he was regularly shown blueprints ofnew aircraft, and that he initiated proposals for greater ICBMreadiness, for placing ICBMs in silos, and for the amount ofspace between the missile and the silo wall.43 The highest Sovietleaders are habituated to this kind of concern with technical de-tail; as obkom secretaries they were likely to have dealt withissues such as how many people should work on a specific shiftin a single factory.44

The intervention of high officials in matters of detail is an-other factor that tends to widen the area of political leaders' freediscretion, and to decrease the determination of policy by bur-eaucracies. It discourages one of the most frequent excuses bywhich the wishes of political leaders are set aside in Westernpolicy-making: the technical difficulty of carrying out the policysought at the top.

The Soviet Priority System

If the Soviet system tends to concentrate authority at the top,how can a leadership manage such a wide and deep involvementin policy? Part of the answer is the stronger tendency to sepa-rate high and low-priority matters in Soviet bureaucracy ascompared with the West.45 At each level of the official hier-archy, high-priority matters tend to be managed in detail andcontinuously by the top leadership. Low-priority matters areleft to the relevant bureaucracies to manage in a routine way.Such a separation of priorities could be seen in the OttomanEmpire, but it is least talked about more in the Soviet Union.Soviet bureaucracy has undergone a succession of crises—the

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Revolution, the Civil War, the collectivization of agriculture, theterror, the German invasion—that habituated it to a continuouscrisis atmosphere and required strict concentration on the mosturgent problems. Over this same time, lack of resources and ex-pertise made the rulers turn to solving problems by the concen-tration of will and enthusiasm on them. This tactic continues tobe attractive because it guarantees a crucial role to the Commu-nist Party—which does not excel the State apparatus in exper-tise or in the ability to organize and systematize problem-solving, but does specialize in the mobilization of mass effort.Such mobilization is only possible if certain problems areplucked from the mass of problems and designated as high-pri-ority.

The result of these forces is a pervasive atmosphere of intenseconcentration on certain problems and inattention to others.There are successive "campaigns" (kampanii) throughout theyear, each dealing with a particular problem; Gorbachev's cam-paign for openness is one of these. Workers are transferred sud-denly from their regular jobs to other urgent projects such as theannual harvest. "Shock sectors" are designated in industry andagriculture. In industry work is done by "storming" at the endof the month or year rather than by evolving an efficient rhythmof production.46

Since high-priority projects are given much more attentionthan low-priority projects, it stands to reason that there will be agreater difference in performance on various kinds of projectsthan there is in the United States. This does seem to be the case.In recent years projects such as ICBM development or theBaikal-Amur Railroad have been handled more rapidly thanthey would have been in the West, while low-priority areas suchas light industry or consumer services are completely misman-aged. In this respect there is a certain parallelism between theSoviet Union and a pre-modern society, such as the Ottoman,where the matters regarded as most urgent—such as religionand the Caliphate—tended to be more splendid than today, butthe low and useful areas—filing systems—were neglected. Thedifference is that the conservatism of traditional society and bu-reaucracy prevented new priority subjects from emerging asoften as they do in the U.S.S.R.

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Shapelessness

I used the term "shapelessness," rediscovered by Bialer, todesignate uncertainty and fluidity in the spheres of responsi-bility of Ottoman officials and organizations. This phenomenonis also very characteristic of the Soviet Union, if perhaps frompartially different causes. The simplest is the split in the admin-istrative apparatus between State and Party. Since there areState and party officials set jointly over most areas of publicbusiness, it is frequently hard to know who has the authority toorder particular actions. For example, machine-building plantswork under industrial ministries, but the local Party secretariescan also force such plants to do work "outside the plan" onprojects such as city parks. In general, says an authoritative So-viet handbook, "it is impossible to give a recipe or some sort ofcatalogue" about "what kind of question should be decided bythe Soviet [State] organs and what kind by the Party organs."47

The effects of "shapelessness" are complex and important.First, shapelessness obviously weakens adherence to rules andstandard operating procedures in decision-making. That is, theSoviet Union is closer to the Ottoman system than is the UnitedStates in one of the key characteristics of modern bureaucracy,the replacement of official discretion by systematic, relativelyrigid, and impersonal rules. Adherence to rules and standardoperating procedures is also weakened by the rigidity of an inef-ficient centrally planned economy. It is very difficult for factorymanagers and local Party secretaries to fulfill the plan withoutviolating rules, including Soviet law. Breaking the rules is asmuch a part of the texture of life in Soviet bureaucracy as inOttoman bureaucracy, if its expressions are sometimes less ec-centric. Even the mass of regulations and standards that doesexist encourages their violation: they are so rigid and cumber-some that one has to go outside them to perform effectively. Thecircular interrelationship between discipline and informalproblem-solving appears to characterize the U.S.S.R. as it didthe Ottoman system.

Because the inability of bureaucracies to act outside of pre-established standard operating procedures is a major limitationon the authority of top leaders in Western-style bureaucratic

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politics, the weakening of rules can function to make bureau-cracy more responsive to the top leadership. This is one effectof shapelessness in general. The political leadership can keep itsdeciding role by maintaining multiple organizations to developand implement policy in a given area and by not demarcatingtheir mutual spheres of authority. Such a structure will yieldmultiple information channels and multiple policy options. Inthe implementation of policy, conditions of shapelessness allowthe top leadership to turn to whichever organization is morefaithful to the policy and more efficient in carrying it out. Fi-nally, as Merle Fainsod suggested, "the ruling group [can pit]one bureaucracy against another and [rely] on the rivalry be-tween them to enforce its demands on both."48

But in other cases shapelessness must diminish the respon-siveness of bureaucracy to top leadership. A local factory man-ager and a Party secretary, for example, do not have clearly sepa-rated responsibilities, but they are jointly responsible formeeting the plan. The easiest way of doing so, under conditionsof shapelessness, is to arrive at a mutual consensus on policyand "turf." Such consensus formation leads easily to "local-ism" (mestnichestvo)—deciding questions at a lower level, inthe light of the participants' interests, rather than referring themupwards. Moreover, shapelessness of official structure makes itharder to find pressure points within the bureaucracy, to identifywho has the ultimate responsibility. Shapelessness does set upthese conflicting currents to strengthen and reduce the respon-siveness of bureaucracy, and their net effect must depend on theissue and the circumstances. On low-priority issues shapeless-ness is likely to diminish responsiveness, on high-priority issuesto increase it. On the average one gets the impression thatshapelessness works more to help bureaucrats evade responsi-bility for performance than to assist higher officials in forcing it.Our knowledge of Ottoman bureaucracy is scarcely completeenough to balance against this. But it would not be surprising ifthe more demanding, mobilizational tone of Soviet bureaucratic"style" increases the incentives to evade responsibility, whilethe vastly greater complexity of Soviet government tends moreto lose responsibility in an organizational jungle. Shapelessness

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characterizes both systems but may work better in the more tra-ditional one.

Since the spheres of responsibility of officials are not formallydefined, they are likely to be defined in practice by other means.One is symbolism—who stands where in photographs, for ex-ample. Another means is the replacement of the authority con-ferred by titles with the personal authority of specific indi-viduals, as in the Ottoman system.

The director of a truck depot tells what happened after he andPetukhov, the deputy director, made one Sichkin, a worker, thefront for their innovation-idea:

We found we now had a valuable, simply indispensable man in ourtruck depot. When, as often happened, we desperately needed cer-tain spare parts or some new equipment failed to arrive, it was notPetukhov or I who sat at the telephone hour after hour. It wasAleksei Fydorovich (Sichkin) who used my telephone to get intouch with the necessary people. He would say politely: "This isSichkin calling . . . " and he was very quickly connected withwhomever he wanted to talk to, and they listened to what he had tosay; things that Petukhov and I had racked our brains for weekstrying to get he obtained in a few hours."49

Shapelessness interferes with the coordination of governmentby the bureaucratic hierarchy of persons who command andobey as holders of official titles: it tends to replace titular au-thority by personal authority, titular relationships with personalrelationships. This is another way in which the Soviet mode ofadministration is more "pre-modern" or "feudal" than Amer-ican administration.

Soviet Clientelism

The coordination of government by bureaucracy (i.e., by a hier-archy of offices) can be partially replaced with the coordinationof government by voluntary personal relationships among indi-viduals. Such relationships are formed partly on the basis offriendships or blood relationships, partly on the basis of non-market exchange among the individuals that make them up. The

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Soviet system cannot function without such exchange becauseof its economy, which allocates goods not primarily by exchangefor money but by a cumbersome and inefficient system of cen-tralized allocation. New exchange relationships spring into exis-tence when, to take an example from the Soviet press, it is pos-sible to get your car repaired only by giving the garage managertickets to appearances by visiting celebrities. In Soviet novelswith bureaucratic settings, accepting a job from someone oftenimplies the obligation to give his relatives jobs in turn.50 Thischaracteristic kind of interaction is the social root of the well-known "family circles" within Soviet bureaucracy, whosemembers collude together for protection from higher authorityor to advance each member's interests. When their membersadvance in rank, such personal exchange relationships tend toturn into a patron-client relationships, in which a higher officialprotects his subordinates in return for political support.51 Pa-tron-client relationships such as the khvosts or "tails" ofZhdanov, Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Podgorny, Shelepin,Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Ligachev have played a crucial rolein postwar Soviet elite politics. "Kremlinology" is to a largeextent the tracing of these patron-client networks.

These networks are made equally visible in local press re-ports:

A. Mamedov, in selecting candidates for responsible posts, countedon a certain circle of people, shifting them from place to place notonly without regard to their business and political qualities, butoften in spite of them.

And, elsewhere: "What is bad is that a good worker, hired inthis fashion, feels himself Ivan Ivanovich's man, personally ob-ligated to him."52 That these words almost coincide with thewords used by Tahsin Pa§a in recalling life at the Ottoman courtis a deep testimony to the patterns that can recur across dif-ferent economic and ideological systems, like harmonies inmusic.

Our understanding of the Soviet Union does not now enableus to measure the relative weight of organizations of the normaltype and of clienteles in Soviet bureaucratic politics. But, to the

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extent that clienteles are important, Soviet bureaucratic politicsare rather different from bureaucratic politics in the UnitedStates.

IV. Conclusion

We have examined two vast and confused bureaucratic systemsin a very short space. Apart from this limitation, the state ofresearch on the Ottoman Empire does not permit us more than alimited understanding of many aspects of bureaucratic politics;the subject is one that has not been studied as such. But anumber of common features do emerge that cohere together in areasonably consistent pattern. What is most surprising is thatthis pattern resembles the pattern of contemporary Soviet bu-reaucratic politics in a number of ways. The overall differencebetween these two societies, and their governments, is so enor-mous that we may be tempted to be incredulous.

We should remember that we are not comparing the two soci-eties in general, but only the characteristic modes of activitywithin each bureaucracy. There still remain significant differ-ences between these two systems. For example, formal paper-work rules set from the center play a much greater role in Sovietbureaucratic politics than they did in Ottoman, and these un-doubtedly make the climate of bureaucracy where they arestrongest—particularly on the state side—substantially moreWeberian than the Ottoman climate. Both systems display whatwe call corruption, but the Ottoman was more corrupt. Ad hocorganizations were even more important in the Ottoman system.On the other hand, the hortatory style that infuses Soviet bu-reaucratic life (whatever it may mean) seemed to be missing inTurkey, and there was a more general difference of degree in thedelegation of authority. The Soviet system seems to lay morepublic emphasis on the need not to delegate authority. But thesimilarities between these two systems of bureaucratic politicsare more striking, especially because we would not expectthem.

Since this comparison is only a start, it does not yet rigor-ously confirm or falsify any of the theoretical perspectives on

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bureaucratic politics mentioned at the beginning. The evidencewe have surveyed fails to give much support to the notion thatbureaucratic politics emerges primarily from ideology, or fromthe culture and society; we saw two very different ideologiesand cultures with somewhat similar patterns of bureaucratic pol-itics. But the evidence also weakens organizational-process ex-planations of bureaucratic politics, such as Allison's Model II,because we saw that Soviet and American bureaucratic politicsare also very different, in spite of the fact that in both countriesbureaucracy is made up of very large organizations that aremodern in form. The evidence certainly should lead us to giveup for the time being the use of American bureaucratic politicstheory as a standard framework into which the names of Sovietorganizations may be plugged.

Soviet bureaucracy showed us a system that was substantiallyless "modern"—as measured along the direction of movementof Western bureaucracies during the last two hundred years—than it is often regarded. We have compared the Soviet Unionwith a country that was unquestionably traditional. The paradoxemerged that a system that prides itself on being highly progres-sive and efficient has many of the same features as one that laidno claim to modernity or mobilization for new projects. Thisparadox should give us a sense that there is something tradi-tional or "archaic" about Soviet bureaucracy, as compared withAmerican bureaucracy. To say this is not necessarily to con-demn Soviet bureaucracy. In fact, it has been precisely duringthe period when it was most often assumed, on the basis of thebureaucratic politics theory that began to become popular sometwo decades ago, that Soviet organizations behaved rather likeAmerican organizations, that educated American opinion hasbeen most bored by the Soviet Union. We have assumed thatthe Soviet Union has no way of doing things from which wecould learn. If we do not articulate this assumption it is onlybecause it is so remarkable.

On the contrary, it is impossible to separate administration ormanagement from the ends. In terms of certain priority goals,for which other goals wound up being sacrificed, both thesystem of Soviet bureaucracy and the Ottoman system in its last

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days registered significant successes. In fact, the important facthere is that a very complex, differentiated society with a pow-erful state can industrialize the country, smash Hitler, andachieve nuclear parity with many of the same bureaucratic prac-tices as a weak and perishing state. The comparison of Sovietand Ottoman bureaucracy serves to undermine the notion thatmodernization presents us with a certain type of bureaucracy asa decree of fate.

Our inquiry should thus force us to ask more urgently whichaspects of American bureaucratic politics are the inevitable ac-companiment of a complex industrial society, which are pecu-liarly Western, and which are related to the specifically Amer-ican environment. It should give us a freer sense of alternatives.We know from the case of Japan that a modern society andeconomy can develop without some of the social transforma-tions that seemed inevitable on the basis of Western experience.We can thus begin thinking more seriously about which featuresof contemporary American bureaucratic politics are necessaryand which are not. This essay was completed in the earlymonths of 1987, in the aftermath of two incidents of glaringfailure of the American system, both of which were more clearlyfailures of management and organization than any that have oc-curred in years: the Reykjavik Summit and the Iran/Contra af-fair. It is a good moment to begin thinking.

Notes

1. Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the CubanMissile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

2. The material on Ottoman bureaucracy is drawn from a compara-tive study of autocratic regimes generously supported by the NationalEndowment for the Humanities.

3. Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire:The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1980), pp. 83-84, 237-38; and Louis Rambert, Notes et impressionsde Turquie: L'Empire Ottoman sous Abdul-Hamid (Geneve: EditionsAtar, [1926?]), p. 36. Rambert, the director of the Ottoman TobaccoRégie around the turn of the century, saw Ottoman bureaucracy muchmore from the inside than most Westerners.

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4. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Part III, ch. 6, as translated byH. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in From Max Weber: Essays in Soci-ology, paperback edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958)p. 199.

5. Findley, op. cit., 104, 136; 34, 38, 93 ff., 153, 379 note 40, 216;Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Em-pire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977), Vol. II, p. 174.

6. Great Britain, Foreign Office, Turkey, F.O. 424, ConfidentialPrint 8354, p. 266 (November 1904).

7. Ibid., Conf. 8984 (1906), p. 80. See also "Indictment Against theValis of Sivas and Diarbekir . . .," Enclosure in Dufferin to Granville,August 21, 1881, F.O. 424/123, No. 75.

8. Tahsin Pa§a, Abdulhamid ve Yıldız hatıraları, (Istanbul: MuallimAhmed Halid Kitaphanesi, 1931), pp. 30-31. I am grateful to YeşimArat for translations from these Turkish sources. Cf. "Memorandumby Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson . . .," Enclosure in Goschen to Gran-ville, June 22, 1880, in Bilâl N. Şimşir, ed., British Documents on Ot-toman Armenians, (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1983), Vol.II, p. 54.

9. "Memorandum by Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson . . .," in Şimşir,op. cit., p. 57.

10. Stefanos Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye, (Istanbul:Gözlem Yayınları, 1977), Vol. II, p. 923.

11. Harold Gooch and G. T. Temperley, eds., British Documents onthe Origins of the War, 1898-1914 (London: His Majesty's StationeryOffice, 1926-.), Vol. VI, p. 35. See also Rifat Uçarol, Bir OsmanliPaşası ve Dönemi, (Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1976), p. 85.

12. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the OttomanEmpire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1977), p. 180; Findley, op. cit., pp. 252-253; William Och-senwald, The Hejaz Railroad, (Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1980), p. 29.

13. Findley, op. cit., pp. 230-231. For Ottoman diplomacy, seeTahsin Paşa, op. cit., pp. 31-32. For the military, see Mervin A. Grif-fiths, "The Reorganization of the Ottoman Army under Abdul HamidII, 1880-1897," Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California at LosAngeles, 1966, p. 139. For the Hejaz Railroad, see Ochsenwald, op.cit., p. 26.

14. E. Z. Karal, Osmanlı Tarihi (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1962), Vol. 8, p. 421.

15. Griffiths, op. cit., p. 139; Alois Veltzé, ed., Veltzés Internatio-naler Armee-Almanach (Vienna: Verlag für Vaterländische Literatur,1914), p. 494.

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16. Findley, op. cit., pp. 252-253, 265-266, 261; Great Britain,Public Record Office, F.O. 424, Turkey, Vol. 203, Confidential Print8202 of 1903, p. 173.

17. Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., p. 215.18. Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., pp. 268 n.38, 245; Griffiths, op. cit.,

pp. 44-45.19. Griffiths, op. cit., p. 76; Gooch and Temperley, op. cit., p. 36

(from the Annual Report for 1907).20. Findley, op. cit., 265 ff., 282; Ochsenwald, op. cit., 37, 41, 46;

Great Britain . . ., Turkey, F.O. 424, Confidential Print 8354, p. 173(September 1904), pp. 47, 173; Ochsenwald, op. cit., p. 52.

21. Foreign military observers were generally impressed by Turkishlogistics and operations in 1897. See Griffiths, op. cit., pp. 143-147.

22. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, in Gerth and Mills, op. cit.,p. 196.

23. Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., p. 215.24. Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., 225, 245; Robinson Mach, Der Wehr-

macht von Türkei und Bulgarien (Vienna, 1905), p. 8; Griffiths, op.cit., pp. 71-72, 138; Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., 223.

25. M. M. van Bruinessen, "Agha, Shaikh and State: On the Socialand Political Organization of Kurdistan," Doctoral dissertation, Uni-versity of Utrecht, 1978, p. 236.

26. Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors: Leadership, Stability andChange in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1980), pp. 10, 16-17.

27. Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., p. 79; cf. pp. 23-24, 73, 78, 81, 245;Findley, op. cit., p. 254; Griffiths, op. cit., p. 33.

28. Gooch and Temperley, op. cit., Vol. VI, p. 41.29. Findley, op. cit., pp. 252-253, 254.30. For this term see, e.g., Wilson Memorandum, in Şimşir, op. cit.,

p. 56.31. Shaw and Shaw, op. cit., p. 214 (cf. p. 75), p. 81.32. In Gerth and Mills, op. cit., p. 196.33. W. S. Richards to Goschen, December 27, 1880, F.O. 424/122,

pp. 23-26, no. 11/1.34. Ibid.35. "Indictment against the Valis of Sivas and Diarbekir . . .," En-

closure in Dufferin to Granville, August 23, 1881, F.O. 424/123, no.75/1.

36. I am grateful to the Office of the Secretary of Defense/Net As-sessment for supporting this inquiry.

37. "Formation of Soviet Foreign Policy," Orbis, Fall 1973, p. 826.(cf. also Theodore Shabad, "Brezhnev, Who Ought to Know, ExplainsPolitburo," The New York Times, June 15, 1973, p. 3; "Party Life: For

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Leninist Style of Work," Pravda, July 20, 1979, p. 2; Jerry Hough,The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress, 1969), pp. 193, 241.

38. Ye. Vostrukhov and N. Lisovenko, "Nobody's Pencil," Iz-vestia, August 14, 1975, p. 2.

39. For this phenomenon see Nathan Leites, Soviet Style in Man-agement, (New York: Crane, Russak, 1985), and Soviet Style in War,(New York: Crane, Russak, 1982).

40. Oleg Penkovskiy, The Penkovskiy Papers, paperback edition,pp. 238-239. Translated by Peter Deriabin (New York: Avon Books,1966)

41. Colonel Yu. Deryugin, "Discipline," Krasnaya zvezda, June 8,1982, p. 3.

42. "Political Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU," Ba-kinskii rabochii, February 26, 1986.

43. N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya: izbranniye otryvki, ed. V.Childze, (New York: Chalidze Publications, 1979), pp. 162-168; N. S.Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, ed. andtr. Strobe Talbot, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 41-42, 50.

44. Hough, ibid., pp. 86, 186, 193; cf. also pp. 185, 1987.45. Matthew P. Gallagher and Karl F. Spielmann, Jr., Soviet Deci-

sion-Making for Defense: A Critique of U.S. Perspectives on the ArmsRace (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 24-25. Seweryn Bialer has alsoemphasized this theme.

46. See V. Yermolayev et al., "The Railroad is the Main Thing,"Pravda, May 7, 1979, p. 2; Hough, op. cit., pp. 157-158, 203, 33, 192,146, 84.

47. Hough, op. cit., pp. 241, 83.48. Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, revised edition (Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 418.49. A. Borin, "The Hustler," Literaturnaya Gazeta, May 19, 1976,

p. 11.50. Ibid.; V. Kochetov, Sekretar' Obkoma, (Moscow: Molodaya

Gvardiya, 1963), pp. 55, 59, 62, 68, 87, 162..51. For further discussion of the function and nature of patron-

client relationships, see Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., "Clientelism andHigher Politics in Georgia, 1949-53," in Ronald Suny, ed., Transcau-casia: Nationalism and Social Change (Ann Arbor, 1983).

52. "When the Principles of Personnel Work Are Distorted," Ba-kinskii Rabochii, February 19, 1979, p. 2; A. Levikov, "The NewPost," Literaturnaya Gazeta, January 28, 1976, p. 11.

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