the supervisory function in russian and soviet history

The Supervisory Function in Russian and Soviet HistoryAuthor(s): David ChristianSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 73-90Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496636 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.90 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:11:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496636?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


DISCUSSION

DAVID CHRISTIAN

The Supervisory Function in Russian and Soviet History

Even a brief survey of the institutional history of Russia and the Soviet Union will show the existence of a remarkable number of institutions and officials whose main function is best described as supervisory. They do not usually legislate or make policy decisions. For the most part they do not execute policy directly or pass legal judgments. Their task is to check that other government officials and institutions are acting in conformity to the law and the commands of their superiors. Yet for all their evident importance during two and a half centuries (and in spite of the fact that Russian statesmen were always aware of their importance), the general nature and significance of these institutions have not been fully clarified. Of the several important works on individual supervisory institutions, none that I know of attempts to explain the role played in Russian institutional history by supervisory institutions as a whole.' The reason for this oversight is clear. Supervisory institutions were never as significant in Western Europe as in Russia and thus were not incorporated into European political theory. Russian and non-Russian historians have approached Russian institutional history with the categories of European political theory which ignore the very existence of supervisory institutions. In consequence, it has been difficult to identify supervisory institutions as a general category or to explain their significance in Russian institutional history.

The first generation of formal supervisory institutions emerged in the early eighteenth century.2 In 1711 Peter I created the Senate, an institution that survived for over two hundred years, and the office of fiskaly.3 The task of the fiskaly was to oversee secretly (taino nadsmatrivat') all government business and, in cases of injustice or corruption, to summon the offender before the Senate. Fiskaly were, in short, official informers (donoschiki). By 1722 there

1. See, for example, A. D. Gradovskii, "Vysshaia administratsiia Rossii XVIII st. i General- Prokurory," in Sobranzie sochinzenzii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1899); Glenn G. Morgan, Soviet Adminz- istrative Legality: The Role of the Attornzey Genzeral's Office (Stanford, 1962); Gordon B. Smith, The Soviet Procuracy arid the Supervisionz of Administration (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1978); Jan S. Adams, Citizenz Inspectors inz the Soviet Unzionz: The People's Conztrol Committee (New York, 1977). See also Viacheslav Gribovskii, Vysshii sud i nzadzor v Rossii v pervoi polovinze tsarstvovanziia imp. Ekaterinzy II (St. Petersburg, 1901).

2. Peter I's contribution to the building of the Russian bureaucracy may well have been exaggerated (see Borivoj Plavsic, "Seventeenth Century Chanceries and their staffs," in Walter M. Pintner and Don K. Rowney, eds., Russianz Officialdom: The Bureaucratizationz of Russianz Society from the Sevenzteenzth to the Twenztieth Cenztury [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980], pp. 19-45). But it was not until his reign that supervisory institutions appear with a distinctive and formalized role.

3. Polnzoe sobranzie zakonzov rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter cited as PSZ), 1st ser., 46 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830-43), vol. 4, no. 2,331, March 5, 1711.



74 Slavic Review

were about five hundred fiskaly in all parts of the empire.4 In 1729 the institution was abolished, but its functions had been taken over by other, less secretive institutions. The Senate had originally been a wartime cabinet while the monarch was away from the capitals. With the creation of the colleges in 1718, however, it lost its directing role and became instead supervisor of the colleges.5 In 1722 a new supervisory post was created, that of the procurator-general, whose initial job was to supervise the Senate itself. As the Senate increasingly became a judicial body, its supervisory functions were concentrated in the procurator-general and his subordinates. The officials of the procuracy were charged with overseeing the activities of the Senate, the colleges, and other central (and some local) government institutions. In 1775 Catherine the Great created provincial procurators responsible both for general supervision and for prosecution of criminals in the courts.

In 1802 the colleges were replaced by ministries. At the same time the post of procurator-general was abolished, and its powers were transferred to the new Ministry of Justice. The network of procurators survived this reform, but after the judicial reform of 1864, which established a more open judicial system, the procurators lost their powers of general supervision and became purely judicial officials, more like the French procureurs. This was at least partially because the courts themselves began to provide a more adequate and independent means of supervising the activities of government officials. After the establishment of a constitution in 1906, the procuracy seemed even more irrelevant and so did the problem of supervision in general as it had been understood in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6

In 1917 the procuracy vanished along with the rest of the tsarist machinery of government. But the new government soon felt the need for adequate supervisory institutions of its own and created a second generation of supervisory institutions. Local commissars of justice, military commissars, and the People's Commissariat of State Supervision (Narodnyi Kommissariat Gosudarst- vennogo Kontrolia) were all established in 1918. The Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate (Raboche-Krest'ianskaia Inspektsia or Rabkrin) was created in 1919 and given formal status in 1920 as a new commissariat. In the same year the Central Control Commission was created to deal with supervision within the party, and in the following year, at Lenin's suggestion, Rabkrin and the Central Control Commission were merged. Most striking in this sudden resurgence of formal supervisory institutions is the reestablishment of the procuracy itself in 1923 as an organ of general supervision over the administration.7

With slight modifications, this cohort of supervisory institutions has survived to the present. In 1934 the institutions of state and party control, which had been merged in 1923, were split apart and ceased to be the mass organizations they had been in the 1920s. In their place two new bodies appeared, the Commission of Party Control and the Commission of Soviet Control, which became the People's Commissariat of State Control in 1940. In 1962 these

4. N. P. Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvenznzykh uchrezhdenzii dorevoliutsionznzoi Rossii, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1968), p. 101. The name fiskal was borrowed from Prussia.

5. Ocherki istorii SSSR; pervaia chetvert' XVIII v. (Moscow, 1954), p. 307. 6. Morgan, Soviet Adminzistrative Legality, pp. 17-18. 7. See ibid., pp. 28-43, for the debates behind the reestablishment of the procuracy.



Supervisory Function 75

institutions were reunited in the Party-State Control Committee, and in 1965 this commission was transformed into the People's Control Committee (Komitet Narodnogo Kontrolia), which exists to the present.

Throughout the Soviet period, particularly in the 1920s and again since the death of Stalin, the Soviet government has attempted to recruit ordinary citizens into the work of supervision. In recent years this has meant a massive expansion of the number of people involved professionally or voluntarily in supervisory work. Jan Adams estimates, for example, that by the mid-1970s some thirty-six and a half million volunteer inspectors were associated with the People's Control Committee, about 22 percent of the adult population.8

But the history of these formal and general supervisory institutions gives only a partial idea of the extent of specialized supervisory agencies that have existed both in tsarist and Soviet times. Many agencies exercised extensive supervisory functions even though they were not as specialized as the procuracy and the other institutions mentioned above. Most important of all were the various secret police institutions: the Petrine Preobrazhenskii Prikaz and its various successors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Vecheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation), established in December 1917, and its successors, including the present KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti). Many other institutions also have exercised important supervisory functions. The Senate never entirely lost its supervisory role, although its functions became increasingly those of a court of appeal, and inspections (revizii) by members of the Senate were a regular feature of tsarist government. In the Soviet system of government, the Communist Party itself has always exercised extensive supervisory functions. This is particularly clear in the case of primary party cells in industrial enterprises.9 Furthermore, numerous, more specialized supervisory agencies of state or administrative supervision have always existed, such as the present-day State Automobile Inspectorate, Fire Safety Inspectorate, and Sani- tation Inspectorate.'0 Finally, both the tsarist and Soviet governments made great use of informal methods of supervision - spies, informers, and denuncia- tions.

In short, supervisory institutions have played a far more significant role inl Russia since the eighteenth century than they have in the countries of Western Europe over the same period. The ubiquity of supervisory controls is conveyed by Merle Fainsod's description of the Soviet bureaucracy in the 1960s:

The Soviet bureaucracy is . . . characterized by a formidable proliferation of control agencies without parallel in the West. The typical Soviet adminis- trator functions in an environment in which every major decision is subject to the possibility of check, recheck, and counter-check. The long-range plan under which he operates must be approved by the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) and the short-range plan by the All-Union Council of the National Economy. His staff arrangements and financial transactions

8. Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 139. 9. See Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-

making (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), chaps. 4 and 5. 10. Smith, Soviet Procuracy, p. 3.



76 Slavic Review

are subject to the scrutiny of the Minister of Finance. The Party-State Control Committee maintains a watch on his efficiency, seeks to prevent fraud and deception, and checks to make certain that he is fulfilling all government orders and decrees. The Procurator General watches the legality of his actions. The KGB (State Security Committee) enforces security regulations and keeps him under observation to ensure his political reliability. The whole range of his activity, as well as that of the control organs, is always under careful surveillance by representatives of the Party. It is not too far-fetched to describe this complex network of controls as a system of power founded on the institutionalization of mutual suspicion."I

The boundary line between supervisory institutions and other institutions is, of course, no more hard and fast than any other theoretical line one might draw. In many instances supervisory institutions have evolved beyond these boundaries. By 1800 the tsarist procurator-general was virtually a prime minister,'2 but like that of the Senate, his role was confined to judicial tasks. Similarly, the Soviet procuracy has at times gone beyond the task of supervision, particularly during the 1930s when procurators were directly involved in enforcement of economic policy.'3 Institutions, such as the Communist Party and the police, whose original functions were not supervisory have acquired huge supervisory functions. Perhaps the boundary can best be drawn by reference to Peter's instruction to the first procurator-general, whom he called his "eye and steward" (Oko nashe i striapchii). Supervision primarily implies observation, but the steward's role implies corrective action as well. When this aspect of supervision became too dominant, supervisory institutions began to encroach on other spheres of government. The importance of the distinction is suggested by repeated government attempts to confine supervisory institutions to their proper sphere. 14

Where the line is drawn in practice in the Soviet Union is suggested by Harold Berman's brief account of the main functions of Soviet procurators:

The procurators keep watch over the entire system of administration, to see that executive and administrative bodies do not overstep their legal authority. They sit in as consultants on sessions of the local city councils and receive copies of orders and regulations issued by regional and republican and federal executive administrative organs. When the procurator con-

11. Merle Fainsod, Howv Russia is Ruled, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 388. 12. E. Amburger, Geschichte der Behordenorganisation Russlands von Peter demn Grossen bis

1917 (Leiden, 1966), p. 73. 13. Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, chap. 5. 14. Ibid., chap. 7. This was also the aim of a curious reform project submitted by the poet and

senator Gavriil Derzhavin in 1801. Derzhavin's paper is an early attempt to identify a distinct supervisory (oberegatelnyvi) function in Russian bureaucratic practice. His project is printed in Sbornik arkheologicheskogo instituta, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1878-98), 1:134-51, where it is falsely attributed to Speranskii because the copy used there is in Speranskii's hand. la. Grot has shown that the project is in fact Derzhavin's (see la. Grot, ed., G. R. Derzhavin: sochineniia, 9 vols. [St. Petersburg, 1864-83], 9:190). The project is also printed in N. M. Korkunov, "Proekt ustroistva Senata G. R. Derzhavina," Ministerstvo iustitsii, Zhurnal, 10 (1896): 1-14. For a summary of Derzhavin's main ideas, see David G. Christian, "The Reform of the Russian Senate: 1801-1803" (D. Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 1974), pp. 120-34.




siders that an act is in violation of the Constitution or of laws or decrees of higher bodies, he may "protest" to the executive-administrative organ immediately superior to the body which has issued it. If a ministry has ex- ceeded its authority, the procurator's protest is lodged with the Council of Ministers.'5

Making sense of these many supervisory institutions is more difficult since the problem of supervision has never been central to European political theory. Even in the Soviet Union the notion of supervision (nadzor or kontrol') only recently found a firm place in political and legal theory. The first monograph on "general supervision" appeared in 195416 and was mainly concerned with the functions of the procuracy. Its author pointed out that:

up to the present there is not a single point of view or a single opinion on the content of the activity of the Procuracy in the field of general supervision and the idea of "general supervision" itself, despite its universally recognized nature, is insufficiently defined in practice and in legal literature. 17

This commentary on general supervision has been followed by discussion of the nature of the functions exercised by the procuracy and other supervisory institutions.'8 The literature identifies supervision as a broad political category, as is suggested by the statement, "Supervision (nadzor) is one of the most important channels for the receipt of objective information on the life of society." 19 Soviet writers have also established a crucial distinction between "state" and "public" supervision (gosudarstvennyi and obshchestvennyi kontrol'), between supervision by the state apparatus over itself and supervision by society at large over the bureaucracy. However, the value of the distinction is lost once one assumes, as Soviet writers too often do, that in the Soviet Union there is no essential difference between the interests of the state and the people and that therefore the distinction has only formal significance.20

The distinction between state and public supervision, however, is vital to the discussion of Russian supervisory institutions. The two categories are not mutually exclusive. Given growth in public control over the government itself, then state supervision can become, to some degree, more representative of the interests of society as a whole. Indeed, this is precisely the path along which the modern Swedish ombudsman has evolved. Walter Gellhorn describes this evolution:

In the eighteenth century . . . a long-absent Swedish monarch, having lost touch with his tax-gatherers and other employees, and moved more by

15. Harold J. Berman, Justice in the USSR: An Inaterpretation of Soviet Law, rev. ed. (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 238-39.

16. V. G. Lebedinskii, Sovetskaia prokuratura i ee deiatel'nost' v oblasti obshchego nadzora (Moscow, 1954), cited in Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 125.

17. Ibid., pp. 133-34. 18. Ibid., p. 125. 19. V. I. Turovtsev, ed., Gosudarstvennyi i obshchestvennyi kontrol' v SSSR (Moscow, 1950),

p. 12. 20. V. I. Turovtsev, ed., Narodnyi kontrol' v SSSR (Moscow, 1967), pp. 23-24.



78 Slavic Review

desire to insure himself against embezzlement than by desire to insure his countrymen against oppression, named an overseer of officials. Only much later, after power had passed from the hands of absolutists, did the emphasis on administrative oversight change. Then the possibility of wrong against the ruled rather than the ruler became the chief concern.21

For the moment, however, it will be helpful to treat the two aspects of supervision separately.

There can be little doubt that the institutions described above have func- tioned mainly as organs of state, rather than public, supervision. Like his near contemporary, the first Swedish ombudsman, the original procurator-general was an agent of the tsar, a sort of personal spy. He was instructed to "sit in the Senate and make sure that the Senate fulfills its duties, and that in all matters brought before it, it acts honestly, dutifully, and correctly, without wasting time, and in accordance with the Regulations and Laws." If the Senate acted improp- erly, the procurator-general was to point this out to the senators "that very hour," and if they ignored him, he was to protest (protestovat'), to stop the case from proceeding, and "immediately to report to Us." He and his subordinates were "subject to no jurisdiction but Our own."22 Clearly their function was to serve the governmental high command, not the general public. This remained true of the procuracy, the Senate, the governors-general, and the police until 1906. At the crudest level the problem involved hiring, firing, and security of tenure, and the tsar's ultimate legal authority in such matters was unquestioned. Supervisors occasionally may have defended individual citizens against bureaucrats, but their functions of public supervision were of secondary importance.

The evolution of Soviet supervisory institutions has been more complex. Formally the procuracy has considerable independence from the main organs of government. Like the Swedish ombudsman, the Soviet procurator is subordinate to an elected parliamentary body, the Supreme Soviet, and therefore might be regarded as an instrument of public supervision and a means for the redress of public grievances.23 At present, however, the procuracy, like the Supreme Soviet itself, remains closely controlled by the party. Control is exercised partly through members of the procuracy who are also party members - in 1923 almost 80 percent of procurators belonged to the party, and in 1973 the figure was 82 percent.24 But there are other controls as well.

The Party supervises procuratorial work to insure that it is satisfactorily fulfilling its mandate.... The existence of active party organizations within the Procuracy at all levels allows the party to direct (napravlyat') and lead (rukovodit') the Procuracy. The Party also plays a considerable role in the selection of procuratorial personnel based on its system of nomenklatura. 25

21. Walter Gellhorn, Ombudsmen and Others (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 2. 22. PSZ, vol. 6, no. 3,979, April 17, 1722; my emphasis. 23. Walter Gellhorn comes close to this view (see Gellhorn, Ombudsmen and Others, p. 367). 24. Smith, Soviet Procuracy, p. 25. 25. Ibid., p. 15.




In an important sense, the Soviet procuracy is as subject to the control of the party as its tsarist predecessors were to the imperial will.26

The limitations on the independent authority of the procuracy are also evident from the fact that there are many areas of supervision closed to it. It has no powers of supervision over the highest governmental bodies - the party itself and the Councils of Ministers and Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the Union Republics and Autonomous Republics.27 But in practice the off-limits area is far larger than this. As Gordon Smith writes, "it is significant that no published cases exist in which procurators issued protests or representations on behalf of aggrieved citizens and in conflict with the State's interests." " This does not mean that Soviet supervisory institutions never act in defense of private interests - they clearly do.29 But their functions of public supervision are subordinate to their functions as state supervisors. As Glenn Morgan concludes, the aim of general supervision by the procuracy is

enforcing devotion to state purposes and adherence to governmental commands rather than protection of the rights of individuals. General supervision was to be more concerned with protecting state interests and property than with those of Soviet citizens.30

And what is true of the procuracy is clearly true of most other governmental supervisory institutions: they are all primarily organs of state supervision.

Western political theorists do not appear to have been interested in the problem of state supervision. To my knowledge, the problem has been consid- ered seriously only in works on bureaucracy, particularly in the work of Anthony Downs.31 Downs's theory of bureaucracy assigns an important and well-defined role to a general class of institutions that he calls "Separate Monitoring Agen- cies." These have three distinctive features:

Their hierarchies and personnel promotion systems are different from those of the bureaus they monitor; their main function is monitoring although they may also have other functions (especially downward trans- mission of orders); at their top levels they are integrated into some large bureaucratic or political structure.32

26. For this reason it is confusing to describe the procuracy, as does Glenn Morgan, as a "branch of the Executive" (Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 3).

27. Smith, Soviet Procuracy, p. 22. 28. Ibid., p. 133. 29. The books of Gordon Smith and Jan Adams document this role in some detail. Adams

concludes that the citizen controller often acts as a "consumer ombudsman" and as "a champion of the citizen's interests versus a bureaucracy that tends to ignore those interests" (Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 191).

30. Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 110. 31. Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, 1967). Both Gordon Smith and Jan Adams

rely on Downs's work. 32. Ibid., p. 148. For the purposes of this article, the crucial chapters of Downs's book are

10, 11, and 12.



80 Slavic Review

He gives as examples "the [U.S.] Army Inspectorate General, the [U.S.] General Accounting Office and the Communist Party of most Communist nations." 33

Downs's account of these institutions provides many suggestive parallels with the supervisory institutions I have described. In particular, it suggests at least a partial explanation for the extraordinary proliferation of supervisory institutions in Russia and for their limited effectiveness. In Downs's theory, monitoring agencies appear as one of several solutions to a basic problem - that of combating the distortions of information that are unavoidable in bureaucratic hierarchies and thereby increasing the control of the center over the periphery. Monitoring agencies combat these distortions primarily by providing a redundant channel of communication that, even if it contains its own distortions, provides some check on the information transmitted through the operating bureaucracy.

One would expect of course to find such institutions flourishing where the distortion of information and the problems of control were most extreme. Downs points to several factors that are liable to increase the distortion of information in bureaucracies: (1) the absence of good sources of information outside the bureaucracy; (2) the sheer size of the bureaucracy; (3) the "tallness" of the bureaucracy (that is, the number of distinct levels in relation to the total size of the bureaucracy); and (4) the newness and instability of the bureaucracy, the speed with which both the bureaucracy and its external environment are changing. In Downs's model, each of these characteristics should increase the difficulties faced by the high command in its search for the accurate information it needs to prevent the erosion of its authority over its own agents.

Each of these four factors of distortion has been present to an exceptional degree in Russian and Soviet history. The absence of external sources of information and the tallness of the bureaucracy are functions of sheer size, of the fact that political processes, which in Western Europe took place among a number of distinct groups and institutions, in Russia have been concentrated within a single bureaucracy. This need not imply an exaggeratedly monistic view of Russian and Soviet politics. The Soviet bureaucracy is perhaps as conflict- ridden as the American political system and just as sensitive to external pressures. In many cases the central authorities are little more than mediators. In an important sense, however, the Soviet political system remains a single bureaucracy while the American system (for example) does not.34 Even Jerry Hough, who recently launched a strong assault on excessively monistic interpretations of Soviet politics, is forced to concede that the pluralism which he identifies in Soviet politics is nevertheless confined to a single framework. Accordingly, he proposes that the system be described as one of "institutional pluralism." Thus, while

the methods of classical pluralism allow all citizens to choose between the programs of competing elites in elections and to form new pressure groups to advance their political interests. . . [,] in the model of institutional

33. Ibid. 34. I have posed the contrast in these terms because since World War II much comparative

political study has revolved around this particular polar contrast.




pluralism ... those who want to effect political change must, with a few exceptions, work within the official institutional framework.35

Later he adds the obvious corollary: "Soviet society quite literally is a 'bureaucracy writ large' with all large-scale organizations ultimately being subordinate to a single political institution." 36

The monolithic nature of the Russian and Soviet system is best explained by the extreme precariousness of the environment in which the Russian ruling class has found itself since the thirteenth century. The huge Eurasian plain afforded few natural defensive boundaries and placed the whole burden of defense on the army. In turn, the support of an unusually large defense establishment put an exceptionally heavy fiscal burden on a peasantry that lived in a poorer natural environment than the peasantry of France or England. The peasants responded with a hostility that from the late sixteenth century onward found expression in periodic peasant uprisings, the last of which was provoked by collectivization in the early 1930s. In such a peculiarly hostile social environment, the price the ruling class paid for its survival was the acceptance of an unusual degree of cohesion, hierarchy, and unity. Open conflict within the ruling class was less tolerable and more dangerous to the class as a whole than in Western Europe. This fact found its expression in the institutions of the autocracy (most strikingly in the Petrine Table of Ranks), a persistent suspicion of liberalism, and, more generally, in a unitary government structure.

Because of the environment in which Russian governments operated, the idea of a division of powers within the governmental structure never made sense. Thus Russian and Soviet political institutions in some sense can be seen as parts of a single huge bureaucracy headed by a single (if collective) sovereign. In Western Europe it is more accurate to speak of several smaller rival institutions, even if the ruling elites of these countries retain an underlying unity. Whether the Russian sovereign could direct society in the way totalitarian or autocratic models assumed is not immediately relevant. What is relevant is that open, formalized conflict within the governmental system (or even within the ruling class as a whole) was effectively suppressed, which exacerbated the various forms of distortion of information to which Downs refers.

The suppression of open conflict within the political system meant, first, a systematic attempt to control all public expressions of ideas and demands. This does not mean, as Jerry Hough has pointed out in the case of the Soviet Union, that governments have tried simply to repress the expression of ideas. Rather, they have tried to control the channels through which public demands have been expressed.37 A monolithic government needs feedback as much as any other government, but its officials have been nervous about uncontrolled feedback from society at large. The effect, of course, is paradoxical, for government censorship itself contaminates the feedback it receives. Far more public inputs into the Soviet system occur than totalitarian models recognize, but they are always manipulated by the bureaucracy. Thus the system has lacked the inde-

35. Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 24.

36. Ibid., p. 50. 37. Ibid., chap. 9.



82 Slavic Review

pendent sources of external information that are one of the major "antidistor- tion" devices in Downs's model:

Merely by reading several good newspapers each day, and letting all his subordinates know he does, a top official can produce a marked reduction in the distortion practiced by his own bureau. The absence of a free press in dictatorial countries undoubtedly makes this verification process much more difficult than in democratic societies.38

The blunt contrasting of democratic and dictatorial societies sounds a bit archaic, but the basic point remains valid - one cannot expect any source of information to be both subject to control and impartial. It is perhaps a tribute to the efficiency and cohesion of the tsarist and Soviet bureaucracies that, for much of their history, they have found so few channels of information entirely beyond their own control.

To the extent that information is forced to pass through the governmental bureaucracy, it is inevitably subject to the second and third forms of distortion mentioned earlier - those arising from the size and tallness of the bureaucracy. Downs's model clearly implies that the degree of distortion is directly propor- tional to the absolute size and tallness of the bureaucracy concerned, as each official and each level contribute to the total distortion.39 Thus the size of the bureaucracy which the Soviet high command attempts to control ensures that the problems of securing accurate information will be exceptionally severe. Downs draws precisely these conclusions:

Most bureaus in non-democratic societies receive weaker feedbacks . . [and] the bureaucracies in at least two communist nations - China and Russia - are vastly larger in absolute size [than the bureaucracies of Western countries]. Faced by enormous hierarchies with dozens of levels, top-ranking officials are compelled to establish giant monitoring bureaus.Y0

Downs's model is also applicable to the tsarist government prior to the early twentieth century. External sources of information were scarce as a result of rigid censorship, and the tsarist government was probably the largest and tallest single bureaucracy in Europe.41

38. Downs, Inside Bureaucracy, p. 119. 39. This conclusion follows from Gordon Tullock's model of hierarchical distortion described in

ibid., pp. 116-18. This is really a formalized version of the party game in which a secret message is given to one player, who whispers it to a second player, who passes it on to a third player and so on until eventually the end result is compared with the original message.

40. Ibid., p. 164. 41. This second claim remains valid even if one concedes that in a certain sense nineteenth-

century Russia was undergoverned in comparison with Britain and France (see S. F. Starr, Decen- tralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1820-1870 [Princeton, 1972], p.38). The claim itself has not gone unchallenged (see Daniel Orlovsky, "Recent Studies on the Russian Bureaucracy," Russian Review, 35, no. 4 (1976]: 459). The relevant figures are summarized in Walter M. Pintner, "The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755-1855," in Pintner and Rowney, eds., Russian Official- dom, p. 192. In the mid-eighteenth century there were about 10,500 state officials, one official for every 2,000 people; in the mid-nineteenth century there were about 114,000, one official for every 500 people. In any case, the important point is not the relative, but the absolute, size of the respective bureaucracies. Furthermore, the institutional divisions within the governmental structures of Western Europe (divisions that were formalized in the notion of a division of powers) mean that




There is a fourth factor in distortion of information. For several reasons Downs suggests that distortions are liable to be particularly severe when a bureaucracy is undergoing rapid change or for some other reason is rather unstable. Rapid changes in the hierarchy itself and its environment make it harder for the high command to keep abreast of events. To do so they need access to an unusually large amount of information which in itself reduces the efficiency with which information is transmitted.42 Furthermore, rapid changes in the bureaucracy itself or merely rapid growth make it increasingly difficult for superiors to estimate the types of distortion most likely to exist in the reports of subordinates and to use counterbiases: "In communications, unfamiliarity with one's communicants is a form of cost."43 These aspects of Downs's model suggest why the use of monitoring agencies is liable to be particularly important in times of great political upheaval. And as we have seen, Russia's two genera- tions of supervisory institutions were for the most part created during two periods of total renovation of an existing political system - during the reign of Peter the Great, which saw the creation of the imperial Russian bureaucracy, and during the first few years after the October Revolution, the formative period of the Soviet bureaucracy.

In this way the existence of supervisory institutions highlights an important, but too often ignored, contrast between what have traditionally been called autocratic governments and limited governments. We are familiar with the assumption that autocratic governments are extremely, indeed excessively, powerful in relation to the societies over which they rule. But there are hidden weaknesses peculiar to autocratic systems as well, weaknesses that often make the power attributed to the autocratic sovereign more illusory than real. Above all, as Downs's model suggests, the larger the bureaucracy, the blinder it is to the behavior of its own agents and the looser its control over their behavior. The proliferation of supervisory institutions in Russia should alert us to the weaknesses of successive Russian sovereigns and make us wary of exaggerating their strength.

Were supervisory institutions effective as monitoring agencies? Did they solve the problems they were designed to solve? Did they extend the real directive authority of successive high commands? Were they an important instrument of central control over the bureaucracy as a whole, or did they merely reflect the inevitable limitations of the central authority in a large. bureaucracy?

Downs's model suggests that monitoring agencies are always bound to have a limited effect on the system. Some of the reasons for this are fundamental to Downs's theory of bureaucracy. For example, he posits a general law which states that "the larger any organization becomes, the weaker is the control over its actions exercised by those at the top." This law, he adds, is an "inescapable" consequence of the fact that "each person's mental capacity is limited."44 A

from the point of view of Downs's model, these governments are best regarded as consisting of several smaller bureaucracies rather than one huge bureaucracy. It is in this sense that the Russian government was clearly the largest single bureaucracy in Europe.

42. Downs, Inside Bureaucracy, pp. 128-31. 43. Ibid., p. 122. 44. Ibid., p. 143.



84 Slavic Review

second Downs law reads: "the greater the effort made by a sovereign or top-level official to control the behavior of subordinate officials, the greater the efforts made by these subordinates to evade or counteract such control."45 If these laws hold, then clearly the impact of monitoring agencies can only be limited and may even be counterproductive.

In addition, Downs suggests that there ire more specific limits to the ability of monitoring agencies to extend the real control of the center. Two are of particular importance to Russian institutional historly. First, while it is vital to keep monitoring agencies separate from those they monitor, they can never be entirely insulated. The danger always exists that they will enter into collusion with those they monitor. Second, as soon as monitoring agencies attain a size adequate to their large task, they too may require monitoring. These limits on control do not mean that supervisory institutions are valueless, but that there are inevitable limits to their effectiveness.

In order to act as alternate channels of communications, monitoring agencies must be kept distinct from the institutions they monitor. However, the monitored institutions have a clear interest in trying to blur these distinctions through bribery or through the subtler pressures of friendship and favors. In this way they may manage to create local horizontal ties with the monitors that are stronger than the vertical ties binding monitors to the bureaucratic high command. As Downs puts it, "monitoring officials are . . . the center of a constant struggle between top-level officials and their operating subordinates." 6

The history of the tsarist procuracy offers numerous examples of the difficulties of preventing collusion. The procurator's chief loyalty was supposed to be to his direct superior, but it was extremely hard for procurators to resist developing countervailing horizontal links with those agencies and individuals they were supposed to supervise. Richard Wortman describes the penalties paid by overzealous supervisory officials in the central government apparatus in the early nineteenth century:

Chief-procurators were expected to avoid conflict with senators and court their favor. The poet I. I. Dmitriev, a chief-procurator during the reign of Paul, entered into almost weekly quarrels with the senators and watched with dismay as he was passed over while his more docile colleagues received decorations and bonuses. . . . When he became minister of justice in 1811, Dmitriev found that his chief-procurators were mostly young people from the court or military service. They were "well-bred but inexperienced and strove to excel mostly in securing advantageous connections. " 47

P. A. Zaionchkovskii cites a conversation between a young procurator ap- pointed to a supervisory post within the Ministry of the Interior in the mid-1850s and the minister he was to supervise, as reported by the procurator:

I . .. presented myself to the Minister who was, at that time, Sergei Stepanovich Lanskoi. In conversing with me, Lanskoi asked: "Well, so how

45. Ibid., p. 147. 46. Ibid., p. 157. 47. Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976),

p. 61.




is your Viktor Nikitich [the Minister of Justice, Count Panin]? He keeps on issuing judgments and decisions and we keep on riding as we always have," With this, Lanskoi made an inverted V-shape with two fingers of his right hand, put it on one finger of his left hand, and then, lifting and lowering it several times made a inotioi like the riding of a horse. "Like this, just like this,"9 said the good-natured minister, smiling, "we ride on your Justice."948

Lanskoi clearly took it for granted that the new procurator wouild not pursue his supervisory tasks overzealously.

The provincial procurator was even more likely to come to terms with those he was supposed to supervise. His direct superior, the minister of justice, was far away, and the person with the greatest influence over his immediate position was the local governor, one of the officials the procurator was supposed to supervise. The main demand of the governor was inevitably that the procurator's reports reflect well on the administration of the province. Zaionchkovskii cites a characteristic document, a report from the third section (a secondary supervisory body in this instance) on the behavior of the Vladimir provincial procurator, P. 1. Shkliarevich, in the mid-1840s. He was, the report maintained, a drunkard,

although in the mornings he is often sober. 1le spends alynost all of his time sitting in his p.-rocuratorial office, very rarely visits other government offices and hardly ever protests against unjust decisions, as a result of which all the local officials, beginning with the governor, are extremely pleased with him, but those with complaints find him no help at all.49

Zaionchkovskii himself concludes, after a detailed survey of the bureaucratic personnel of the autocracy in the 1840s and 1850s, that the procurators generally were only slightly less corrupt and lawless than the colleagues they were supposed to supervise.

To what extent did the conduct of the procurators distinguish them from the other representatives of the provincial administration? It seems to us that they, too, were not lacking in the vices common among their colleagues. True, they did not steal, as there was nothing much for them to steal, but they took many bribes. Out of nine reports from the third section on provincial procurators, belonging to the second half of the 1840s and to the 1850s, only one is without qualifications, and three are described quite definitely as bribe takers.50

Corruption, connections, and patronage were the great enemies of central authority because they created local horizontal ties which were often stronger than the vertical, hierarchical ties binding the servants of the autocracy to their master. As George Yaney wrote of an earlier period in Russian history: "Bribery

48. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel'stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow, 1978), p. 168.

49. Ibid., p. 169. 50. Ibid., p. 171.



86 Slavic Review

formed the little islands of resistance up and down the hierarchy that sealed the tsars off from the lower levels of their 'organization,' which is why the tsars denounced bribery from the earliest times." 51 It was precisely this insulation of the higher authorities from the subordinates that monitoring agencies were supposed to prevent.

Two examples from the Soviet period show how even now supervisory institutions can often get hopelessly entangled in networks of this kind. Roy Medvedev, who was brought up in Georgia, describes the situation of legal officials in that republic:

The Soviet Constitution states that judges are independent and subordinate only to the law; it also lays down that procurators shall be independent of all local authorities and answerable only to the procurator general. In practice, however, these provisions of the Constitution tend to be ignored and local organs exert considerable influence on both judges and procurators at the district level, even more so at the regional level - and at the republican level it is evidently overwhelming. This means that in Georgia, for example, before the republican prosecutor can institute proceedings against a highly-placed bribe-taker, he must first obtain permission from the First Secretary of the republican Central Committe. Nor is it by any means certain that this permission will be forthcoming, however much evidence there may be. It frequently happens (and not only in Georgia) that the procurator is instructed to drop the case at once.52

Joseph Berliner points out that inspectors of Soviet factories were often

compelled to abdicate their control functions in some measure. Their attitude is revealed in the theme of "looking the other way." . . . Moreover they often . . . overlook the transgressions of an enterprising and success- ful director and share in the rewards and prestige that come with plan fulfillment. It is the fact that the control officials perceive their fates as closely interwoven with the success of the enterprise that explains the endurance of the irregular practices of management.53

These examples provide a clear illustration of the extreme difficulties the governmental high command has faced in its attempts to maintain the separateness of supervisory institutions. To supervise adequately they had to keep their distance from those they supervised, yet they also had to be close enough to observe well. As a result they were subject to a powerful gravitational attraction toward those same bodies. For these reasons the efficiency of supervisory institutions seems always to have been limited.

Successive governments tried continually to overcome these problems. One method was simply to create formal barriers between supervisory agencies and those they supervised. This separation was generally written into the founding statutes of more formalized supervisory bodies. A law of 1722 decreed that

51. George Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government (Urbana, Ill., 1973), p. 26. 52. Roy Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (New York, 1976), pp. 161-62. 53. Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1957),

pp. 324-25, cited in Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 63.




heads of colleges were not to sit in the Senate "so that the members of the Senate . . . should vieWv the colleges from an independent position. " 54 Over two centuries later, Article 117 of the 1936 constitution states: "The organs of the procuracy fulfill their function independently of any other local organs and are subordinate only to the General Procurator of the USSR."55 In 1922 Lenin argued strongly that procurators could not be made subordinate to both the central and the local authorities. Such a proposal was, he claimed,

an expression of the interests and prejudices of local bureaucrats and local influences, that is, the most pernicious wall that stands between the working people and the local and central Soviet authorities, as well as the central authority of the Russian Communist Party.56

Other, less formal ways of keeping the procurators separate from those they supervised also existed. Their recruitment and career structure was often mark- edly different from that of the people they supervised. In Peter's time, Feofan Prokopovich took it for granted that if people were "of different ranks and callings," it would be impossible for any of them to conspire:

How . . . can bribery prevail . . . where one is apprehensive of another in that his venality may be revealed . . . ? This is especially so when a college consists of such persons that it is quite impossible for any of them to conspire secretly, that is, if they are persons of different ranks and callings.57

The characteristic career patterns of the provincial procuracy in the nineteenth century give an indication of the ways in which the government systematically used as procurators people who were members of a different social circle than those they were to supervise. Zaionchkovskii's analysis of the provincial bureaucracy in the 1840s shows that to a significant degree the procurators were younger, poorer, better educated, and lower in social rank than their colleagues. And, like the voevody of Muscovite Russia, they were systematically moved more rapidly from post to post.58 In the modern Soviet procuracy the career

54. PSZ, vol. 6, no. 3,877. 55. The wording of this clause is virtually unchanged in the 1977 constitution. 56. V. I. Lenin, "'Dual' Subordination and observation of the law," Collected Works, 45 vols.

(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960-70), 33:363-67, May 20, 1922. For other examples of Lenin's growing concern with supervision in the last two years of his life, see "How we should reorganize the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate," ibid., 33: 481-86, January 25, 1923 and "Better Fewer but Better," ibid., 33:487-502, March 2, 1923. The latter is the last article Lenin wrote.

57. A. V. Muller, trans. and ed., The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great (Seattle and London, 1972), p. 10. On collegiality as a specialized form of state supervision, see David G. Christian, "The Senatorial Party and the Theory of Collegial Government," Russian Review, 38, no. 3 (1979): 298-322.

58. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel'stvennyi apparat, pp. 170-71. In Zaionchkovskii's sample (which included fifty-two procurators), there is a statistically significant difference between the age of procurators and that of other officials, and there is no significant difference among the other groups excluding the procurators. I have also checked the claim with respect to social origins against Zaionchkovskii's data, and here too the procurators rank significantly lower than all the other central and provincial institutions covered by Zaionchkovskii.



88 Slavic Review

patterns of procurators maintain their separateness even more decisively than did those of nineteenth-century procurators. According to a 1974 survey, 30 percent of procurators in the USSR had held their position for three to ten years and 50 percent for over ten years.59

The limitations of these methods often made it necessary to resort to another familiar dodge - the creation of further supervisory institutions, custodes custodientes custodes.60 Glenn Morgan cites a nineteenth-century legal writer, N. V. Murav'ev, who comments:

The government itself partly regarded [the procuracy] as a bulwark against the abuses and arbitrariness of its own officials. The aim was high, but difficult to achieve, because the procurators were also the same government officials who in turn also required supervision over themselves.61

Supervisory institutions appear to have a natural tendency to multiply, and it is the readiness of successive Russian governments to tolerate this remarkable fertility that best explains the vast number of overlapping supervisory agencies and the way in which they have clogged up the workings of the Russian and Soviet bureaucracies. Indeed, volokita, Russia's proverbial red tape, can itself be regarded as an expression of this overlapping supervision.

I have stressed the limitations on the effectiveness of supervisory institutions to show the stubbornness of the problems they were intended to solve. This does not mean that supervisory institutions did not serve the government well. Indeed, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that they would have had so lengthy and active a career in Russia if they had not performed an indispensable function. Clearly they provided redundant channels of information for the governmental high command, which were valuable even if the information supplied was not always as pure as it pretended to be. The point to be stressed is that supervisory institutions could never eliminate entirely the peculiar problems of information gathering created by the immense size and ambitiousness of the Russian and Soviet governmental bureaucracies.

Supervisory institutions in Russia and the Soviet Union have acted primarily as instruments of state supervision, arms of the state, and defenders of the state's interests. The possibility exists, however, that some of these institutions may have come close to playing an important role of public supervision as well. In the tsarist period none of the major supervisory institutions acquired any significant public supervisory functions. The procuracy's powers merely waned after the reforms of the 1860s. But after these reforms embryonic organs of public supervision over the bureaucracy developed in the reformed courts and the elected local zemstvos. And after 1905, of course, the constitutional environment was created in which such institutions were far more likely to appear. In the Soviet period supervisory institutions have remained an instrument of the

59. Smith, Soviet Procuracy, p. 25. These techniques, incidentally, are all mentioned in Downs, Inside Bureaucracy.

60. Z. Szirmai uses this phrase in the forward to Z. Szirmai, ed., Law in Eastern Europe, vol. 13: Legal Controls in the Soviet Union (Leiden, 1966), p. 7.

61. Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality, p. 16.




party, but some recent studies suggest that they may have been more active as public supervisors than most accounts have conceded.

Certainly from the very beginning of the Soviet political system, there was a clearly expressed intention to create institutions through which citizens could control the work of the bureaucracy governing them. This, for example, was one of the central ideas of Lenin's State and Revolution, and as Moshe Lewin's recent work on Lenin shows, Lenin never abandoned this idea.62 It lay behind the creation of Rabkrin in 1919, and after his first stroke in May 1922, Lenin became increasingly obsessed with the isolation of the government from the working class that it claimed to represent. His last articles refer repeatedly to this problem, and in one of them he proposed merging Rabkrin with the organ of party supervision and expanding the number of voluntary inspectors taking part in the work of these supervisory bodies.63

During the late twenties popular participation in the work of supervision increased, giving nonbureaucrats a chance to survey the workings of the bureaucracy.', The 1930s saw the reversal of this process as Stalin began to support a narrower notion of the functions of supervisory institutions than Lenin. But since Stalin's death popular participation in the work of supervision has increased steadily, as it has in fact in all areas of Soviet life. The Party-State Control Committee of 1962 was modeled closely on the combined Rabkrin- Central Control Commission of 1923, "with its union of party and state control apparatuses, its extensive field of operations, its multiplicity of missions, and its enlistment of the layman and amateur in the business of monitoring the nation's economy and administration."65 The formal reason given for replacing the Party-State Control Committee with the new People's Control Committee was that the name of the old committee "does not fully reflect the fact that in our country control is by the people."66 But public inspectors were to be found elsewhere as well:

This army [of inspectors] includes not only people's controllers but also legions of volunteer inspectors mobilized by soviets, trade unions, komso- mols, and newspapers. As a result of this mobilization, public inspectors have become ubiquitous in Soviet society; their efforts have greatly ex- panded popular participation in social monitoring activities; and their pervasiveness has impressively strengthened the participatory character of Soviet society.67

With such institutions, the distinction between state and public supervision becomes rather blurred. The ultimate control of the party over this process remains firm. Lay inspectors in the People's Control Committee, for example, have far less power than professionals. The task of a lay inspector is to

62. Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (New York, 1968). 63. Lenin's target in this case was Stalin. Ibid., p. 120. 64. Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 35. 65. Ibid., p. 69. 66. Leonid Brezhnev to the plenum of the Central Committee, December 6, 1965, cited in

ibid., p. 94; emphasis in the original. 67. Ibid., pp. 118-19.



90 Slavic Review

ferret out shortcomings, waste, mismanagement and inefficiency wherever he found them in the Soviet economic social and administrative scene, and to suggest remedies for them. But he was not given much authority to take punitive action. Punishment remained the prerogative of the staff, which meant, ultimately, directly or indirectly, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.6

The strong role of the Communist Party was made clear in the mid-1970s when about half of the volunteer inspectors were party members.69

This is by no means the whole story. Jerry Hough has argued recently that Western theorists have greatly underestimated the significance of mass participation in the Soviet system of government. In fact, he argues, mass participation has been not simply a means to totalitarian control, but also, inescapably, a device through which the views of individual citizens affect the government itself.70 This process is one that may benefit both state and society - providing the state with valuable critical comment on its performance, but also greatly increasing the extent to which popular opinion may influence both the problems the government tackles and the way in which they are tackled. Jan Adams argues that the work of the People's Control Committee "frequently influences policy decisions at all levels of the Soviet political system." 71

At present it is impossible to say firmly whether changes in the nature of supervisory institutions reflect deeper changes in the system as a whole (although Adams mentions a "silent social explosion affecting all public organizations in the Soviet Union" ).72 But we can no longer exclude the possibility that Soviet supervisory institutions may eventually follow the path of the Swedish ombudsman from agent of the autocratic sovereign to representative of the citizen against the bureaucracy. Such a transition would mark a profound transformation of the whole Soviet political system - a significant shift toward the popular democracy founders of the Soviet state originally intended to build.

68. Ibid., p. 110. 69. Ibid., p. 150. 70. Hough, Soviet Union, pp. 119-24. 71. Adams, Citizen Inspectors, p. 7. 72. Ibid., p. 67.



the supervisory function in russian and soviet history

Documents