Beneath Myth and Illusion, Soviet Power Resides in Hands of Elite Few

In keeping with centuries of Russian tradition, power and politics in the Soviet Union are veiled in myth and illusion.

Official bodies vested by law with the highest power in the land in fact have no power at all, while the authority of the organization that runs the country--the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, known by its Russian initials as the KPSS--is only vaguely defined in law.

The Soviet Union describes itself as a dictatorship of the working people--the proletariat--but few educated Soviet citizens believe that their views matter greatly to the tiny political elite that runs the country. Yet the members of this elite feel a need to work within an internal consensus on large questions of foreign and domestic policy that traditionally pulls them in the direction of conservatism.

19 Million Members

The ruling Communist Party over which Mikhail S. Gorbachev presides as general secretary currently has 19 million members in a population of 284 million. Membership is by invitation only, through a process designed, in principle, to select young adults who display the highest levels of political and moral rectitude.

In fact, millions belong to the party--as in most Communist countries--chiefly because a party card is the surest ticket to career advancement and a relatively comfortable life, often within the vast party apparatus itself.

Every factory, farm, school and military unit has its party cell, which conveys instructions from higher authority, monitors the performance and oversees the personnel policy of each working “collective.”

Most of the party members who belong to these 440,000 “primary organizations” are largely irrelevant to Soviet politics, however. The ones who count are the estimated 3 million members of the apparat, the full-time party bureaucrats who form a vast, hierarchical structure of control reaching down from Moscow.

Levels of Control

The highest level of party authority is the Political Bureau, compressed in party jargon to Politburo. Of no established size, it currently consists of 13 men, among whom Gorbachev is the senior member or “first among equals.”

According to party rules, the Politburo makes and administers policy with the advice and consent of the Central Committee, another body of no established size or structure, whose 307 current members are drawn mostly from the middle ranks of the party elite. The military, government ministries and senior academic advisers to the party are also well represented, along with a sprinkling of welders and milkmaids to support the official claim that the proletariat rules.

Despite its nominal status as a higher authority, the Central Committee meets only two or three times a year, usually only to endorse decisions taken by the Politburo. In policy deadlocks, however, it is the final arbiter, with the power to remove a Soviet leader, as it did in 1964 when it replaced Nikita S. Khrushchev with Leonid I. Brezhnev, bringing an abrupt end to an unsettling era of reform.

Resembles Corporate Board

Compared sometimes by Western analysts to the board of directors of a vast corporation, the Politburo manages the country through the Secretariat of the Central Committee, whose large staff in Moscow is divided into 21 departments that supervise all of Soviet society from heavy industry to newspapers to the Bolshoi ballet. Authority over the 21 departments in turn is divided among 12 party secretaries. Six of these secretaries, including Gorbachev as the senior, or general secretary, make up the Politburo’s inner core.

Below the Secretariat, the party bureaucracy forms a hierarchical chain down through regional, district, city and borough levels. It is in effect a parallel, duplicate government that supervises a real but essentially powerless government whose main task is to run the economy in keeping with party policy and directives handed down by the Politburo in the name of the Central Committee.

Unlike Western leaders, Gorbachev and his Politburo colleagues are free of parliamentary or constitutional constraints. The party, in fact, exists in basic ways as an extra-legal body in the Soviet Union.

Party as ‘Leading’ Force

While the Soviet Constitution calls the party the “leading” force in society, it assigns no specific legal structure, authority or obligations to the party or its leadership. Instead, the Constitution gives primary legal authority to the Supreme Soviet, a nominal parliament that convenes only twice a year in two-day sessions, votes unanimously in favor of every measure the party leadership puts before it and exercises no political influence of its own.

The 1,500 elected members of the Supreme Soviet, however, include the several hundred men (and a handful of women) who make up the top echelons of the party. Its president--the ceremonial head of state--is Andrei A. Gromyko, the durable former foreign minister who has been a Politburo member since 1973.

Despite the absence of constitutional fetters, though, Gorbachev’s power as party leader is far from dictatorial.

In a political culture whose basic features were formed in the Muscovy courts of the 15th Century, Gorbachev is constrained, according to Western and Soviet specialists, by the need to work within an internal consensus of the party elite.

This means that he is answerable mainly to his colleagues on the Politburo, but also--especially when disputes and tensions arise that the Politburo cannot resolve--to the Central Committee.

Consensus Sought

On any given issue, according to Soviet sources, the leadership consensus tends to be a fluid, sometimes unstable collective agreement defined less by formal votes and legal documents than by the personalities and convictions of those who manage to sit on the Politburo, and, to a lesser extent, the Central Committee. Even for those on the inside, it may not always be clear when discussion of an issue has ended and a final decision has been reached.

The working style of the Politburo reflects an old, traditional Russian aversion to Western-style votes that divide winners and losers into majorities and minorities. In the Russian political mind, shaped over centuries of survival in a harsh and unforgiving land, such divisions are viewed as the seeds of social catastrophe.

As in the village communes of pre-revolutionary Russia, votes in Soviet politics are meant to display agreement on a common position, deciding nothing, veiling disagreements but demonstrating a reassuring unanimity for all to see.

Viktor G. Afanasyev, a Central Committee member and editor of the party newspaper Pravda who sits in on each Thursday’s daylong meetings of the Politburo, describes these sessions as governed not by votes but by “consensus,” with Gorbachev playing the leading role in discussions.

‘Designated Speaker’

“There is an agenda, and a number of questions are discussed,” Afanasyev explained in an interview. “Each question has its dokladchik (designated speaker). . . . It happens when questions are being discussed that differing opinions are voiced, different approaches and methods of solution are offered.

“If some common denominator can’t be found, it is stricken from the agenda, sent back for more work and brought up at another session.”

The conspiratorial secrecy that normally surrounds decision-making is another old Russian tradition. As Harvard historian Edward L. Keenan notes, “Whether one is dealing with the 16th Century or the 20th, the rule ‘ Iz izby soru ne vynesi ‘, or ‘Do not carry rubbish out of the hut’-- remains in operation.”