Group Influence and the Policy Process in the Soviet Union

It has become widely recognized that Soviet officials do not formulate public policy in a vacuum, and that, indeed, their deliberations take into account in some fashion the needs and demands of various elements of the society. Further, it has been observed that social groups of various types play a noticeable, if only rudimentary role in articulating interests to the top of the hierarchy. In fact one author has gone so far as to assert that communist policy-making results from a “parallelogram of conflicting forces and interests.” While such viewpoints are now far more widely accepted than in the early fifties, relatively little effort has been devoted to illustrating or illuminating how Soviet public policy in general or even a given Soviet policy can be importantly affected by group activity. We propose here to make a contribution in that direction. Using the Educational Reform Act of 1958 as an exemplary case, we intend to show how and through what process groups can affect policy outcomes, and by identifying circumstances under which this takes place to generate some hypotheses about when such influence is most likely to recur. In their excellent analysis of Soviet policy formation, Professors Brzezinski and Huntington identify what they call “policy groups,” which come closest of any nongovernmental groups to participating in policy formation. These groups, such as the military, industrial managers, agricultural experts and state bureaucrats.