Networks and Hierarchies in the Soviet Provinces, 1945-1970 [RES-000-23-0880]
Secretary of the Central Committee, F.D. Kulakov, awards the Order of Lenin to the province of Vologda, which is received, on behalf of the province, by its First Secretary, L.S. Kulichenko, and by the chair of the oblispolkom, Iu.I. Lamakin (8 January 1971)
Determining the role of regional power structures has been at the heart of efforts to establish a new post-communist order in Russia. This project will examine an earlier attempt to bind Russia’s regions into a coherent and vertically ordered political system. In the mid-1940s, the Soviet regime sought to incorporate the country’s regions into a stable hierarchical order based on an institutionalized pattern of appointments and transfers. The study will examine two aspects of that system. First, how did informal regional networks emerge and at what cost to the system of central control? Secondly, how did the official Soviet system of patronage, the nomenklatura, actually work at the regional level? Focusing on moments of conflict, the research will lead to the creation of a body of data on regional networks and cleavages, on the basis of which we shall construct a structural typology of Soviet regions and gain insights into the operating ethos of Soviet-era administrative elites. The findings of the study—the first comparative archive-based analysis of post-war Soviet regional politics—should be of interest not only to historians and specialists in Soviet studies, but to political scientists concerned with questions of regional integration and the nature of comparative bureaucratic cultures.
Website updates
This website is an integral part of the ESRC project on “Networks and Hierarchies in the Soviet Provinces, 1945-1970” and has been used as a key medium in disseminating its findings. From March 2006 to January 2009 new documents and titles were added approximately every six months, but after the conclusion of the Project in March 2009 new materials have been added at longer intervals.
In 2009 a selection of materials from the project on the Khrushchev period were published in Russian as Regional’naia politika N.S. Khrushcheva. Tsk KPSS i mestnye partiinye komitety 1953-1964 gg. Oleg Khlenviuk et al., eds, (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), 774 pp.
The most recent articles stemming from the project are Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Too Much Trust: Regional Party Leaders and Local Political Networks Under Brezhnev,” Slavic Review, 69, 3 (Fall 2010): 676-700 [see the Project Papers tab in the left hand column of this website] ; Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Structures of Trust after Stalin,’ Slavonic and East European Review, 91, 1 (January 2013): 119-146 [see the Project Papers tab in the left hand column of this website]; and Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Scandal in Riazan: Networks of Trust and the Social Dynamics of Deception, Kritika, 14, 2 (April 2013): 261-296. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk are currently writing up a full-scale monograph based on this project.