The origins of the Gorbachev revolution: Industrialization, social structural change and Soviet elite value transformation, 1917-1985.

Abstract

The Soviet democratic revolution began with the initiation of a reform process by the ruling elite of the Communist Party in the absence of any immediate danger to the continuation of its rule or to the existence of the state. The absence of pressing threat suggests that perestroika was the expression of values held by at least some sectors of the ruling elite. It is thus necessary to explain the formation of these values in the pre-1985 period. The central hypothesis of the dissertation is that long-term change in the educational profile of the political elite, and altered relations between elite and sub-elite groups, brought about by the demands of managing a huge and complex system, culminated in elite-level support for fundamental reform of the existing order. Utilizing the data from the Soviet Interview Project (SIP) survey of emigres and 1988 surveys of the Moscow public, the political values and attitudes of elite versus non-elite groups are compared. Analysis of the data reveals that higher education is negatively associated with authoritarian values, and positively associated with a critical orientation toward the Soviet system, dissatisfaction with life, and a propensity to engage in implicitly regime-challenging behaviors. Further analysis reveals the strong correlation between education and income and, in the SIP sample, between education and a measure of citizen "eliteness." Higher education is particularly concentrated among two elite groups in the SIP sample, political leaders and high-level professionals. These two groups are quite similar attitudinally, although authoritarianism appears significantly stronger among the group of political leaders. The attitudinal similarity can perhaps be accounted for by the increasing educational similarity of the party elite to the intelligentsia in the post-war period. It can be hypothesized that the decision of the Party to enhance the professional qualification of its cadres resulted in the absorption of the critical political orientations of the intelligentsia into the Party. These intelligentsia views eroded the political elite's belief in orthodox ideology and in the superiority of the system, and provided "solutions" to the Party elite for the perceived political and economic problems.