ABSTRACT
The tiny elite against which the rank-and-file communists’ anger had been
directed in 1920 expanded in the first years of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), and its privileges swelled rapidly from their meagre starting-point.
As the state consolidated, the elite accumulated greater political power. As
the economy recovered, considerable wealth was also there for the taking.
The retreat of the revolution played out in changes in class relations:
industry and factory management structures took shape around the imposition
of labour discipline; antagonisms evolved between workers on one side and industrial managers, technical specialists (spetsy) and party cells on the
other. Notwithstanding the tensions between these groups that would merge
into a new Soviet ruling class, the party elite, through the party apparatus,
supported all of them against workers. The account that follows considers
the acquiescence of the Bolshevik party as a whole in the elite’s advance, the
appearance of communist industrial managers and their role in disciplining
workers, and the relationships between these managers, the technical spe-
cialists, and the party’s workplace cells. In western historiography, the role of politics in the formation of the Soviet bureaucratic class has previously
been examined by Graeme Gill. He described the advance of an ‘oligarchy’
of senior party leaders, on whom those at lower levels of the apparatus were
dependent. Gill built on the work of T.H. Rigby, one of whose contributions
was to identify the role of personal networks and cliques in the party elite.
Gerald Easter’s research on regional leaders also developed that theme. A
sociological definition of the new bureaucratic class has been given by Ste-
phen Sternheimer. Don Rowney defined the bureaucratic class as a ‘technocracy’, whose advance was driven above all by the need for technical
skills – an approach that in my view puts too far into the background the
class relations between the workers and the state bureaucracy.1
