ABSTRACT
‘Cadres’, to quote Stalin’s now neglected but still valid aphorism, ‘decide everything’. Given the crucial importance necessarily acquired by personnel programs in such a monoorganizational system, it is not surprising that they are an object of constant attention by the political leadership and that the Communist Party, the ‘leading and directing force in Soviet society’, plays a dominant part in administering them. To grasp the continued vitality of the forces making for clientelism in the USSR we have only to recall the progressive packing of top party and government posts by long-term associates of Khrushchev and Brezhnev as these two party leaders consolidated their power. Of course, bureaucratic patronage is not unique to the USSR, but it is peculiarly pervasive and salient there, along with other communist countries.
