Problems in Soviet Politics (original) (raw)

Problems in Soviet Politics 'Politics', writes Spiro, 'is the process by which a community deals with its problems'.! This book is a study of the problems which the leaders of the Soviet Union attempted to induce their society to resolve during three different years after the Second World War: 1950, 1960, and 1970. It is therefore a study of political content. It defines the shortcomings observed by the leadership, the people and the organisations they tried to mobilise, and shows the measures they decided to take to remedy these. It also considers the leaders' values and views of man and the world, and it deals with political change during a period extending from Stalin to Brezhnev and from relative poverty to relative prosperity. The subject is a vast one. Many scholars choose to employ all available sources to settle just one question. Here the approach is the opposite: a single source has been used to elucidate several questions. Both research strategies are based on the assumption that science is a collective and cumulative undertaking. The old German titles were often introduced by a Beitrag zur Kenntnis ... The present study should be regarded as just that: a contribution to our knowledge of Soviet politics, socialist politics, and perhaps to some degree politics in general. The source that is exhaustively exploited in the study consists of the editorials in the daily newspaper Pravda, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These texts are studied carefully by everyone desiring to keep abreast of the reactions and ambitions of the Soviet Party leadership, including East European governments, diplomats and journalists in Moscow, and millions of career-conscious Soviet citizens. Pravda has often been used in research on Soviet politics, but has never been subjected to a methodical and comparative study, apart from a few quantitative content analyses of sharply restricted problems. What is undertaken here is a systematic and multidimensional ransacking of the informational content of the Pravda editorials, with the aim of establishing the 'agenda' determined by the apex of the Soviet social pyramid for political and administrative work at all lower levels. The source materials have been prepared with the help of information retrieval, a technique that has been widely employed in bibliographical work, but seldom for analytical research purposes. The 1