This unique study provides an original, nitty-gritty view of the true nature and operation of Russia's state bureaucracy from the imperial period to the present, including the Putin presidency. The only book-length exploration of the problems and deficiencies of Russian bureaucracy since tsarist times, this detailed work sheds important new light on Russian public administration, an often-overlooked but key barrier to Russian normalization and democratization.

Russian Bureaucracy and the State provides a rich and innovative assessment of Russian bureaucracy from 1881 to the present. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the work assesses the organization, personnel, and practices of officialdom across three different Russian regimes – tsarist, Soviet and postcommunist.

Russian Bureaucracy and the State provides a rich and innovative assessment of Russian bureaucracy from 1881 to the present. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the work assesses the organization, personnel, and practices of officialdom across three different Russian regimes – tsarist, Soviet and postcommunist.

The purpose of these eleven scholars is to give the Russian official a distinct identity, to describe him in terms of the society from which he emerged, and to summarize the experience that rendered him ever more indispensable as the government became more complex. Quantitative data is skillfully integrated into the analysis of more than ten thousand official careers spanning some thirty decades, adding new theoretical and methodological dimensions to Russian historical studies. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Placing the development of the Soviet and Russian central governments in theoretical context, this work breaks new ground in the study of contemporary Russian politics. Iulia Shevchenko's creative treatment of the principal-agent model offers fresh insight into the institutional origins of change in government organization in the communist and post-communist period, from President Gorbachev to President Putin. She demonstrates that government organization varies with the extent to which the principal actors - the president and parliament - are prepared to empower the cabinet to actively develop rather than just implement policy. Delegation of broad decision-making powers, which occurs when the policy environment is highly competitive, is a crucial factor explaining the uneven dynamics of government development during this period. The originality of this work, rich with supporting evidence and empirical data, will ensure that it becomes the standard source for students and scholars concerned with this aspect of post-Soviet politics.

The first decade of Alexander II's reign is known in Russian history as the Era of the Great Reforms, a time recognized as the major period of social, economic, and institutional transformation between the reign of Peter the Great and the Revolution of 1905. Coming directly after the notoriously repressive last decade of the Nicholas era, the appearance of such dramatic reform has led scholars to seek its causes in dramatic events. Surely some great, even cataclysmic, force must have driven Alexander II and his advisers to initiate what appears to be such an astonishing change in policy. In their search for the origins of these Great Reforms, historians generally have focused upon two phenomena. The first of these was Russia's defeat in the Crimean War by a relatively small, ineptly commanded Allied expeditionary force. The second was the serf revolts, which increased dramatically in the 1850s. From these events, most historians have concluded that the economic failings of serfdom, the problem of preserving domestic peace, and the need to restore Russia's tarnished military prestige were the major forces that convinced Alexander II's government to embark upon a new reformist path. As Lincoln's examination of the long-unstudied Russian archival evidence shows, there are good reasons to question whether such crises of policy and failings of Russia's servile economy impelled Alexander II and his advisers along a previously uncharted reformist path after the Crimean War. Further, in light of the Russian bureaucracy's slowness in drafting much less complex administrative reforms during the previous century, Lincoln argues that the Great Reform legislation simply was too complex and required too much sophisticated knowledge about the Empire's economic, administratvive, and judicial affairs to have been formulated in the brief half-decade after the war's end.

During the twentieth century the problem of post-revolutionary bureaucracy emerged as the most pressing theoretical and political concern confronting Marxism. No one contributed more to the discussion of this question than Leon Trotsky. In Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy, Thomas M. Twiss traces the development of Trotsky’s thinking on this issue from the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution through the Moscow Trials of the 1930s. Throughout, he examines how Trotsky’s perception of events influenced his theoretical understanding of the problem, and how Trotsky’s theory reciprocally shaped his analysis of political developments. Additionally, Twiss notes both strengths and weaknesses of Trotsky’s theoretical perspective at each stage in its development.