Patronage and Politics in the USSR

by John P. Willerton

Overview

How do Soviet politicans rise to power? How are conflicting political interests brought together as policies are developed? Historians and political scientists have long been absorbed by these questions, yet none has systematically examined the crucial role played by patron-client relations. In Patronage and Politics in the USSR Professor John Willerton offers major new insights into the patronage networks that have dominated elite mobility, regime formation and governance in the Soviet Union for the past twenty-five years. Using the career details of over two thousand national and regional officials, John Willerton traces the patron-client relations underlying recruitment, mobility and policy-making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521121330
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2009
Series:	Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies , #82
Pages:	324
Sales rank:	736,331
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

List of tables; Preface; Introduction; 1. The elite, patronage, and Soviet politics; 2. Networks and coaliation building in the Brezhnev period; 3. Patronage and the Brezhnev policy program; 4. Patronage, Gorbachev, and the period of reform; 5. Patronage and regime formation in Lithuania; 6. Azerbaijan and the Aliev network; 7. The logic of patronage in changing societies; Appendix; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...scholarship doing what social science does best—using cautious, imaginative methods to establish as present and give some quantitative shape to phenomena which seem intuitively or experimentally to be true, but for which there is no systematic evidence....Willerton has done us real service by providing this careful documentaton of the ways in which that self-interest manifested tself in the tight confines of the Soviet system." Martha Brill Olcott, Slavic Review

From the Publisher