wages and salaries (about 73 percent in 1960).21 If the government is intent on maintaining this high staffing ratio, it is going to have to raise teachers' salaries substantially above the rates in force during the 1950's. Indeed, at the end of 1964 teachers received a raise generally increasing their pay by about one quarter, and this in itself will do much to keep the cost-curve of schooling on an upward path. One may speculate that the Soviet authorities are just at the beginning of their difficulties in trying to keep the schools staffed with an acceptable number of well-qualified teachers, while also managing to keep costs within bounds.

In the United States there may be some justification for the hope that new techniques of education, using relatively less labor and relatively more capital, will keep costs down. The writer sees no hope that this will be so in the Soviet Union, where it can be assumed that the relative scarcities of labor and capital are just the reverse from the situation in the United States. Substituting capital for labor in the Soviet Union is still likely to mean replacing scarce resources with still scarcer resources. This can never be a cost-reducing process in real terms, whatever the accounting benefits may be for the latter are the wholly misleading consequences of the failure of prices and incomes to reflect relative resource costs at the margin.

The main "cost-raisers" in the Soviet system are the small, so-called dwarf schools for Grades I-IV in the rural areas, each with about 30-40 pupils. In 1962-63, there were still no less than 105,000 of these tiny schools, enrolling 4.3 million children out of a total rural enrollment of 10.4 millions in Grades I-IV. These figures mean that every other institution for education in the Soviet Union is a tiny rural elementary school, which is very expensive to maintain in terms of costs per pupil. It is upon the elimination of these "dwarfs" that the economists concerned with school costs in the Soviet Union pin their hopes. Thus V.A. Zhamin contends:

It is evident that it is worthwhile substituting wherever possible large schools (with a 500 to 1,000 enrollment) in place of small schools, and organizing the transport of the children. In those localities where good roads do not exist, it is necessary to build boarding schools. 22

The writer is by no means convinced a consolidation of schools would in fact reduce costs under

21 Noah, Financing Soviet Schools, p. 131.

22 Zhamin, op. cit., p. 17.

A Comment on "Dwarf" Schools

Caption: "School's Open ..
Signs on School: "Closed," "Repairs."

-From Krokodil (Moscow), No. 25, 1966.

But per pupil costs could still be as high, if not higher, than before, and if the Soviets should decide to try to solve the cost problem by resorting to boarding schools, the costs could go very high indeed.23

Conclusion

For all the problems described above, there can be no doubt that Soviet educational policy-in line with Soviet social policies in general-is entering a new phase of development based upon an empirical orientation. Soviet planners and policy-makers in education are finally throwing off the blinders of simple ideology. Increasingly they are prepared not merely to take the brute facts of Soviet society into account when framing their

23 Boarding schools are very expensive relative to day schools. In 1960, for example, the average annual cost to the state of boarding school education amounted to 6,450 (old) rubles per pupil, seven times more than the annual cost per day-pupil. Capital outlays are no less burdensome proportionately. Construction per place costs four times more than the construction of a day school place. For details, see Noah, Financing Soviet Schools, pp. 108-09.

plans, but also to acknowledge publicly that those facts must be diligently searched out, whether or not they correspond neatly to the textbook categories of orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory. Thus, part-time and correspondence training is now acknowledged to be an unacceptably costly way of producing skilled workers for the national economy, whatever the ideological benefits may be of integrating the student into the world of work and the worker into the world of study. Similarly, it is recognized that neither propaganda nor incentives have succeeded in raising the ratio of semiprofessionals to professionals to the desired level.

Soviet education faces the prospect of a critical labor shortage in the coming years, and it is clear that no amount of pedagogical rhetoric based on Marx or Makarenko will be a substitute for the required massive investment in developing laborsaving educational techniques. Meanwhile, Soviet educational costs have been exhibiting a distressing upward tendency; the late 1950's marked the end of the halcyon period when the Soviet planners could still count on a relatively cheap and adequate supply of good-quality teachers. In such circumstances, we can expect in the future to hear much more about the economics of education from the Soviet Union.

By Hugh Seton-Watson

BOOKS

IN THE UNLAMENTED age of Stalin, Soviet politics had a certain grisly simplicity. Western students of the subject were well aware how little concrete information there was, but the general pattern was clear, like the outline of a great mountain peak looming through the mist. In the age of Khrushchev everything was in flux. The amount of factual material increased every year, but the frequent reorganizations of institutions made it difficult to discern the shape of the structure. To change the metaphor, the Soviet system made one think of an old house with several wings, each of which was being rebuilt in a different manner, some portions being on one floor only and others having twenty stories, with a whole series of barns and outhouses being added and demolished in rapid succession. Since the removal of Khrushchev there has been even more information-but no less confusion.

The three books under review will help the inquirer after truth, though none of the authors could hope fully to satisfy him. Professor Barghoorn is a veteran in the field. His latest work maintains his high standards. He is especially illuminating on the role of propaganda, indoctrination and training, and he has an excellent chapter on recent trends in the Soviet judiciary. The occasional deadpan references to his incarceration by the KGB give a special personal flavor to his narra

* Frederick C. Barghoorn, Politics in the U.S.S.R., New York, Little Brown & Co., 1966. Alfred G. Meyer, The Soviet Political System: An Interpretation, New York, Random House, 1965. Jeremy R. Azrael, Managerial Power and Soviet Politics, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1966.

tive. His experiences certainly did not affect his fairmindedness or scholarly application. Professor Meyer, who already has to his credit three interesting works on Marxism-Leninism in theory and practice, has produced a general survey of the Soviet political system, full of thoughtful discussion and based on a mastery of detail which is all the more impressive because it is comparatively unobtrusive. Mr. Azrael's book covers a subject that is more limited but of the greatest importance-the relationship between the managerial elite and the political rulers. He provides an excellent historical survey of the relationship, explaining the successive phases of Communist Party policy-the employment of "bourgeois specialists," the use of "red directors," the training of experts in the period of the first two Five-Year Plans and the nature of the managerial elite as it has developed since the Great Purge. In his Introduction and in his brief Conclusion, he gives us some perceptive observations on the role of the managers in contemporary Soviet society and the prospects for the future.

As it is impossible in limited space to comment even on all the major problems treated in these three works, I shall confine myself to two themes: the political role of the managers and the utility or irrelevance of the concept of “totalitarianism” in relation to the Soviet regime.

MR. AZRAEL QUESTIONS the view that the managers are the "gravediggers of communism." This was first put forward, I think, in a stimulating book by a young Soviet exile, German Achminow,

entitled Die Macht im Hintergrund, published obscurely in Ulm in 1950. Since then it has been taken up and elaborated both in sophisticated treatises of political science and in the half-baked clichés of the daily and weekly press. Mr. Azrael argues that the fact that this view "has remained so widespread and so intellectually respectable in the face of such overwhelming counterevidence is graphic testimony to the powerful hold that economic determinism exercises over modern political analysis." He is absolutely right, of course, and he is also right to note that economic determinism is not confined to Marxists, but has deep roots in

Western liberalism. Some of the most naively optimistic views of the Soviet Union, as already ruled by managers, come from highly conservative Western businessmen or their journalistic mouthpieces. In reality, Soviet managers have had little political power, and the institutions which they dominate have little influence on the making of policy. "The only periods during which they have acquired a certain independence have been those in which the central leadership has been internally split . . . split . . . Managerial power has been both marginal and contingent. . . . . . The probability is high that this power will be used in the future, as it

HUGH SETON-WATSON-Head of the History Department at the School of Slavonic and East European Affairs, London University. Author of From Lenin to Khrushchev (New York, F. A. Praeger, 1963), and other books.

VIKTOR MEIER Formerly East European correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; now Washington correspondent for a number of German newspapers.

PETER WILES-Well known British authority on the Soviet economy. Co-editor of Planning and the Market in the USSR: The 1960's (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1967).

RICHARD T. DAVIES--An American student of East European and Soviet affairs; regular contributor to Problems of Communism.

VLADIMIR PETROV-On the staff of the SinoSoviet Institute at George Washington University; author of Money and Conquest: Allied Occupation Currencies in World War II (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). ABRAHAM ASCHER-Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College, New York; contributor to Survey (London), Problems of Communism and other journals.

THOMAS W. WOLFE-Senior Staff Member at the RAND Corporation (Washington, DC) specializing in Soviet military doctrine and history. Author of Soviet Strategy at the Crossroads (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964). ALBERT BOITER--American specialist on Soviet

law; director of research facilities at Radio Liberty, Munich.

BORIS SCHWARTZ-Professor of Music at Queens College, City University of New York.

NANCY NIMITZ-Staff member of the Economics Department of the RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, California), and author of various papers on Soviet agriculture and national income. JAMES P. HARRISON-Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, New York, Contributor to Asian Survey (Berkeley, Cal.), China Quarterly (London), and Problems of Communism (MayJune 1966).

ROBERT V. DANIELS-Professor of History at the University of Vermont, Burlington; author of, most recently, Marxism and Communism (New York, Random House, 1965).

PAUL LENDVAI-Central and East European correspondent for The Financial Times (London). Formerly wrote under the name of Paul Landy. THOMAS S. AN-Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of International Studies at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland. ERIC WILLENZ-Adjunct Professor of political theory and Communist party systems at American University, Washington, D.C.

DAVID L. MORRISON-Editor of The Mizan Newsletter, published by the Central Asian Research Center (London), and frequent contributor to Problems of Communism.

ROSALIND VEE AVNET-American student of Soviet affairs, now on the staff of this journal.

But there is more to the problem than that. Though power continues to be held by the party hierarchy, it is unlikely that the type of party bureaucrat is not being changed by the evolution of Soviet society. It is at least arguable that the mentality of the party bureaucrat and of the manager are coming closer to each other, that the ethos of the governing class is changing, and that this will in time modify the whole nature of the regime.

The point may perhaps be clarified by a comparison with Imperial Russia. In 1900 there was no homogeneous bourgeoisie in Russia: rather there were three middle classes whose highest levels reached into the upper class, but which were divided from each other by vertical compartments. There was a bureaucracy, whose ethos was derived from the traditions of the Muscovite and postPetrine service nobility. There was a business class, concerned only with its business, and completely subservient politically. There was an intelligentsia, which had begun to be infected by the ideas of Western bourgeois liberalism, but whose prevalent attitude was a rejection of bourgeois values. This rejection combined the arguments and emotions of pre-capitalist noblemen and modern socialists.

In the Soviet Union, too, three functional groups exist in the upper and middle strata of society: bureaucrats, managers (in place of capitalists), and intellectual professions (an expanded equivalent of the old intelligentsia). But fifty years of Communist dictatorship, industrial development, education and indoctrination, intensified for brief periods by purges, have produced a much greater cultural and social homogeneity than existed in the old Russia. The three groups are bound together by an official ethos compounded of potted Marxism, Great Russian chauvinism, and artistic philistinism, which inevitably recalls the mixture of puritanism, imperialism, and philistinism which marked the triumphant bourgeoisie of the age of Joseph Chamberlain, McKinley and William II.

IF A POLITICAL threat to the ruling party from managerial gravediggers of communism is nonexistent, the cultural embourgeoisement of the Soviet upper and middle strata seems to be a reality. Whether these trends amount to the formation of a new upper class, and whether this should be called a "state bourgeoisie" (in contrast to the "private bourgeoisie" of 19th-century capi

or by some other name, are matters for further argument.

The revolt against the conventional wisdom of this self-satisfied and self-righteous upper stratum comes from the same direction as the revolt against the Autocracy, Orthodoxy and National Principle of Nicholas I-from the intelligentsia in the narrowest sense, especially from the imaginative writers. At present these few can easily be defeated, as Belinski and Herzen were defeated, but they can no longer be completely silenced as in Stalin's time.

That there are differences of outlook within the upper stratum, that the professional criteria of the managers are different from the ideological criteria of the party officials, can hardly be doubted. It is also reasonably certain that many party hierarchs themselves have divided minds— that considerations of efficiency and orthodoxy pull them in different directions. But it seems likely that the long-term trend is towards secularization, towards the diminution of ideological fanaticism. It seems likely that party hierarchs, bureaucrats, managers, scientists and teachers will accept increasingly similar values, which however will be subject to continuous if slow change.

Secularization and embourgeoisement are not necessarily grounds for satisfaction, either for Soviet citizens or for the rest of the world: the prevalent ethos of the Soviet upper stratum contains strong doses of arrogance and self-righteousness which are likely to make them hard masters and uncomfortable neighbors for many years to come. However, if one wishes to hazard a moderate optimism, one can hope that revolutionary zeal will continue to decline, that the criticisms of the independent intellectual minority will be increasingly tolerated, and that the leaders of the party will eventually come to the point of abdicating their sovereignty over morality and spiritual life. When that happens, the Soviet Union will have ceased to be totalitarian: what will remain will be the normal struggle for power and social justice that has always existed in dictatorial or democratic states.

OUR THREE AUTHORS are not happy with the word "totalitarianism." While recognizing its inadequacies and the unsuitability of some of the "models" that have been "constructed" on it, Professor Azrael feels that on balance it is worth retaining. I agree with him. Professor Meyer seems to feel that the term has been used in so