Customer Reviews

An Algebra of Soviet Power: Elite Circulation in the Belorussian Republic 1966-86 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies)

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Urban collected and processed a lot of data for this book, and I have to give him credit for that, for sure. His objective is to create a rigid, mathematically based methodology for studying the movements in the Soviet bureaucracy, which by no means acted as a conventional bureaucracy, despite many scholars' attempts to analyze it as such. Looking at Belorussia, he gathered data for office vacancies and mobility for twenty years, and plugged them into his "algebra" to calculate probabilities of office-holders coming from particular areas of the bureaucracy, looking for patterns. In this, he is quite thorough, and one really cannot doubt the extent and factuality of his research (although it doesn't make for easy reading).

His analysis, on the other hand, does not come out as solidly as his data collection. Not that what he says did not hold true for the Belorussian republic, but he resists making generalizations from it, extending it to the soviet system as a whole. He also, in considering factionalism in Belorussia (actually one of the strongest sections of the book) does tend to drop back into the subjective mode of analysis that he decries in the book's introduction.

This is not an easy book to read. A strong backing in statistics, some higher math, and a good working knowledge of Russia between Brezhnev and Gorbachev is almost necessary. But with all its faults aside, Urban has created a useful methodology for study of the movements of power in the late soviet period.