Contenu du sommaire : Spécialistes, bureaucratie et administration dans l'Empire russe et en URSS, 1880 - 1945

Alessandro Stanziani, Statisticians, zemstva and state in Russia in the 1880's. The paper describes, in the first place, the system (collection and elaboration of data) of the statistical enquiries organised by the zemstva between 1875 and 1890. It also explains that these procedures were often at the origin of opposition between statisticians and the zemstva administrators. Such a relationship is explained by taking into consideration, on the one hand, the social background as well as the political and professional orientations of statisticians. On the other hand, the zemstva administrators' attitude in this respect is accounted for by the political climate, the agrarian crisis and the evolution of relationship between the zemstva and the state during the 1880's. In the last part of the article, the author endeavors to show how the above-mentioned elements resulted in the zemstva reforms of 1890 and in the increase of economic activity of the central administration. The main features of the "state statistics " developed in those years allow us to understand the nature of this institutional and economic transformation.

Ettore Cinnella, Proletarian state and bourgeois science : the spetsy during the first years of Soviet rule. Considering the debates on "military specialists", one can see that the main reason of the confrontations between the leaders who were favourable to creating a regular army and the members of the so-called "military opposition" lay in the uncertain attitude of the peasantry towards Soviet power. In order to overcome the resistance of rural masses, some Bolsheviks were proposing the way of persuasion and army democratization, while others were insisting on the necessity to resort to measures of constraint. As to the living and working conditions of "bourgeois" technical and scientific personnel, the spontaneous hate of the plebeian masses for spetsy was nourished by Bolshevik leaders' contradictory and ambiguous attitudes. The third part of the article is devoted to the problem of bureaucracy. The confidence which Lenin and the overwhelming majority of the party entertained lor the administrative capabilities of the toiling masses was in contradiction with the reality and was leading to the conviction that the cause of the bureaucratic phenomenon lay in the presence of former tsarist officials inside the government apparatus of the new regime.

Nicolas Werth, Who were the first Chekists ? In the summer of 1918. a commission carried out an investigation on Soviet officials in forty institutions, one of which was the Cheka. The present article is based on the forms filled out in compliance with this investigation and preserved in the Central Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR). In the present article, the author analyzes a representative sample of the rank and file Chekists: in this case, it is a group of 894 employees of the Lubianka. The investigation gives interesting data on the distribution of Chekists according to their positions, on their national origins, on their former occupations before joining the party, etc. The study of Chekists' itineraries allows to better understand the way in which, in the aftermath of October 1917, one of the elements of the new state apparatus was constituted.

Antonella Salomoni, "Economie liberalism" and "academic counter-revolution" . The Soviet experience of Ekonomist, 1922. Between December 1921 and June 1922, the review Ekonomist asserts itself as the most animated organ of discussion on the general backwardness of Russian economy, the difficulties of a new takeoff after the end of civil war and the chances of success of the new line on which the Soviet governement had engaged. The Russian revolution had made the collaborators of Ekonomist aware of the absence of an economic theory of socialism. Now they saw the basic conditions for a positive evolution of the system in the program of the NEP reestablishing the laws of supply and demand, and private initiative. These intellectuals professing very different tendencies and opinions were to endow the review with a real laboratory of research and discussion. A short time before the beginning of the campaign against "bourgeois ideology", they express the engagement taken by some sectors of the intelligentsia to facilitate the rebirth and the free exercise of all the economic, political and ideological trends of Russian life.

Andrea Graziosi, "Building the first system of state industry in history". The paper tries to go beyond the traditional analyses of the economic policies of the 1920's, generally grounded in the intellectual perspective of the "industrialization debate." It centers around the reconstruction of the administrative-economic activities of G. L. Piatakov in 1923-1926, when he was the VSNKh Vice-President. Special attention is devoted to Piatakov's attempt to build what he called the "first system of state industry in history" and to the consequences such a policy had tor the NEP, whose crisis it accelerated. At the same time, the article is the first scholarly work devoted to Piatakov to appear in the West. For such reason, it also tries to give an assessment of Piatakov's role and importance, witnessed among other things by the fact that he was one of the six "outstanding" Bolshevik leaders mentioned by Lenin in his Testament.

David R. Shearer, The language and politics of socialist rationalization. Study of the socialist rationalization movement reveals the complexity of political and social conflict in Soviet industry during the late 1920's and early 1930's. Struggles over policy and hegemony, as expressed in debates over appropriate forms of socialist rationalization, did not cut along easily discernible social or political lines. Official rhetoric legitimated class conflict, but masked far more complex forms of social war within factories and state industrial bureaucracies. Thus, this paper argues that the Stalinist attack against the industrial apparatus in 1929 and 1930 should not be seen mainly in ideological terms, or in terms of party control vs. professional autonomy. Many engineering and administrative groups supported Stalinist policies precisely because those policies offered the prospect of expanding professional activity and authority. The Stalinist leadership, itself divided politically, endorsed contradictory notions of socialist rationalization in its attack against NEP economic policies. The regime's productivity policies developed in an ad-hoc and contradictory manner, simultaneously embracing and encouraging technocratic, syndicalist, and radical populist tendencies. Contradictions in policy initiatives were never resolved, nor were conflicts among competing social and occupational groups that shaped the regime's policies. Violent social conflict became institutionalized in the ongoing struggles over policy and hegemony inside factories and throughout the state apparatus.

Alessandro De Magistris, Architectural culture and urban strategies during the I930's. The years between the end of the twenties and the mid- thirties were marked by a high urban population growth and a worsening of living conditions in the cities. This period saw radical changes in Soviet urban strategies and policies of which Moscow offers a clear example. The processes which had started in the 1920's aimed at the creation of a diversified urban economy; they were replaced with the growing role of the state in town "planning" and "management". At the beginning of the first piatiletka an initial phase of radical egalitarianism was followed by a firm anti-egalitarian practice. This in the context in which there was an intense (albeit brief) theoretical debate and a drastic change of orientation in Soviet architectural and town planning culture. These factors may explain in part the intense link between the approach of urban planners and architects and the social and political objectives of the regime.

Alexis Berelowitch, From Listopad to Onisimov. Two visions of Stalinist executives. In this article, it is endeavored to make use of literary works to outline a portrait of a manager of an enterprise at the time of Stalin. The two novels analyzed in this work are Kruzhili- kha of V. Panova (awarded the Stalin prize) and The new assignment (Novoe naznachenie) of Alexander Век, which has been forbidden for a long time in USSR. The two novels describe a manager who is all powerful as far as his subordinates are concerned but deprived of any rights whatsoever when faced with his superiors. These technically competent managers seem to be inspired in the lirst place by devotion and allegiance. So. the picture that is drawn up is less the one of a hierarchy of bureaucratic power than (hat of an archaic system of personal allegiance within which Stalin is the only source of power and legitimacy.

Jacques Sapir, The "problem of specialist" in USSR: is there a Soviet specificity ? This article proposes to elaborate an economic point of view on the problem of executives in USSR. In view of the specificities of the Soviet system as regards investments and because of the "closed" system of the economy, the author concludes that the problem is more complex as far as USSR is concerned than it would have been in the case of a Western economy.