Joseph Torigian, <i>Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao</i>

Joseph Torigian has written an ambitious and impressive book. He seeks to understand the extent to which opportunistic power considerations, rather than conflicting policy preferences or deference to institutionalized procedures, predominated in the succession struggles that followed the deaths of Jospeh Stalin in the USSR in 1953 and Mao Zedong in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1976. Torigian conducts an in-depth analysis of four episodes, with two in each country: in the USSR, the arrest and execution of Lavrenti Beria in 1953 and the purge of the so-called “Anti-Party Group” in 1957; in China, the arrest of the so-called “Gang of Four” in 1976 and the ascendance of Deng Xiaoping over Hua Guofeng in 1978–1979.Torigian structures his research by testing two sets of alternative hypotheses (three hypotheses for an “economic model” and three for an “authority model”) about the power struggles involved in these episodes. Hypothesis 1a of the economic model proposes that “the leader who provides the best patronage model or popular policy platform wins the power struggle” (p. 5). Hypothesis 2a proposes that “a defined group [a ‘selectorate’] is enfranchised to choose their leader, and a ‘median voter’ [in that selectorate] makes the final decision” (p. 6). Hypothesis 3a suggests that “power ministries (military or secret police) do not play an independent or unique role: enforcement of decisions is automatic.”Hypothesis 1b of the authority model proposes that “sociological ties and prestige are more important than the dispensation of patronage or real policy differences” in the victory of the new leader (p. 7). Hypothesis 2b posits that the nature of the “bureaucratic organ [that] makes a final decision is more important than a search for a ‘median voter’ in the elite as a whole: institutional manipulation explains more than open vote-seeking” (p. 8). Hypothesis 3b suggests that “power ministries have leeway when choosing to obey certain decisions about leadership selection and not others.”The virtues of the book are many. It is a rare case of structured comparative analysis of Communist systems, based on prodigious research in Russian and Chinese sources. The evidence resulting from this research is immense: 61 pages of endnotes (nearly one-quarter of the book) citing mainly Soviet and Chinese documents and memoirs (many of them previously unmined by scholars), leavened by some interviews conducted with living actors and references to English-language scholarship on the topic. The book is well structured around the conflicting hypotheses, well organized, and very well written—clear and flowing.But is the product convincing? Admirable though some features of Torigian's approach might be, I mostly felt skepticism about the whole enterprise and doubts about the book's importance. If one is seeking to inquire whether opportunistic power considerations prevailed over policy differences and deference to written party and constitutional rules of procedure, it would be crucial to examine “hard cases.” Torigian has instead opted to focus on “easy cases.” In all the episodes he analyzes, the potential stakes in the political struggle bordered on all-or-nothing. Because the murderous despot had died so recently in each case, it instilled a level of interpersonal distrust and fear that would have induced any members of a successor collective leadership to worry about their careers or even their lives. The originality of Torigian's findings is also questionable. In all four cases, the book's empirical claims merely echo the assessments already dominant within the Sovietological and Sinological literature.Thus, traditional explanations for the arrests of Lavrentii Beria in the USSR and the Gang of Four in the PRC remain close to the mark and, in the case of leaders’ fears of Beria, are endorsed by Torigian. Both Beria and the Gang of Four had been intimately associated with the prior period of intra-elite violence. Moreover, in the case of Beria, his demonstrated urge to seize the political initiative with reformist proposals, his erratic and self-serving behavior at Stalin's bedside, and his installation as head of the state security organs (the principal instrument for intra-elite violence and blackmail over the previous quarter-century) were understandably interpreted by other leaders of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) as potentially threatening—not just to their careers but to their lives.In the case of the Gang of Four, their life-threatening radicalism during the Cultural Revolution and Jiang Qing's strident self-presentation in both private and public arenas were surely sufficient to trigger fears among the majority of Chinese elites who were determined to move past the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, this would explain why, in each case, the individuals perceived to be most threatening were rather swiftly arrested.The arrests of Beria and the Gang of Four were preludes to a continuing political-succession struggle among those who remained. When documenting Nikita Khrushchev's move against the Anti-Party Group and Deng Xiaoping's ascendancy over Hua Guofeng, Torigian is intent on demonstrating that there were few policy differences between the victorious leaders and their ousted rivals. If in fact there were no fundamental policy differences, the eventual outcomes must have been determined by opportunistic power considerations; manipulative actions such as changing the institutional arenas within which key decisions were to be made; and inviting the military to intervene, formally or informally, in intraparty politics.There is a long history in Western scholarship on Communist regimes of asking whether power or policy is what motivates action by political leaders. Those who reject the pure-power argument typically ask: “power for what”? In some cases, scholars seek to demonstrate the existence of crystallized factional conflict over rival policy orientations: “reformists” versus “conservatives” in the Sovietological literature; “storming” versus “engineering” approaches in the Sinological literature. Obviously, under some circumstances, political actors in Communist regimes (and perhaps more generally) will see their political or physical survival to be at stake and forsake their policy preferences to save their skins. In the case of the immediate post-despot periods in the USSR and the PRC, we would expect the struggles to be higher on power considerations relative to policy commitments. This is why I referred to the episodes Torigian has chosen as “easy cases.”And yet, even in these cases, I am skeptical of Torigian's claim that there was substantial consensus on policy in all the instances he examines, a necessary adjunct to an argument that it was all about power. (Full disclosure: my books on Soviet leadership politics have privileged the role of ideas in enabling leaders to “build their authority,” though I did not deny that political positioning and power considerations were also at play.) To be sure, there was a super-majority consensus among party leaders after both Stalin and Mao that they could not continue in the old way. In each case, all the key figures wanted to put an end to political terror against both the elite and the masses and to overcome material austerity for the bulk of the population. This consensus, however, was never formally spelled out, and policy differences were bound to emerge over how far to go in new directions and which directions to pursue.Yet, Torigian denies this. He claims, for example, that Vyacheslav Molotov and others in the higher reaches of the CPSU's ruling organs were in agreement with the Virgin Lands Program, with an end to the idolization of Stalin, and with rehabilitation of political prisoners. He further claims that the so-called Anti-Party Group did not have “fundamental” policy differences with Khrushchev—their differences were only “tactical.” This is hard to believe, and the evidence Torigian adduces is rather flimsy and unconvincing. Molotov, for example, might have claimed long after the fact that he had supported coming to terms with Stalin's legacy, but this hardly means that he was not alienated by the way Khrushchev did so. Consider the sequence: Khrushchev's semi-public denunciation of Stalin in February 1956; his argument (not entirely true) that others in the leadership were more responsible than he was for the Great Terror under Stalin; the outbreak of mass unrest in Poland and a revolution in Hungary (which Soviet troops ultimately crushed) shortly after Khrushchev embarked on his de-Stalinization campaign both at home and abroad; Khrushchev's utopian, public demands in early 1957 for a vast acceleration of meat and milk production; and his disempowerment of the central ministries in favor of regional economic councils (could Georgii Malenkov, the technocrat, really have supported these?). To view the insurgency against Khrushchev within the CPSU Presidium as simply a revolt against his growing power, rather than also a revolt against how he was using that power, strains credulity.The way Torigian interprets his sources is at the root of his dubious arguments. In the Soviet cases, Torigian cites memoirs and retrospective statements by members of the Anti-Party Group and their associates, disclaiming policy differences with Khrushchev. But such retrospective disclaimers were a form of self-protection (or, in later memoirs, self-vindication) in a regime that boasted of its intolerance of “factionalism” and that valorized intra-party “unity,” especially when such “unity” was defined by the regime as necessary to uphold systemic stability. (When I met Marshal Dmitrii Yazov, a principal in the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, in Moscow in 1999, he objected to my use of the term “coup” and insisted “There was no coup!”) Even William Taubman, whom Torigian dubs the author of Khrushchev's “definitive biography,” discusses substantial policy differences within the post-Stalin leaders of the CPSU along the lines I have suggested.In the Chinese case, Torigian depicts the Gang of Four as not in “fundamental” disagreement with the new regime after Mao's death. He cites statements they made and feints they went through toward cooperation with Hua Guofeng's short-lived administration, that, according to Torigian, were indicative of crystallized factional conflict. But again, are not such statements and feints to be expected in the aftermath of their patron's (Mao's) death, when they were politically out on a limb? As for Deng's differences with Hua Guofeng, here Torigian might appear to have a better case. Hua identified himself with “reform” in the immediate aftermath of Mao's death. Deng followed in his footsteps in this regard.To Torigian, therefore, Deng's outflanking and ouster of Hua a few years later is a case of pure, power-driven opportunism. But there is a different way of thinking about this. Torigian notes that Hua stood both for reform and for “collective leadership,” and the book marshals considerable evidence for this interpretation. Torigian depicts Hua in ways similar to his depiction of Malenkov: as a sincere believer in, and willing practitioner of, truly “collective” leadership.Yet there are two types of collective leadership: one based on a consensus-seeking, relatively unassertive leader (a “first among equals,” as with Malenkov and later Leonid Brezhnev in the USSR and Hua Guofeng in China); and one based on an active, assertive leader who induces, sometimes “railroads,” the collective into endorsing his ambitious initiatives (Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Deng). This distinction is sometimes referred to by scholars as “leading from the front” versus “leading from the back or the middle.”Whether one type is superior to the other depends on circumstances and the observer's conception of the “needs” of the country at the time. If Gorbachev had led the collective the way Malenkov or Hua Guofeng did, he would never have achieved the breakthroughs he pursued (for better or for worse). If Khrushchev had emulated Malenkov's passive leadership, there might never have been a generation of anti-Stalinists on whom Gorbachev would later rely. Actively manipulating both the agenda and the arenas of power is often what assertive leadership requires, whether in democracies or dictatorships (though the institutional scope for such manipulation is narrower in consolidated democracies). Brezhnev's passive leadership of the collective created the “stagnation” that Gorbachev criticized when calling for bold action.As for the PRC, in Deng Xiaoping's mind, his role models for reform were to be found in South Korea (Syngman Rhee) and Singapore (Lee Kwan Yu), dictators who dramatically modernized their societies and developed their economies without tolerating any push toward democracy. Deng believed that China could not jump-start economic growth without a strong leader, given the likely obstacles to the far-reaching reform strategy he embraced. Is this power for its own sake? Or is it power in pursuit of a policy vision? Deng's felt need to launch a “Southern Tour” in 1992 (notably, after he was no longer the official leader of the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese state) was retrospective confirmation of his belief that regional leaders could smother his reforms unless they were mobilized by assertive leaders. According to Ezra F. Vogel in his 2011 book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Deng worried that he would encounter opposition to radical reforms, and he thus wanted o build his own team to blunt that opposition and ensure both promulgation and implementation of his reform policies. Did Deng regard Hua Guofeng's relatively passive leadership of the collective as an obstacle to a well-intended reform program? If so, what does this suggest about the relative roles of “power” versus “policy” considerations in motivating leaders’ behavior?With respect to the second set of hypotheses—about the manipulation of arenas of conflict and decision-making and the procedures for decision-making within the given arenas—here, too, I am skeptical of Torigian's framework and interpretations. The evidence is clear that the winners in all four cases had opportunistically chosen the political-organizational pathways most likely to facilitate their ascendancy. But there is nothing surprising about this, and it certainly does not undermine conventional wisdom. After the death of a despot who ruled capriciously for decades, deference to formal party statutes can hardly be said to have been commonly understood and highly or widely respected (in Torigian's apt phrase, this was a condition of “low institutionalization”). Political competitors looked for pathways that would outflank their main competitors. In 1957, the Anti-Party Group assumed that the CPSU Presidium would be determinative, but Khrushchev outfoxed them by invoking the idea—not respected since the 1920s—that the highest party organs were accountable to the CPSU Central Committee. Indeed, according to the party statutes, the Presidium was supposed to “report” to the Central Committee. This suggests that Khrushchev, not the Anti-Party Group, was the one complying with the rules.With regard to the state security organs and the military, they did indeed play roles in helping to determine outcomes, albeit in different ways in the two countries. Yet, except for some details, this is hardly a novel finding. The role of Marshal Georgii Zhukov in both 1953 and 1957 is well known. The role of Deng's ties with the military, and with a generational cohort of party-military cadres, is also familiar from authoritative biographies of the man.In seeking to demonstrate that these regimes were not polarized into elite factions battling over policy differences, Torigian is convincing that the image of crystallized factional conflict is an exaggeration and often patently false. He notes, for example, that “the Gang did not always act as a coherent group, which also discounts the idea that they fought together as a faction for a cohesive ideological platform” (p. 111). This is a useful point, but it is not entirely surprising as an act of self-preservation under conditions of great uncertainty about the prospects for remaining in the leadership, or out of jail, or alive, in the aftermath of the despotic patron's death. Their protestations may not have been credible to members of the leadership, but they were in line with the party statute against “factionalism.” Because this statute extended all the way back to Vladimir Lenin, it presumably contained some residual normative power in both countries and provided incentive for the aspirants to deny that they—be it Beria, the Gang of Four, or the so-called Anti-Party Group—were engaging in “splitting” behavior. The idea of “unity” also reflected the notion that, in a dictatorship, disunity would facilitate challenges to the regime from that Torigian but without his of the statements he with the argument that power is all important is the incentive within the When attempt to seize the they are within a political the CPSU ruling organs or a political by and The are to see the political are their or Those will determine whether the choose to with the perceived or to against the power by with the as explains in his to and in China, The involved are such under conditions of political uncertainty and with a notion of the to be for with the uncertainty is by the fact that the Khrushchev or seeks to seize the initiative on policy and the that he will it is the for whom considerations of political to political far more important than their perhaps policy are by a far-reaching of that as a or He that these regimes were only institutionalized when the despot died But what are we to of such as an (p. and “a of elite (p. Or a of the as “a political (p. If the is that post-despot politics in these Communist regimes was not no claimed it Torigian (p. that “the Deng was one of the Mao had not been I how Chinese who under Mao would with that second are dictators and murderous (the Cultural does not by the focus on formal procedures also to the of within these a made long by these over and In The and William that when a of the Anti-Party Group, Khrushchev for his Khrushchev's was do that a by Khrushchev's in Nikita Khrushchev and the of a Khrushchev his ousted official far from thus the that in the political struggle were no longer at of put to death. after Khrushchev himself was in Brezhnev's policy of in that party was could often their In the PRC, Deng Xiaoping the Cultural Revolution it thus the that need no longer fear for their and they economic reforms (a that has been under Deng the idea of term for the leader, a that was followed by the two of his and in both were but only institutionalized for In both however, they in as a of which Gorbachev radical political reforms, and a vast campaign and formally term for the of this is the scope of Torigian's book. But his focus on without of the of his argument the post-despot as he might to that Brezhnev's regime was my about Torigian's I end by that his impressive research in Russian and Chinese and his to structured and comparative of Communist systems, are rare and I only that the book were not so structured and that the hypotheses he the he not so Torigian's are but he to them more in his comparative