Outside Moscow (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 273 for his blindness to Stalin's dark side, fares slightly better in this account than elsewhere, partly because Hendersen makes great efforts to be fair. Unfortunately, Loy Hendersen died before he could take his memoirs far past the beginning of World War II. The reflections contained in A Question of Trust, however, cover the early years ofU.S.-Soviet relations more thoroughly than those of Kennan and Bohlen. Hendersen's memoirs, as theirs, should be required reading for anyone interested in the formation of the superpower relationship. Outside Moscow. By Donna Bahry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 230 pp. $30.00/cloth. Reviewed by Andrew Kuchins, Ph.D. candidate, SAIS. Donna Bahry's work is a useful addition to the body of literature that disputes the totalitarian model of Soviet politics. She illuminates the nature of centerperiphery relations in Soviet domestic politics by analyzing the interrelationship of national, republic, and local powers in the allocation of state funding. Bahry admits that even with the post-Stalin evolution of Soviet center-periphery relations to the benefit of the periphery, the center still holds overwhelming sway over economic decisionmaking. But feedback from outside Moscow is too important for the Soviet Union to fit neatly into a directed-society model. Similar to the rise of the postwar welfare state in the West, the Soviet commitment to social welfare after the Stalin era gTew to assume a larger slice of the state budget. The sweeping centralization of government expenditures of the Stalinist economic revolution has broken down to some extent as the Soviet republics have stormed the barricades of state spending policies. The power of the republics over government spending peaked during Khrushchev's sovnarkhozy reform, but even today the Soviet republics hold the purse strings for about twice as much of the Soviet budget as they did at any time during the Stalin years. While subnational levels of government have more state funds to allocate than in the past, their responsibilities have grown perhaps a degree faster. Bahry draws a scenario that reminds one of a cat chasing its tail. Republics and local and regional governing bodies are never appropriated quite enough funds to complete the projects assigned, and they are left to their own devices to fill the gaps. Echoes of Gertrude Schroeder's seminal article on Soviet reform attempts are heard when Bahry calls this situation, "the treadmill of appeals." The fundamental question the author poses is, Does activism below the national level matter? And the answer is yes, politics do matter, but it is a brand of politics involving compromise and glacial adaptations that spawn new problems and new appeals. A shrewd regional leader can lobby for various causes and achieve results that over the long term can add up to substantial results for local needs. The emphasis is on persistence because changes in the regime's allocation policies are incremental and the result of bureaucratic compromise. U.S. executive and congressional budgetary deliberations seem an appropriate 274 SAIS REVIEW analogy. In fact, Bahry makes an effort to put the Soviet political economy in an international perspective. Despite a much higher degree of centralization than found in Western advanced industrial economies, Soviet planners and bureaucrats must deal with many of the same structural issues that are haggled over in such world capitals as Washington, Paris, and Tokyo. After analyzing allocations data and speeches of republic and local leaders, which she admits are not totally reliable, Bahry draws some interesting conclusions that counter conventional Sovietological wisdom (if such a beast exists). She finds little or no evidence to support the thesis that Politburo or Central Committee representation gives a republic or local leader more clout in the investment arena. Whether a leader has been in power for a short or long period does not seem to matter, either. Nor does the ethnic background of leaders help or hinder their causes in Moscow. (Evidence supporting the last conclusion exists only at the republic level because of the paucity of available biographical information.) Finally, subnational leaders tend to make the same appeals regardless of who is general secretary. Although Bahry notes that calls for reorganization have substantially increased under...