Communist State Administrative Structures [open access via the DOI link]

Abstract

This article presents some core structural–organizational principles of communist state administration and gives empirical examples of how they were—and are—expressed in practice. The administrative structures and institutional traditions of communist regimes constitute a family or type, where affinities to the original Soviet model are strong.

The administrative doctrines of unity of power, socialist legality, cadre management, and the so-called nomenclature model of administrative control were developed by the former Soviet Union, where the nomenclature system was instituted in 1922. With Soviet military and ideological expansion, the Soviet model then spread across the globe. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union remained as an occupying force in Eastern and Central Europe, remodeling state administration on the Soviet example (Naimark & Gibanski, 2019; Tismaneau, 2009). During the same era, in 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took over China, the Soviet Union acted as its mentor.

In essence, the socialist parties’ self-professed leading role and its translation into administrative structure meant that communist regimes were peculiar animals. The Communist Party’s leading role meant that industry and societal associations were treated as parts of the state, to be guided and directed by the party. Specifically, staffing practices—so-called nomenclature systems—ensured that in all sectors of society, the party retained direct political control over individual managers. In turn, managers secured the political loyalty of staff by so-called cadre management practices. Together, nomenclature systems and cadre management made for a highly centralized structure, an absence of separation of powers, and no clear divisions between politics, state, and society.

Popular understanding often envisages communist-type administration as hierarchical commands from the top, which can be quietly resisted and circumvented by a nonpolitical bureaucracy and everyday life.

In contrast, empirical studies of both historical communist regimes and 21st-century China draw up a picture of political control more as a grid, trellis, espalier, or net. The trellis of nomenclature positions is lowered down from the center into society. Ambitious administrators and professionals can grow to positions of power only by grabbing onto this trellis, growing upward along it, and themselves becoming part and parcel of the structure of political control. In effect, despite its centralized structure and the absence of pluralism, the steering from the center is not unison and concerted, but multiple, complex, interlocked, and geared toward cooptation.