James Heinzen

James Heinzen's new study takes advantage of newly declassified archives of the Soviet State and Communist Party as the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union from World War II to the death of Stalin. Within the larger framework of official corruption, a study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, using social-historical approaches to examine it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. Thus, the Soviet case is evocative of societies around the world, even as it developed its own specificities.

http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300175257/art-bribe

Despite abundant interest in corruption and black markets during “late socialism” in the Soviet Union, scholars have neglected the archival study of the phenomenon of bribery in the Late Stalinist period. This study takes advantage of newly declassified archives of the Soviet State and Communist Party as the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union from World War II to the death of Stalin. Within the larger framework of official corruption, a study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. Bribery (vziatochnichestvo)—typically defined in law as gifts in cash or in kind intended to influence public officials to the benefit of the giver—represents the paradigmatic variety of corruption. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, using social-historical approaches to examine it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. Thus, the Soviet case is evocative of societies around the world, even as it developed its own specificities.

Within this framework, The Art of the Bribe delves into the unrelenting tensions among official ideologies, popular attitudes, and customary practices that exposed by such “everyday corruption.” Everyday bribery is explored as a vehicle for investigating how individuals entered into “unofficial” relationships with officialdom, often to elude the arbitrary power of the Soviet state. The Art of the Bribe argues that bribery in the USSR was simultaneously enabling and disabling; it served as a source of stability in the near term, comprising a series of informal relationships facilitating the distribution of scarce goods and services via a huge “shadow economy.” Yet in the long term, bribery was a destabilizing factor, as widespread graft contributed to popular cynicism, eroding faith in the party’s ideological foundations and exacerbating inefficiencies in the economy.

Reviews:

“Corruption could be the most important of all the understudied topics in Soviet history, but James Heinzen has found a way to illuminate this dark terrain with brilliant research. His cogent analysis built upon startling archival finds enlarges the pioneering work of the great Gregory Grossman, and provokes a rethinking of Soviet legal machinery, the state, and the society.”

—Stephen Kotkin, Princeton University and author of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power


“A magnificently researched, archivally based study of bribery and corruption under high Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The analysis is carefully drawn, fully persuasive, and makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Soviet Union and the comparative study of corruption and bribery.”

—Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University


“In a stunning study that exposes the intricacies and intimacies of late Stalinism, James Heinzen demonstrates how bribery, embezzlement, and other forms of corruption were deployed in an economy of scarcity and a culture of gift-giving.  Bribery was not peripheral or alien to the Stalinist command economy but an essential consequence of the fatal combination of opportunities to steal, the necessity to make it, and cultural values that allowed for extra-legal behavior.  …Heinzen's study is bigger than its ostensible subject, for it gives a deeply textured view into how Soviet society actually worked.”

—Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan


“In Stalin’s Russia, where the party ruled every aspect of life, to give or take a bribe was to be human. Heinzen’s fascinating study shows how and why it was done.”

—Mark Harrison, University of Warwick

Following the largest peasant revolution in history, Russia's urban-based Bolshevik regime was faced with a monumental task: to peacefully “modernize” and eventually “socialize” the peasants in the countryside surrounding Russia's cities. To accomplish this, the Bolshevik leadership created the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), which would eventually employ 70,000 workers. This commissariat was particularly important, both because of massive famine and because peasants composed the majority of Russia's population; it was also regarded as one of the most moderate state agencies because of its nonviolent approach to rural transformation. Working from recently opened historical archives, James Heinzen presents a balanced, thorough examination of the political, social, and cultural dilemmas present in the Bolsheviks' strategy for modernizing of the peasantry. He especially focuses on the state employees charged with no less than a complete transformation of an entire class of people. Heinzen ultimately shows how disputes among those involved in this plan-from the government, to Communist leaders, to the peasants themselves-led to the shuttering of the Commissariat of Agriculture and to Stalin's cataclysmic 1929 collectivization of agriculture.

In the waning months of the war in late 1944, law enforcement agencies created new measures to combat bribery, together with renewed measures against networks of theft and speculation. These intermittent and highly flawed “campaigns” lasted for eight years. An analysis of the contentious internal discussions surrounding the “struggle against bribery” that ensued in 1944 provides insight into many aspects of late Stalinist state and society. These include reasons for the stubborn survival of corruption; official attitudes toward the crime of bribery and bribe-giving; and hesitation by party officials to press forward with measures to control bribery. This chapter also offers perspective on how a post-war campaign was launched, and how institutional interests shaped the parameters of the campaign. The campaign’s weaknesses—and the reasons for them—highlight significant features of the late-Stalinist state and its interactions with a society struggling to recover from the catastrophe of the Nazi invasion and occupation. Archive documents now allow an exploration of the campaign’s origins, the way that the campaign was formulated, discussed, and received by various state actors (especially the Procuracy and courts), and its haphazard implementation. In the final analysis, the postwar campaigns against bribery were created and carried out without conviction. As the process made its way through the legal agencies, both the seriousness and scope of the problem were played down. Agencies wanted to protect themselves, as they tried to deflect the blame for crime onto other agencies. Publicly understating the extent of bribery also protected the entire party-state from embarrassment, as the reality of official corruption did not fit the positive image the Soviet Union was trying to project, both to its own citizens and to the rest of the world.

Несмотря на огромный интерес к коррупции и «черному рынку», ученые уделяют
мало внимания периоду широкой социальной экспансии 1940-х и 1950-х г. Этот период был переломным моментом для коррупции советской эпохи когда были широко распространены должностные преступления и предприняты крайне непослдовательные усилия по их искоренению. Это—одно из первых всесторонних исследований, основывающихся на архивных источниках коррупции среди чиновников в Советском Союзе во время Второй мировой войны и периода позднего сталинизма; в этом исследовании проанализировано несколько важнейших факторов эволюции советского государства и динамичного и развивающегося советского общества в послевоенные годы.

Relying on recently opened Soviet justice and party archives, this article explores contested notions of the bribe and official corruption in the Late Stalinist USSR (1945–1953). The article highlights the efforts of the rationalizing and modernizing Soviet state to impose its vision of a perfectly professional civil service onto traditional structures that often valued personal relationships between petitioners and officials.While tracing the interaction of gifts, the law, and social practices along "bribe trails,”
the research examines the important role of what I call
“cultural brokers.” Acting as intermediaries between cultures, or between institutional and traditional arrangements, these cultural brokers moved between one set of norms and practices that dominated on the Soviet periphery, and a very different set in the Imperial center of Moscow. The article examines intermediaries who represented non-Russian clients in the courts of Moscow, focusing on the case of the Soviet republic of Georgia. Cultural brokers bridged the chasm between legal cultures. Because of the multinational character of the empire, there was a great deal of demand for culturalbrokers in many spheres of social and economic life. In highlighting participants' initiative the research challenges stereotypes of a paralyzed Soviet society during Stalinism, just as it questions popular caricatures of the prototypically corrupt Soviet bureaucrat.

Based on research in the archives of the Soviet penal camp system, this article addresses the phenomenon of corruption among officials of the Gulag in the period between 1945 and 1953. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversaw the camp system, treated corruption as a harmful and dangerous phenomenon that was unacceptably pervasive. The article investigates the varieties and frequency of corrupt activities among camp officials, including bribery, theft of state property, participation in illegal markets and speculation, and embezzlement. Gulag authorities’ anti-corruption efforts included inspections, audits, and a large network of prisoner–informants. These anti-corruption campaigns were largely ineffective. The article concludes that corruption existed in significant quantities inside the camp system, and that the forms it took were largely the same as those pervasive in the wider Soviet society.

Based on research in the archives of the Soviet penal camp system, this article addresses the phenomenon of corruption among officials of the Gulag in the period between 1945 and 1953. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversaw the camp system, treated corruption as a harmful and dangerous phenomenon that was unacceptably pervasive. The article investigates the varieties and frequency of corrupt activities among camp officials, including bribery, theft of state property, participation in illegal markets and speculation, and embezzlement. Gulag authorities’ anti-corruption efforts included inspections, audits, and a large network of prisoner–informants. These anti-corruption campaigns were largely ineffective. The article concludes that corruption existed in significant quantities inside the camp system, and that the forms it took were largely the same as those pervasive in the wider Soviet society (Article in Russian)

AbstractJames W. Heinzen, Professional identity and the vision of the modern Soviet countryside: Localagricultural specialists at the end of the NEP, 1928-1929. This article discusses the position of ruralagricultural and land specialists on the eve of the forced collectivization of the peasantry, before theviolent and disorganizing nature of the drive was apparent. The study focuses on a group of specialistswho have been neglected in the literature, yet who comprised one of the most important links betweenthe Soviet regime and the peasantry during the period of the New Economic Policy. Very few werecommunists, and many were holdovers from tsarist land administration. The article uses archival andpublished materials to show that local agricultural and land specialists resented the fact that they weretreated poorly relative to their peers in industry. Local specialists were also dissatisfied with their treatment by local Communist Party and soviet officials. Further, party officials appealed to thesespecialists at the end of the decade by explicitly appealing to their wounded professional identities.Many specialists saw in plans to modernize and urbanize rural Russia a chance vastly to improve their status and working conditions, while simultaneously carrying out their vision of a rationally organized countryside

This article focuses on a critical element of early Bolshevik political discourse: the promotion of ‘common people’ – peasants and workers ‐ into prominent positions in the state and economic apparatuses during the first dozen years of Soviet power. Programmes to bring in industrial workers to leading positions in the Central government in the Soviet Union have been thoroughly investigated by historians. Those to promote peasants have not. By 1929 the highly publicised programmes to promote peasants into leadership positions, which had been pursued for nearly a decade, had been deemed a failure. In this article, for the first time, peasant promotion is considered. Based on research done in newly opened Soviet party and state archives, it details for the first time the peculiar nature of programmes to promote peasants into the central offices of the largest Soviet ministry, the People's Commissariat of Agriculture. Examination of the planning and execution of, and reaction to, these programmes between the beginning of the New Economic Policy and the launching of collectivisation in 1929 gives new insight into Bolshevik political and bureaucratic culture, the nature of post‐revolutionary elites, and aspects of Bolshevik and intelligentsia perceptions of the rural population.