Funding Loyalty by Eugenia Belova & Valery Lazarev

Author:Eugenia Belova & Valery Lazarev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

6 The Party and Its Overseers

Communism was supposed to breed a “new socialist man” to replace the self-interested Homo economicus. Indeed, would it not be reasonable to expect party members, as the avant-garde of the socialist state, to place the interests of the state above their own narrow interests? If this were the case, however, there would be no need for the party to supervise its members as they could be counted on to serve the higher interests of the party and state. That there were shady characters in the party should come as no surprise, but the fact that the party had to create elaborate oversight and control structures tells us that they were dealing with more than an anomaly. Given the party’s large size, complex structure, and variations in the objectives of the members of its bureaucracy, the relationship between party members in general and the party leadership was not immune to the principal-agent problem.

All aspects of party operations—from the accuracy of paperwork by regional party finance departments to the everyday behavior of rank-and-file members—could be the subject of scrutiny by local or central supervisory agencies. Two types of official institutions were created specifically to deal with such agency problems within the party system—audit (revizionnye komissii) and party control (partiinyi kontrol’).1

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