The Primacy Of Politics: Ideology and Modern Political Practices in the Russian Revolution

The Primacy Of Politics: Ideology and Modern Political Practices in the Russian Revolution

June, 1996 Working Paper no. 96.2

The changing nature of the political world was, however, paralleled by changes in conceptions of the cosmos.

The issue of continuity and change dominates discussions of twentieth century Russian history. This agenda is dictated, of course, by the centrality of the Revolution to twentieth century Russian history. Nor is the issue merely historiographical. It was through this particular lens of change, an insistence on breaking continuity, that the Soviet regime viewed itself--and it was in this light that it acted upon its population.

This dispute naturally carried over into the historiography, where it was played out along the field's ideological divide, between totalitarians and revisionists. However, the continuity-change issue did not so much divide the two as provide a common point of discussion, a field for debate. In fact, I would argue that the two camps' disagreements were so heated precisely because they shared common questions and methodological assumptions.

Yet, while this topic has been one of our field's perennial accursed questions, it now takes place within a radically reconfigured historiographical landscape. Whereas debate had previously centered around the degree of the regime's "social support" and "popular legitimacy," an emerging orthodoxy emphasizes the political-ideological foundations of the Soviet system. Archival revelations have unambiguously shown how the regime actually operated. But new material alone generates no new paradigms. As per usual, the new approach in the Russian field is deeply indebted to current trends in Western European history. Whereas the Western European literature on workers and class had earlier served as the model for studies of Russian history, now works on the French Revolution play that same role; E.P. Thompson has been superseded by Fran�ois Furet.

Clearly, this "political turn" revisits some of the interests of the totalitarian school, but refashions them in significant ways. Martin Malia, the foremost proponent of this new approach, indicts not only the social history model, but also criticizes Richard Pipes' approach to Russian history. Malia faults scholars for focusing only on the mechanisms of repression, urging instead that we move "beyond a purely political understanding of Communism to an ideological...one."

As had been the case with the question of "social support," historians now pointing to the primacy of the political differ less over their methodological approaches than over the particular emotional or moral valence attached to those positions. Thus it is not surprising to find that both those who embrace the linguistic turn and those who defend a reinvigorated concept of totalitarianism find themselves in agreement over the issue of continuity and change. A decisive verdict seems to have been handed down: change. Emphasizing the political, scholars now largely concur that the Soviet state was qualitatively different because it was an "ideological regime," a "Marxist state."

II.

In calling for an "ideological understanding" of the Soviet system, Malia has identified a most fruitful avenue of analysis. Ideology, however, can mean many things. Too often the term, instead of clarifying, merely cloaks "a terminological vagueness which appears to reflect some deeper uncertainty about the status of ideas in the genesis of historical movements." However it is used, all definitions agree that "ideology" refers to a system of meaning, a guide for living. Definitions diverge over whether such systems are an intrinsic component of social life, or are reflections or distortions preventing one from accurately apprehending this social life.

In discussions of Soviet history, ideology has been most commonly used in the sense of a pathological pursuit of the "ideal" over the "real," of pursuing "ideas" over "interest." Under such a definition, the Soviet Union is distinct solely by virtue of the fact that it proclaimed an ideology and sought to realize it. An ideological understanding therefore becomes equivalent to claiming that the regime simply had an ideology, in contrast to "healthy," "normal" and "realistic" states, which do not. Ironically, this approach underplays the specific role of Marxism in shaping the Soviet regime, insofar as Marxism is presented only as an ideological mindset--Marxism itself is not wrong, but wrong as a manifestation of "ideology." (In this, Malia is something of an exception: he is much more attentive to how a specifically Communist world-view informed Soviet behavior than is Pipes.) Proponents of this definition trace this pernicious ideological strain back to the Enlightenment: Rousseau (or Condorcet; or Helvetius) is to blame for introducing a perverse idealism at odds with "reality."

Yet "ideology" need not only imply a shadow world of phantasms, the camera obscura of a self-evident, empirical reality. One may retain Malia's insight, but employ "ideology" in a different sense. Rather than using it to distinguish between a realm of the "real" and a realm of "ideas", we might instead see reality as constituted by both the mental and the material. Fifty years ago, Leo Spitzer decried the tendency to view intellectual history in isolation, as something independent of those who created and lived ideas. The "living idea" cannot "be considered apart from the movement, the individual." More recently, one student of the intellectual origins of the French Revolution has noted that "All social activity has an intellectual dimension that gives it meaning, just as all intellectual activity has a social dimension that gives it a point." One can "therefore set aside the untenable distinction between ideas and events."

The insight that all action is imbued with meaning does not in itself constitute an alternative definition for "ideology." Ideology, even from this perspective, can still have two primary meanings: a universal definition, typifying ideology as a component of any socio-political order, usually in the role of cloaking or legitimizing forms of domination (albeit with widely differing manifestations); and a restrictive definition, viewing ideology as an ineluctable component of the political realm, whose emergence may be variously dated anywhere from the late Renaissance to the French Revolution--when the term first appears.

I will be using ideology in the second, restricted sense, primarily because it captures the self-conscious nature of ideology in the modern political age. Keith Baker argues that "ideology" and "the ideological" remain distinct from "intellectual" precisely because "ideology" characterizes those activities and situations in which signification itself seems to be at issue in social life, in which there is a consciousness of contested representations of the world in play, in which social action takes the form of more or less explicit efforts to order or reorder the world through the articulation and deployment of competing systems of meaning.

Insofar as this definition posits a belief that people can reorder the world--that they themselves can generate "systems of meaning"--'ideology' is only the most highly articulated component of a larger modernist cosmology. For, in contrast to the view that the subject is integrated within a preestablished, divinely-instituted order of things (as in a system of estates), modernity views the existing order "as the outcome of a symbolic organization undertaken by the subject. Instead of being immersed in the world, the subject becomes the autonomous maker of the world." Ideology therefore can emerge only when man comes to view himself as a subject (in the sense of conscious agent) who can--indeed, should and must--act on the world. Ideologies are these worlds to be realized, the frameworks of meaning that subjects are meant to implement, as opposed to descriptions of an existing order they are merely to observe (again, as in a system of estates: "a place for every person, every person in their place"). This modernist cosmology begins not with the Enlightenment, but crystallizes in important ways during the Reformation. Thus, as I will be using it, "ideology" as such is not unique to Marxist or totalitarian systems, but is an ineluctable component of a modernist cosmology and the emergence of the political realm.

If this is the case, what distinguished the Soviet regime? I believe it was not merely "ideology" in some generic sense, but the intersection of a particular ideology with the simultaneous implementation of the practices of modern politics. Thus an ideological approach would measure not merely whether the Soviet regime had an "ideology," but (1) the particularity of its specific ideology and (2) the manner in which it was practiced. By my definition, these two issues cannot be disentangled. Indeed, to study ideology is not to study ideas in isolation. Ideology is something that "must always be studied in situ." An example of such an approach would be Stephen Kotkin's work, where he probes how and in what ways ideology shaped the contours of the "Stalinist civilization."

In addition to the Enlightenment, we might employ the Reformation as a prism for isolating certain aspects of Bolshevik thought and practice. Again, I employ the term Reformation not as a strict historical category, but as a heuristic device for viewing the Russian Revolution. In addition to modernity's indebtedness to concepts that emerged in conjunction with the Reformation itself (in passing let me cite only the work of Max Weber and Michael Walzer), Reformation historiography itself provides a model for discussing continuity and change. In the 1970s, scholars engaged in a heated academic debate over the "success of the Reformation." The Reformation, it transpires, did not achieve the goal it had set for itself: "to make people--all people--think, feel and act as Christians." In this sense it can be said to have failed. Yet the Reformation radically expanded the pretensions of all churches over their parishioners, and fundamentally transformed people's relationships with authority. The resulting division was not so much between Catholicism and Protestantism as between pre- and post-Reformation religious and political practices. I will be making a similar argument for the Russian Revolution.

III.

The period of Revolution and Civil War provides a unique opportunity to measure the specificity of Bolshevik ideology in practice. The years 1917-1921 can serve as a laboratory, for they allow one to measure not simply what various political movements proclaimed as their goals, but, much more to the point, this period permits one to analyze precisely how they sought to realize these self-proclaimed goals. As one might expect, this methodology demonstrates profound contrasts in approach, but also reveals some unexpected and discomforting similarities. While Bolshevism sanctioned wide-scale social engineering and terror to a greater degree than its competitors, Bolshevism itself, it transpires, cannot alone account for all attempts to organize and utilize the population in new ways. In this sense, Bolshevism may be seen merely as the most successful and most complete implementation of a new view of politics.

I will explore this hypothesis by comparing how Soviet institutions and those of their opponents sought to achieve their goals--what I call their "practices of governance"--in two fields: food supply and surveillance. By the first example I will seek to show how a modernist cosmology and the ideology expressing it did indeed account for significant differences in practice; by the second example, I will show that many practices traditionally ascribed solely to "Bolshevik ideology" in fact are indebted at least as much to the implementation of a modern view of politics, a view which extended beyond the merely ideological divide between Red and White.

i. FOOD SUPPLY

All sides during the Russian Civil War set themselves the task of ensuring the "proper" distribution of foodstuffs to the population. Both Red and White governments alike pursued this enterprise, with the Whites proving no more sympathetic to the market than their Soviet opponents. Of course, it is not axiomatic that the state be responsible for the task of food supply: liberal theory assigns this role to the market, independent of political structures. The Russian political class's activist view on this issue, an outlook extending to both the White and Red camps, was not only an extension of the paternalist ethos of earlier Imperial officials, but also intersected with the interventionist concerns of the modern state. As part of a larger agenda of "mobilizing" or "organizing" societies for total war, all combatants in World War One (perhaps Germany first and foremost, but including also the United States) concentrated control over the collection and distribution of food supply in the hands of government agencies. Thus we find a concurrence in Red and White views on the state's role in securing an appropriate distribution of food-stuffs to the population.

Yet the task of food supply was not merely a response to the "imperatives of state-building." The concept of "reserves" and, even more so, "surplus" is not an economic criterion, but a politico-moral one. As Gouldner explains, a surplus is not some value-free amount, but is the result of a political contest between the "ruthlessness of the appropriators and the resistance of the appropriated." The decision about why and how much political effort should be invested in securing grain (and concomitantly, how much resistance should be offered to protect one's "own") is essentially the product of a moral judgment.

Given the moral framework for determining surpluses, it should come as no surprise that, while both Red and White regimes alike set themselves the task of food supply, they had radically different conceptions of the constituencies they were addressing and to what end they were doing so. The stark contrast between the two sides in the sphere of punitive measures demonstrates the differing ideas of self and agency that underlay each of their policies. Whereas the Whites viewed an agrarian producer's shortfall as an economic misfortune and decreed administrative confiscation, the Soviet regime saw shortfalls as a political crime and consequently criminalized food supply violations. The two cast the problem in radically different ways: to coax grain from the farmer, or to exhort the citizen? These two contrasting approaches reveal both the gulf between 'traditional' and 'modernist' cosmologies as well as the role of ideology in framing the purpose and objects of policy.

Put crudely, the anti-Soviet Don government's food supply apparatus viewed the agrarian producer as occupying a certain role which he was responsible for performing, but which he was unable to alter or transcend. The Russian Imperial Government, Provisional Government and anti-Soviet Don Government all established obligations for producers to meet. Yet producers were held responsible for failure to meet these obligations only in those cases where they had the grain and failed to turn it over. That is, one could be held responsible only for concealing grain one actually had, but a farmer was not to be punished if he simply did not have the grain. All these regimes pointedly distinguished between "speculation," for which one might be personally prosecuted, and simple "failure to meet obligations," for which one could not. Moreover, naked force or criminal prosecution was not held over violators: at most they were threatened with confiscation or a fine equal to their shortfall. Fundamentally, these regimes did not conceive of coercing individual farmers into overcoming any shortfall they had.

Similarly, these different cosmologies accounted for the radically different explanations each side advanced for shortfalls in their food supply targets. The White food supply apparatus sought to skim off what the traditional agrarian mechanism produced: it did not seek to reorder agrarian relations. The Whites therefore recognized the constraints confronting farmers and blamed "droughts," "seed shortages" and, most commonly, "labor shortages" for the perennial shortfalls the food supply apparatus confronted. One cannot read a report generated by Don government agencies on the progress of the 1919 harvest without coming across repeated reference to the "shortage of labor" [nedostatok rabochikh ruk], a term conspicuously absent from Soviet reports on the 1920 harvest. White administrators felt themselves powerless to overcome such "objective" factors. The Don food supply department, bowing before what it believed were objective constraints, would adjust its demands down if the producers were "unable" to meet them. The essential, unalterable side of the equation was the producer's role.

In contrast, the object of Soviet practices was not so much the actual shortfall itself as the individual who had failed to meet his assignment. The Soviet regime focused its punitive measures on the individual, rather than on his holdings, as part of a larger attempt to inculcate in him a new sense of his obligations. Since the Soviets proceeded from the belief that the world could be changed, they thought of themselves as testing people's intent, not their performance at a given task. This project to engineer the souls of new citizens found expression in Soviet punitive measures in food supply.

From very early on the Soviet state had failed to distinguish between intent and performance by prescribing criminal punishment for individuals who failed to meet their targets--whether they had the grain or not. A Soviet decree from 14 May 1918 described the failure to meet state obligations as a conscious and personal act--the product of a malicious intent--rather than as an unfortunate but unavoidable natural fact. The failure to surrender surpluses [izlishki] testified to "the stubbornness of greedy village kulaks." Consequently, since non-fulfillment was an intentional act, a malicious attempt to strike at the Republic, punishment was focused on the person of the violator. The decree portrayed the violator as "an enemy of the people" who was to be tried for his crime before a revolutionary court. The Commissariat for Food Supply soon after reiterated that "any attempt to avoid the grain monopoly and violation of the plans for supplying central power are to be regarded as a serious crime [prestuplenie] against the starving population of Soviet Russia."

Recall that neither the Imperial government, the Provisional Government or the Don regime had made failure to meet obligations a crime for which the violator was held personally responsible. In those cases where someone had hidden grain from the state, only his property was seized. One can hardly conceive of the Imperial, Provisional or Don governments making failure to sow, or to present a "surplus" on demand, a "crime" for which an individual was personally answerable. I know of no trials or courts-martial in the White zones for individuals who failed to meet their assignments, whereas by late 1919 the Soviet state was instructing its officials to "widely publiciz[e] your repressive actions against those who decline to turn over grain." In the regime's eyes, any shortfall testified not to a shortage of grain but a shortage of will: it presumed recalcitrant farmers were choosing not turn grain over, not that the grain was simply not there.

Nor would the Soviet regime accept any mitigating explanations--such as drought or even the simple lack of grain--for failure to turn over state assessments. Soviet policy recognized only a shortfall in the harvest [nedosev]. Unlike their counterparts, Soviet administrators showed little concern for the reasons for it (be it a seed, labor or "people" shortage). Thus the Soviet outlook was much more voluntaristic in its estimation of the individual's ability to influence agricultural production, and profoundly indifferent to whatever limitations he might face. State assignments set a mark to which the citizen should strive, even if he had to overcome constraints that would previously have prevented him from doing so in his role as farmer. Since the world could be changed, there was a solution--a political solution--to everything. Any obstacle was therefore not the product of objective constraints but due to the opposition of subjective wills.

Obviously, I need not expound upon how the implementation of such views affected the rural population. The Soviet regime's voluntarist expectations were communicated to the agrarian producers quite concretely, first and foremost through the grain requisitioning campaigns. During late 1920 and early 1921, for instance, the Soviet regime dispatched throughout the Don Territory over eight thousand men in "shock groups" and thousands more soldiers in Red Army field units (six thousand Red Army men in Donets district alone) to secure "compliance" in the grain campaign. Here was voluntarism at two levels: an expectation that producers could present surpluses if they truly desired, and faith in the state's own ability to secure this if producers did not. Nor did the regime resort only to brute force. The employment of such force was always framed in legal terms. As they moved throughout the entire Don Territory, shock groups and food supply brigades were invariably accompanied by assizes of the Don Revolutionary Tribunal. The assizes not only directly punished the recalcitrant but served as a didactic tool--or, in the instructions issued by the Don Food Supply Conference, "as a means of agitation and repression." The local press broadcast far and wide the cautionary tale of their activity. Some assizes went so far as to print thousands of broadsheets of their sentences for distribution among the local population.

Of course, what the regime was seeking to convey to the population through agitation and official violence was Marxist ideology. Soviet behavior on the Don was distinct from the equally voluntarist demands of French arm�es revolutionnaires precisely because it was not some generic implementation of modern politics, but Marxism in practice. If a modernist cosmology provided the general belief in mankind's greater ability to re-make the world and described the political realm as the forum for this project, Marxism as ideology furnished the particular articulation of this world and the precise goals of political action. What is distinct about Marxism, then, is not that it is "ideological" or even "voluntaristic", but the particular ways in which Marxism explained agency and its failure. When voluntarism failed, Bolshevism explained it as the nefarious plotting of enemies. Because of its particularly Marxist ideology, in the countryside the regime saw--and acted upon--classes. Its directives focused on--and its courts tried--class enemies.

ii. SURVEILLANCE

So far, so good: a study of food supply practices demonstrates that Marxist ideology, as a specific manifestation of a modern form of politics, did indeed account for profound differences in how people lived and experienced the Soviet regime. Yet a study of surveillance practices demonstrates the limitations of employing ideology in and of itself as an explanatory tool. What I mean by surveillance is information-gathering of a particular type, the specific purpose of which is to observe the population's attitudes. It is the collection of information for political purposes, rather than for some other operational purpose.

I am not inventing this distinction between "intelligence-gathering" and "surveillance"; it is a distinction that contemporaries made by the very terms they employed to describe the two tasks. Denounced as one of the most pernicious manifestations of a totalitarian mindset, surveillance is not a specifically Bolshevik, Marxist or even totalitarian practice--it is a modern one. Surveillance, I believe, was itself part of a broader redefinition of the nature of politics. The purpose of governing came to be seen less as ruling territory and more as governing a population. Concomitantly, the meaning of "sovereignty" shifted from being merely the act of governing itself to a concern for the welfare of the objects of governance, the population. To serve the needs of this new focus of legitimacy, Russia's political elites needed to develop a technical apparatus to generate a "knowledge of state."

Of course, various agencies had long reported on popular attitudes in passing (Okhrana and government reports in the Imperial period; military intelligence and counter-intelligence reports during both World War One and the Civil War). But the creation of agencies whose sole purpose was to describe the population's attitudes was a qualitatively different endeavor. Governmental organs in the Imperial period had gathered information on the population's political views only incidentally. The Imperial apparatus became concerned about popular attitudes only when they threatened public order. It evinced little interest in what the public thought, so long as it did not support the revolutionary movement.

The concern for a governmental state did not originate during the Civil War, but developed in the immediate pre-revolutionary period, as the political elites began to conceptualize the components of the body politic as citizens (agents) rather than mere subjects (that is, objects of administration). It was during the First World War that the employment of surveillance to further this governmental endeavor came into its own. As Russia prepared to mobilize a modern conscript army to fight what Russia's opponent Ludendorff was to describe as 'total war', the Russian Imperial Army wished to know what its conscripts thought and felt. To this end the Army in July 1914 established "military-censorship departments." These organs were charged with opening and reading every letter sent to and from the Army. The purpose of this massive interception effort was not active and interdictive, but passive and observational. The departments were not established to hunt out "traitors" or "unpatriotic" soldiers (few reports were forwarded for further action), but for the purpose of gathering information on the troops' "mood" [nastroenie] or "spirit" [dukh]. The departments' main function was to prepare summaries at regular intervals according to a standardized form: censors registered each letter as "patriotic", "cheerful" or "somber."

Military censorship departments continued their activity under the Provisional Government, and were abolished only with the October Revolution. While they were reintroduced in the Red Army in November 1918, the task and structure of the Soviet organs did not fundamentally differ from that of their prerevolutionary predecessors. Again, the purpose was less to interdict (again, relatively few reports were actually forwarded for further action) than to observe. The censorship departments used the knowledge they gathered to compile various summaries. The real goal of this massive effort was to discover what people were thinking.

Of course, it is not difficult to demonstrate the Soviet concern for surveillance. While the first Soviet institution to employ "summaries" on a massive scale was the Red Army, this concern soon became suffused throughout virtually the entire Soviet apparatus. The ubiquitous "summaries on the population's mood" [svodki o nastroenii naseleniia] represent the classic artifact of this concern. Again, the Red Army led the way: from early autumn 1918 onward, political departments began compiling regular summaries on the mood of both the troops and the civilian population. Political departments in each division, Army and Front issued daily political summaries. These summaries--and the laconic standardized categories drawn up to typify the population's moods ("clearly counter-revolutionary"; "concerned-wavering"; "reliably revolutionary" and so forth)--rapidly became a veritable genre in its own right. They were generated by virtually every major Soviet institution: the Army, the Party, the Soviet civil apparatus, the Cheka. The summaries testify to the Soviet state's burning desire to know the population's "mood" and stand as a testament to how they institutionalized this concern in agencies charged with uncovering it.

But the Soviets were not alone in pursuing their surveillance project. Virtually all their opponents in the Civil War practiced surveillance to a greater or lesser degree. It might be argued that the Whites merely sought to counter Soviet surveillance activities. Certainly this was a consideration. Yet some White movements embarked on surveillance projects of their own even prior to the institution of similar organs by the Soviets (the anti-Soviet Don government established an "information department" in May 1918, months before the analogous Soviet effort got off the ground). The experience of 1917 seems to have impressed upon all participants (White military authorities aside) the desirability of identifying the population's aspirations in order to engage them most productively. Even local insurgencies--anti-Soviet ones--organized "information departments" and "political departments." Surveillance had become virtually a genetic component of post-1917 administrative thought.

For the anti-Soviet movements, the surveillance effort was an entirely civilian affair. But it was very well-established. The "Don Department of Information" [DDI], for example, consisted of a central administration in Novocherkassk, nine district departments, each of which supervised six to ten centers, around which six to ten sub-centers were grouped. By August 1919 the entire network numbered roughly two hundred sub-centers, sixty centers, nine district departments and the central administration. And while the DDI was the primary institution charged with surveillance, a welter of other institutions also devoted themselves to the "information" endeavor.

"Information" encompassed two related tasks: informing the population of the government's views; and reporting the population's "mood" to the government. To communicate the government's agenda, the information agency published several of its own newspapers and controlled the content of all other press reporting. To establish a permanent presence among the population, the agency established a network of centers and sub-centers throughout the region. Most intriguing, however, was another tool for keeping the population abreast of the government's activity--the reading-hut [izba-chital'nia]. Clearly, one need not have a specifically Soviet or Marxist mindset to conceive of such things.

The DDI also sought to determine what the population was thinking. The Don government set up special courses to train its agent-instructors and established an entire network of secret informers. These agents then traveled undercover throughout the Territory in the guise of actors, refugees, students, railway workers, teachers and even obstetricians. Others traveled openly as lecturers, communicating the government's views and activities to remote communities. From the regular reports of its agents and from the DDI information points, the central administration then compiled its own daily summaries. These summaries were organized topically, with each topic assigned a letter. It is no coincidence that the first letter of the alphabet was reserved for reports on "the mood of the population."

During the Revolution and Civil War, Red and White alike sought to institute a new form of administration by actively engaging the population. To do so, both developed a technical apparatus to generate a "knowledge of state." Just as in the Protestant Reformation, when both Protestant and Catholic churches alike inculcated a more doctrinal affiliation among their parishioners, so too the diverse political movements in the Russian Revolution all sought a new structural relationship with the population. While its victory in the Civil War presented the Soviet state with the opportunity for more fully and totally pursuing surveillance within an explicitly Marxist framework, the project itself had begun in the Tsarist Army.

Nor was this phenomenon limited to Russia and its Revolution. Surveillance, as practiced by White and Red, paralleled similar measures introduced in the British, French and German Armies during the First World War. In Weimar Germany, "strategies of surveillance that were originated in the war were eagerly introduced into civilian life after the war." Surveillance bridged various "ideological" divides. German citizens found themselves under the surveillance of both the myriad Nazi institutions as well as those of the regime's "ideological" opponent, the German Social-Democratic Party (which engaged in this project from exile, no less). Even England, home of empiricism and good sense, saw the establishment of "mass observation" in the 1930s, begun as an academic endeavor but later adopted by the government during the Second World War. The express purpose of Mass-Observation was "the observation of everyone by everyone, including themselves." Between the wars, the OGPU was far from the only agency assiduously gathering all it could on its own population's thoughts and attitudes.

My purpose in this paper has not been to argue that "ideology" was not a fundamental aspect of the Soviet regime, nor to claim that the Soviet Union was merely practicing the same 'modern' politics as everyone else. It has been my contention that one should understand Bolshevism not solely as an ideology, but as a particular manifestation of a modern conception of politics. What was modern about this outlook was not that the regime employed new tools to an age-old end, to "seize power" or "maintain control," but that modern politics posited different goals and focused on new objects -- the 'population' and the 'self.'

Yet I too wish an ideological understanding of the Soviet regime. What I have argued is that such an approach should seek ideology in its practice, not as some disembodied obsession with 'ideas.' Thus, in analyzing the place of Communist ideology in transforming society, one might transform the question from one of "continuity or change"--or the even less specific observation that there was "continuity and change"--along more interesting avenues of inquiry, such as: "how specifically did Communism integrate and deploy existing power networks"; "which mechanisms of control did they choose to elaborate--and in what manner"; and, once having identified what preexisting power networks Communism had elaborated upon, "what new structures of control did Communism develop--and for what purpose"?

Continuity and change are not zero-sum propositions. The answers we give depend less on the question itself than our reasons for asking it. Continuity? Certainly--if one wishes to discuss the shift from a territorial to a governmental conception of administration and the employment of surveillance which resulted. Change? Without doubt--if one wishes to show how the regime sought to discipline the population into a new view of agency and demonstrate what groups it focused this effort upon. There is no answer to 'continuity and change' because it is not meant as a question in itself; it is merely a tool for asking other questions.