The Executive Committee

Ultimately, administrative responsibility for municipal management rests with the local soviet's executive committee and its departments, administrations, and standing commissions.^[53] The executive committee retains authority to act on a daily basis to ensure that all aspects of state economic, social, and cultural policies are implemented. National legislation grants the committee a broad mandate to manage the activities of municipal and other agencies operating within its jurisdiction.^[54] The executive committee (led by its chairman, deputy chairmen, and secretary, operating through its organizational-instructional department), prepares the agenda for sessions of the full soviet and informs deputies of important developments within their jurisdiction.^[55] Finally, interlevel communications with other jurisdictions in the Soviet federal system are conducted through the executive committee.^[56]

The executive committee varies in size according to its level of responsibility in the overall state hierarchy. Typically, the executive committee, in addition to its officers, includes the managers of major industrial enterprises and other institutions within the soviet's province, and the first secretary of its equivalent Communist Party committee.^[57] In Leningrad's Kalininskii District, for example, executive committee Chairman Shekalin and party committee First Secretary Grachev frequently operated as a single managerial team for their district's development.^[58] Shekalin and Grachev's cooperation was facilitated by the physical location of both institutions in a single building, an arrangement frequently found in Leningrad and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

Officers of the executive committee share their soviet's broad com-

petence. The executive committee's legal counsel, for example, serves deputies, departments, and commissions regardless of specific content.^[59] Legal consultants to a local soviet may also provide services for local citizens. One former district legal official now residing outside the USSR described her duties to American University criminologist Louise Shelley, who reported:

Her work was closely connected with the diverse operations of city government and the people of her community. Her job was a juggling act between the protection of the bureaucratic interests of the distant authorities and the needs of the people who appealed to her for assistance. Because the power and the financial resources of city government are limited, its ability to effect changes requested by its constituents is similarly limited.^[60]

To assist officials with general responsibility for the entire scope of soviet activities, the executive committee delegates daily management in specific areas to departments and administrations, and monitors the bureaucracy through a system of standing commissions.^[61] The departments and administrations constitute the managerial infrastructure for the soviet's actions. The size and number of such offices depend on the level of the jurisdiction in question. By the early 1980s, the Leningrad city soviet operated an extensive bureaucracy through more than three dozen administrations, plus another dozen departments, directly employing approximately 2 percent of the city's workforce.^[62]

The executive committee oversees the work of its bureaucracy through a network of standing commissions. Each commission consists of a number of elected deputies, as well as several citizens. Such commissions are charged with general supervisory responsibility for state institutions operating within their area of competence.^[63] The composition of each commission is established at the opening session of the newly elected soviet. While the number and purview of commissions will vary according to the size and needs of a given jurisdiction, nearly every soviet will establish an auditing commission; commissions for planning and budget, socialist legality and public order, and youth affairs; and more specialized bodies for specific economic, social, and cultural spheres. Commissions that are attached directly to the executive committee are usually organized to supervise council operational functions, while those serving the soviet in its entirety tend to be specialized according to substantive policy areas.^[64] Both categories of commission assist the executive committee with general planning and managerial responsibilities.^[65]

Despite their large constitutional mandates, local soviets have encountered persistent difficulty in asserting their authority over local institutions, whose primary loyalty is to all-union ministries in Moscow and union-republic ministries in Moscow and the republic capital. All-

union ministries are directly subordinate to the USSR Council of Ministers, while union-republic ministries are subordinate to republic councils of ministers, which in turn are subordinate to the USSR Council of Ministers. In other words, all-union ministries have no republic-level counterpart and operate as a single, centralized unit for the country as a whole. Union-republic ministries, by contrast, are responsible for coordinating the work of ministries of the same name and similar purpose operating within each of the Soviet Union's constituent union republics.

Prior to 1977, for example, the Soviet community of legal-affairs specialists, as well as many regional planners and politicians, had begun to express heightened concern over the inability of existing institutions to deal effectively with the conflict between territorial interests and those of various economic branches and sectors. Jerry Hough attributed this increased anxiety in part to the higher educational levels and growing economic power of the urban sector. He also noted the limited impact of piecemeal reform attempts, such as the much-ballyhooed effort dating from the late 1950s to bestow on local soviets the responsibility of "single client" (edinyi zakazchik ) for housing, cultural-social, and commercial services within their jurisdictions.^[66] In other words, the local soviet could attain sole responsibility for ordering the necessary provisions for such services. The USSR Council of Ministers, it should be noted, reinforced that statute in 1978.^[67]

A flurry of legislative activity by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet and the Communist Party's Central Committee similarly has sought to invigorate municipal agencies down to the level of the urban district (raion ), an administration unit that, while generally regarded as powerless in confrontations with ministries, is nevertheless important in the provision of day-to-day services to the population as a whole.^[68] Jeffrey Hahn reports that local governmental institutions in the Soviet Union can and do successfully represent those who elect them.^[69] Hahn also notes, however, that only a few Soviet citizens take advantage of the opportunities that do exist for participation.

From a slightly different perspective, Ronald Hill indicates that a number of Soviet scholars have proposed new powers for local soviets that could alter the balance of power between municipal and ministerial operations.^[70] According to Hill, specialists centered in and around the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of State and Law have urged that legislation specify the "competence" of municipal agencies, as well as their more traditional "rights and obligations." Such advocates, Hill continues, also argue for a strengthening of the economic powers of local state agencies as well as greater legislative attention directed toward relationships between municipal and ministerial agencies. The framers of the 1977 constitution must have been aware of these controversies and may have been among the participants.^[71] This presumed

knowledge accentuates the significance of provisions eventually ratified in the so-called Brezhnev Constitution that still governs the Soviet state.

Taken together, these constitutional and legislative assertions provide the legal framework within which local officials function. They define the juridical rules of the contest for municipal administrators. In any legal system, of course, interpretation and actual implementation are often more significant than published codes in influencing behavior. This is particularly true of the Soviet Union, where legal pronouncements often represent statements of what ought to be, instead of reflecting what has actually come to pass. While recognizing this, we can nevertheless conclude that legislative activity over the past two decades or so has enlarged the bounds placed around municipal elites in their dealings with the center, thus expanding the room for maneuvering at the periphery.^[72] The 1977 constitution, legislation, and resolutions of the 1970s taken as a whole thus represent a loose municipal charter defining the rules of the Soviet urban contest for such major municipal institutions as the city soviet and its executive agencies.