policy. Above all he was amilitarist, increasing defence expenditure by 50% in
his first five-year plan, and by even more later. In this context he fought an
expensive and ultimately futilearms racewith the USA, the costs of which
the Soviet economy could not bear, and increased the threat of nuclear attack
on the Eastern European countries of theSoviet blocby using them as bases
for nuclear missiles ranged against EuropeanNATO countries. He was
responsible for Soviet intervention in the Third World, for support of Vietnam
(seeVietnam War), for invading Afghanistan (seeAfghan War), and above
all for brutally suppressing the Czechoslovakian liberalization movement of
- It was after the 1968 intervention that he coined what was to be known
as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, proclaiming that the Soviet Union and other
communist countries were entitled to suppress anti-communist movements in
other socialist societies because fraternal solidarity overcame any ‘bourgeois’
doctrines of national sovereignty. His complete refusal to modernize the Soviet
economy, or to allow any freedom of expression, led to the economic and
social collapse inherited by Gorbachev. His personal indifference to the
increasingly widespread corruption of the Soviet e ́lite, including several
members of his own family, may have done as much as his economic and
foreign policy failures to prepare the Soviet Union for the radical departure
from tradition which followed so soon after his death, and indeed opened the
cracks which led within a decade to the disintegration of the Union.
Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy, in its most general sense, describes a way of organizing the
activities of any institution so that it functions efficiently and impersonally.
The major theorist of bureaucracy was MaxWeber, and most subsequent
research and theorizing has closely followed his analysis. For Weber, and most
subsequent writers, bureaucracy is characterized by a set of basic organizational
principles. The most important are: (1) that office-holders in an institution are
placed in a clear hierarchy representing a chain of command; (2) that they are
salaried officials whose only reward comes from the salary and not directly from
their office; (3) that their authority stems entirely from their role and not from
some private status, and that the authority exists only in, and as far as it is
needed to carry out, that role; (4) that appointments to bureaucratic positions
are determined by tests of professional skill and competence and not for
considerations of status or patronage; (5) that strict rules exist on the basis of
which bureaucrats make their decisions, so that personal discretion is mini-
mized; and (6) that such institutions collect and collate detailed records and
operate on the basis of technical expertise. For Weber bureaucracy, which he
saw as a necessary development of the modern world, developed along with
the shift from a ‘traditional’ towards a predominantly ‘rational-legal’ orienta-
Bureaucracy