Corruption Control and Regime-Building in the Soviet Union and Communist China

• In Event: The Politics of Corruption and Anti-corruption in China

Abstract

This paper is a comparative-historical study of elite corruption crackdowns as an integral part of regime-building in the Soviet Union and China under communism. Despite the communist ideology’s promise of delivering a classless society and eliminating exploitation, elite corruption had plagued communist regimes ever since their founding. As both durable communist regimes born out of violent indigenous revolutions, the Soviet Union and Communist China were no exception. How to control elite corruption, therefore, had taken on particular significance and become central to regime-building ever since the founding of these regimes. This paper argues that different developmental trajectories and the different variants of communism pursued by the Soviet Union and China led to varying problems of elite corruption and divergent regime responses to these problems, directly contributing to these regimes’ respective fates. It will first examine the evolution of regime efforts to control elite corruption in the Soviet Union since the establishment of the Soviet regime until the Soviet collapse. This evolution consisted of three distinctive periods, including the initial ideologically-driven anticorruption efforts under Lenin and Stalin; the proliferation of elite corruption and weak anticorruption efforts in the context of post-Stalinist “developed socialism” and Brezhnev’s “trust in cadres;” and finally, the post-Brezhnev damage-control anticorruption campaigns under Andropov, Chernenko and the last Soviet leader Gorbachev. The paper will then turn to the case of communist China by focusing on elite corruption control during three periods: the early socialist transformation when cracking down on corruption became a crucial part of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat; the era of Mao’s mass campaigns against party bureaucratization and Soviet-style “revisionism;” and finally, the Deng Xiaoping era that witnessed an explosion of elite corruption and largely ineffective and inconsistent anticorruption efforts as ideology took a backseat. The paper will conclude by highlighting the most important sources and points of divergence between the approaches to elite corruption in these two historical cases, setting the stage for different challenges of post-communist elite corruption control in contemporary Russia and China.

Author

• Cheng Chen, SUNY, Albany