William D. Prigge is a professor of history at South Dakota State University. He is the author of The Bearslayers: Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists (2015).
Marius Tăríţă in an independent researcher in Chișinău, Moldova.
This post derives from a recent publication in Europe-Asia Studies.
In 1959, the tiny republic of Latvia experienced one of the most traumatic leadership purges of Soviet history since the death of Stalin—with some two thousand Communist Party members purged. While it did not result in the deaths of those “cleansed,” it marked a dramatic departure in policy, which many Latvians today remember as the collapse of the last bulwark against Russification. Those purged were the Latvian national communists, informally led by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Edvards Berklavs. The Latvian national communists rose rapidly to the heights of republican leadership after the Second World War, only to experience an even more rapid descent beginning in 1959.
From their high perch, the Latvians carried out an audacious agenda. For a Soviet society that privileged “friendship of the peoples” over national particularism, Berklavs’ policies included the vigorous promotion of ethnic Latvians, nearly halting the influx of non-Latvians to Riga with internal passport restrictions, and the initiation of Latvian language requirements for certain areas of work critical to the public.
Meanwhile, new leadership was emerging in the equally tiny republic of Moldova, located, like Latvia, on the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. Compared to other Soviet republics, it was annexed late, in 1939-40 (the Bessarabian portion), and then reoccupied after the Nazi withdrawal. Yet its leadership developed very differently from Latvia’s. Moldova’s Ivan Bodiul went from being that republic’s Second Secretary in 1959 to its First, a post he retained from 1961 to 1980.
Like Berklavs, he was caught up in a massive Union-wide leadership turnover during this period, but with very different outcomes. Most historians consider this Union-wide event as a reaction to localism gone too far. Many Party members in Moldova likewise lost their posts during this period, with a turnover rate as high as 39% in 1961. The reason, though, was not nationalism. Instead, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had embarked on titanic struggle against the Party’s older generation, determined to replace the stale and lethargic with the fresh and dynamic.
Two of his young footsoldiers were Ivan Bodiul and Eduards Berklavs. The former was grey, quiet, and plodding; the latter, a colorful, brash force of nature. Each in his own way targeted the older Party generation on Khrushchev’s behalf, as well pursuing their respective republics’ visions.
Bodiul was arguably the more successful of the two, although his reputation today is hardly as a vigorous defender of national interests. Rather, most of his countrymen see him as a Ukrainian with a trace of Moldovan ancestry who pursued a course servile to Brezhnev and utterly intolerant of any signs of local nationalism.
The fact that Dumitru Cornovan remained the only ethnic Bessarabian on the Moldovan Bureau for a decade after his appointment in 1961 reinforces this perception of weakness in the advancement of locals. This view stands in stark contrast to the heroic image of Berklavs—standing up to Moscow, enduring exile to Siberia, and finally being unceremoniously ejected from the Party. Yet at least one Bessarabian Party member conceded in his memoirs that “it was Bodiul who made the first steps, empty, timid and uncertain, in the policy of promoting personnel on the basis of proportionality among representatives of national minorities living in the republic.” In fact, Bessarabian representation in the Party had greatly improved by 1980 under Bodiul.
If Latvia ultimately failed as a Soviet republic, how then can one analyze the different outcomes among some of the other satellite states? Did specific systems within each republic inform their course? Did chance, individual factors like specific leaders and their respective leadership styles make the difference? British sociologist Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration helps make sense of this seeming randomness. According to Giddens, change is not produced by individual actors alone, but results from a complex back-and-forth among actors and the structures of the societies in which they live.
While these structures are constantly created anew, they generally continue with old forms rather than changing to something entirely different. Trust in the unspoken rules that make up these structures, based on confidence from past success, are the binding glue that limit the changes individual actors can impose. According to Giddens, “routine persists through social change of even the most dramatic type.” Change, then, requires transformative capacity from both individual actors and societal structures.
Thus, societal structures both “enable and constrain” transformative action. Through this lens, we can compare the leadership styles of Berklavs and Bodiul as to how successfully each effected change. We identify at least three key elements: 1) charisma; 2) a willingness on the part of change actors not to stray too far from trusted norms, even when altering them; 3) a decline in the trust of accepted norms because of threats caused by the continued status quo.
Ultimately, Berklavs was the less successful agent of change. While he had the charisma necessary to effect change, he fell too far outside the norms of what was acceptable to the structure of Latvian society. Specifically, his desire to alter the social structure toward greater acceptance of nationalism (within the confines of Marxist theory). While Bodiul’s charisma did not equal Berklavs’, he did consider himself an activist Second Secretary. Giddens’ concept of trust was also central to the performance of the two leaders. Berklavs understood Moscow did not trust him to be Second Secretary of Latvia, even though there was strong support for such a move within the local Party. Bodiul, knowing that he did not have Moscow’s full trustduring his first years in power, was careful to keep his behavior acceptable to the center.
As tensions between Romania and the Soviet Union mounted—Bessarabians being considered a Romanian-speaking fifth column with potential to act against the Kremlin—Moscow valued a steady hand on the helm. Bodiul’s youth and relative inexperience were already strikes against him, but in his own way, he was a transformative leader—more so than Berklavs. For Bodiul to succeed as an agent of change, the threat posed by the preservation of the status quo had to be imminent, and any changes had to be carried out within strict bounds.
According to Giddens, continuity in society’s structure is neither automatic nor assured. Instead, it is based on confidence, which in turn is based on experience; that is to say, an understanding that the structure has provided security and will continue to do so. As that trust begins to falter, then the structure itself aids the individual in becoming an agent of change. When Bodiul arrived in Moldova, much of the leadership from the older generation resisted his “fresh breeze.” But what was apparent to enough people around and above Bodiul, particularly Khrushchev, was that the cost of doing nothing was becoming much greater than the cost of change.
The state had stopped developing and was going backwards. This situation explains Bodiul’s successful early efforts as second and first secretary in the rapid replacement of the older generation with more competent leadership from the younger generation. This effort was harmed in Latvia because Berklavs afforded the older generation (inside and outside of Latvia) with an opportunity to purge the Latvian younger generation, based on charges of nationalism.
At the Union-wide level, what was said about Bodiul could also be applied to Khrushchev as he, too, sought to replace the old guard, albeit on a much larger scale. The high turnover rate in the republican Central Committees in the years 1958-1962 indicates that Khruschev was a successful change agent, perhaps for many of the same reasons as Bodiul.
