著者

鈴木 博信

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

桃山学院大学社会学論集 (ISSN:02876647)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.31, no.2, pp.1-16, 1998-03-31

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Western leaders and mass media, including their Japanese counterparts, quick to claim "victory" in the cold war, never took a close look at the "losers". It was assumed that Russians would take to Western forms of economic and polifical development as eagerly as they had bought Western jeans and rock music tapes on the black market. The West's, that is, our biggest mistake was to have expected more than Russia was able to become. We did not fully understand how sick Soviet society was. There was, on top of everything else, no trusted new "elite" to replace the old. A truly non-partisan civil service has always eluded Russian governments. And the so-called democrats or reformers in power are themselves nomenklatura people, their children and their acquaintances. In a word, the system never collapsed after August, 1991, despite the appearance. S. Handelman, Canadian joumalist and author of ≪Comrade Criminal≫, elucidates, in his work, that the bureaucrats and managers of the former regime acquired new capital and political strength by exploiting the legal vacuum left by departing Communist authorities. Thus, a post-Soviet mafiya emerged, in corporating (1)the most entrepreneurial element of the former nomenklatura and (2)the gangster capitalism of the new. The Comrade criminal-the personification of this new force that combines the just mentioned two elements-is now setting the rules of game in Russia. Inspired by Mr. Handelman's sardonic insight, I try to trace here, both on local and national level, though in a very sketchy way, how the nomenklatura suruives. And by drawing this sketch, I want to clarify the essence of the organisation, that had been called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.