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Measuring the motives of Soviet leadership and Soviet society: Congruence reflected or congruence created?
MEASURING THE MOTIVES OF SOVIET LEADERSHIP AND SOVIET SOCIETY: CONGRUENCE REFLECTED OR CONGRUENCE CREATED?
David P. Schmitt Bradley University
David C. Winter* University
of Michigan
We explore the relationship between the motive profiles of Soviet leadership and Soviet society, using the first Communist Party Congress speeches of four Soviet leaders (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev). During the two years before the leaders’ speeches, the societal motive profile tended to diverge from that reflected in the speeches. During the two years after the speeches, however, societal motives tended to converge with leadership motives. These results suggest that in Soviet society, the leadership shaped or influenced societal motives (i.e., the “popular will”), rather than reflecting them.
According to the stereotypes of both political philosophy and everyday ideology, democratic leaders reflect the will of the people, while dictatorships or totalitarian leaders impose their will upon the people. While the “will of the people” is usually understood in terms of sets of policies and preferences, Winter (1987) showed that at the presidential level of the United States political system, there was also a psychological convergence between the leader and the led. Specifically, Winter demonstrated that the greater the correspondence or convergence of motive profiles (that is, levels of achievement, affiliation, and power motivation) between a U.S. president and U.S. society at the time of his inauguration, the greater that presidents’ electoral success (rs = +.60 between convergence and percentage of the total popular vote received, and +.46
* Direct all correspondence to: David G. Winter, Department of Psychology, University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-I 109: e-maik [email protected]. Leadership Quarterly, 9(3), 293.307. Copyright 0 1998 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1048-9843
University
of Michigan,
525 E.
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Table 1 Correlates of the Achievement,
Political Behavior
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AffXiation, and Power Motives Motive
Characferistic
Achievement
Associated
actions
Moderate risks, using information to modify performance, entrepreneurial success. dishonest means when necessary to reach goal
Cooperative and friendly under “safe” conditions, defensive and even hostile under threat
Leadership and high morale of subordinates, if high in sense of responsibility Profligate impulsivity, if low in sense of responsibility
Negotiating
style
Cooperative “rational”
Cooperative under “safe” conditions, defensive and hostile under threat
Exploitative, aggressive
Friends and similar others
Political “experts”
Peacemaking and arms limitation Vulnerability to scandal
Charisma War and aggression Independent foreign policy Rated greatness
Smith (1992, chaps. 13 and 15)
Smith (1992, chaps. 19,21)
Seeks help from:
Technical
Politicalpsychological manifestations
Frustration
Major reference
Smith
SOlUTe:
Adapted
from Winter
(1996,
and
experts
(1992,chap. 9) p. 139)
between convergence and margin of popular-vote victory). In this paper, we apply Winter’s general technique to a study of four major leaders of the Soviet Union-Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev-in order to explore the relationships between the leadership and society motive profiles in a political system organized very differently, as a dictatorship of the Communist Party. The basic research questions guiding the research are these: Over the seventy-plus years of the Soviet Union’s existence, did its party leaders rejZect the motivational forces of Soviet society, or did they create or shupe those forces? More fundamentally, does the answer to the question of whether leaders follow or shape societal trends depend upon the organization of the society’s political system?
MOTIVES
AND POLITICAL
BEHAVIOR
Personality is composed of many different psychological elements: motives, traits, cognitive structures (beliefs, attribution patterns, self-concept, and so forth), and social contexts. Over the past few decades, political psychologists have developed methods of measuring
Motives
of Soviet Leadership
and Soviet Society
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many of these elements at a distance, without direct access to the persons being assessed (Hermann, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980a, 1980b; Rubenzer, Faschingbauer, & Ones, 1996; Simonton, 1987, 1988; Suedfeld, 1994; Tetlock, 1983, 1984; Winter, 1991a, 1992; Winter, Hermann, Weintraub, & Walker, 1991; Zullow & Seligman, 1990). Motives refer to that element of personality involving broad classes of goals, for which people strive by employing a variety of functionally equivalent but superficially quite different alternative instrumental behaviors. (In contrast, traits refer to bundles of highly intercorrelated stylistic behaviors; see Winter, John, Stewart, Duncan, & Klohnen, 1998). While theories of motivation are as old as Empedocles (a Sth-century B.C. Greek philosopher), there is an emerging scientific consensus that three motives-for power (or dominance), for affiliation (or love), and for achievement-describe the most important dimensions of human motivated behavior (see Atkinson, 1958; Smith, 1992; Winter, 1991b, 1996, chap. 5). Previous research in political psychology has demonstrated that these three motives are related to many important outcomes, as shown in Table 1. For example, power motivation has been associated with war (Winter, 1980, 1993), and the power and affiliation motives have been linked with foreign policy preferences. Thus Hermann (1980b) found that in the late 1970s Soviet Politburo members high in the affiliation motive and low in power tended to favor detente policies more than did Politburo members with the opposite motive pattern. Winter (1991a) has adapted the empirically-derived and validated scoring systems for imagery of these motives in order to measure them at a distance through content analysis: both for individual political actors (using speeches, diaries, and interviews) and groups, collectivities, and even entire cultures (using such collective products as diplomatic documents, folktales, and popular literature). Winter (1987) was able to study the relation of leaders and followers because the motive-scoring technique could be applied to both sources: individual presidents and U.S. society. For presidents, the first inaugural address is a relatively standardized situation, a tahula ram on which the new president is expected to write the goals and sketch the overall tone of the incoming administration (see Donley & Winter, 1970; Winter, 1987; Winter & Stewart, 1977). For U.S. society, Winter took motive scores for each decade from the 1790s through the 196Os, based on popular literature (novels, children’s readers, and hymns), from data previously collected by McClelland (1975, chap. 9).
STUDYING
SOVIET LEADERS AND SOCIETY
In adapting Winter’s technique to studying the Soviet Union, the first problem is to identify the principal leaders. Scholars of the Soviet system are in general agreement that the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party (first secretary or head of the party secretariat), rather than president or prime minister, was the “real center of power” in the Soviet Union after 1924 (Schapiro, 1970, p. 319; see also Hough & Fainsod, 1979), though of course a given person sometimes occupied more than one of these positions. Stalin was chosen General Secretary by the party Central Committee; later General Secretaries were chosen by the Political Bureau (or Politburo) of the Central Committee. While new Soviet leaders did not make inaugural addresses in the manner of an American president, they did make a lengthy speech (usually several hours long), typically titled
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“Political Report [or Organizational Report] of the Central Committee,” to each Communist Party Congress. Party congresses were large gatherings in Moscow of thousands of party officials from throughout the Soviet Union. They occurred every two or three years during the first decade of the Soviet Union, much less often under Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s and then about every four years from Stalin’s death down to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 199 1. These “report” speeches by the General Secretary reviewed events and prospects on a variety of topics, and set the tone for the congress. In an analogy to Winter’s (1987) procedure, we selected each General Secretary’s first speech as General Secretary to a party congress. Soviet Leaders or Soviet leadership?
Whose motives are actually reflected in these speeches? In the American popular mind (during the Cold War, at any rate), all power and policies in the Soviet Union derived from the will of a single omnipotent individual-usually personified in the image of Stalin as absolute dictator. This is, of course, a naive view. Over the seventy-plus years of the Soviet Union’s existence, Communist Party leaders shared power in different ways, varying from “oligarchic” to “bureaucratic.” For example, Schapiro noted the constraints on an individual’s power entailed by the requirement of collective concurrence in appointments (pp. 578-579). Adams (1990) and Bishop (1990) detail the ways in which Gorbachev’s power rested upon a variety of coalitions, constituencies, and organizational mechanisms. For this reason, as Stewart (1977) points out, published statements and speeches such as the General Secretary’s reports must be viewed as measured, deliberate, and calculated, rather than spontaneous-at best reflecting “variations in perceptions by the [party] elite of approved, or useful, public images rather than the actual private beliefs and attitudes” (p. 247). Given these considerations, it seems appropriate to think of the General Secretary’s reports to Party Congress as a collective product; motive scores derived from them, therefore, are to be attributed to the elite party leadership circles as well as (or instead of) only to the General Secretary.’ Conceptual Status of the “Motives”
of Collectivities
Individual persons are said to have motives; but if we apply motive measurement techniques to what are undoubtedly group products, how do we understand the resulting scores as the “motives” of collectivities or groups? In previous research, the techniques used to measure motives in individuals (content analysis of thematic apperceptive or other verbal material; see Smith, 1992), when applied to the verbal productions of collectivities, institutions, or groups (see Winter, 199 la, 1992) generally predict the same kinds of actions or outcomes as they do among individuals. But what do such collectivity-based scores man? We can think of them as a proxy for an aggregation of the scores of those individuals who make up the group or control the institution. (This would be analogous to the procedure of Kock, 1965, who obtained overall motive “scores” for a series of factories by combining the scores of the individual managers of each factory, each weighted by that person’s level of power.) Alternatively, collective scores can also be thought of as reflecting nonmotivational concepts-for example, ideological or psychological climate, values, or even short-term
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of Soviet Leadership
and Soviet Society
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“mood”-concepts that some researchers may find more appropriate when making attributions to collectivities (see McClelland, 1985, pp. 422, 470). For example, McClelland (1961/1976) suggested that a motive score derived from popular literature could be conceptualized differently: an ideological climate variable which can affect child-rearing but also many other things in the environment of an individual in the society. It shapes...ideas about what is important; it affects the sanctions that a society imposes for various types of behavior; it sets the norms....Thus I find no real difficulty in...renaming [achievement motivation] “the social pressure to achieve”. . when thinking of it as a societal ideology. (p. E)
As
Regardless of the precise conceptual status of collectivity-based motive scores, for present purposes the important point is that they predict the same kinds of actions and outcomes as do the scores based on individual verbal material. Measuring
the Motives of Soviet Society
How can we measure the motives of “Soviet society” over seventy-plus years? Following the work of McClelland (1961/1976, 1975) and Winter (1987), one obvious source of data is popular literature. For reasons of economy in scoring, we were limited to using English-language sources. For the period from 1931 onward, the journal Soviet Literature (titled International Literature until 1946), published in Moscow, gave English translations of current popular literature from the Soviet Union. For the period before 1931, we relied on English-language anthologies of Soviet literature. Framing Hypotheses
Given these particular ways of measuring the motives of Soviet leaders and Soviet society, the research question of interest can be phrased more precisely as follows: What is the relation between the motives of the Soviet leadership, as reflected in the speeches of the Communist Party General Secretaries, and the motives of Soviet society, as reflected in popular literature?2 Of course we have no ultimate criterion of electoral success, such as the vote-margins used by Winter in the case of U.S. presidents and society, but studying leader-society relations over time can enable us to make an equivalent analysis for the Soviet Union. Thus, if the similarity or convergence between the motive profiles of the speeches and those of the society tends to increase (or the discrepancy tends to diminish) during the two years immediately before the General Secretary’s speech, then it suggests that the motive profile of the party leadership may be reflecting the goals and concerns of the larger society. (Alternatively, such a trend suggests that the new General Secretary was chosen, at least in part, because he somehow reflected societal concerns.) Such processes may be deliberate on the part of Politburo leaders, but they may also operate implicitly, outside of direct awareness (see Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). While the mechanisms of leadership influence and leader-selection (deliberation and voting by a small elite group) may be different from those occurring in a democracy, the essential result would then be similar, in the sense that leadership articulation of goals and/or leader selection reflect some kind of leader-society congruence.
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If, on the other hand, the similarity or convergence between the two motive profiles tend to increase only in the two years after the General Secretary’s speech, then one of two alternatives to the “reflection” hypothesis is suggested: 1. Once articulated, leadership concerns and motives might somehow “mold” popular motives. This is essentially the “totalitarian” model, that the leadership creates leader-follower consensus by changing or shaping the motives of the followers. Such an hypothesis suggests that any leader-society match is created by the leadership, rather than being an (implicit) factor in the Politburo’s selection of the new General Secretary. 2. Alternatively, however, in articulating concerns and/or selecting a leader, Politburo members may (at least implicitly) be trying to discern the future motive trends (rather than the past track) of Soviet society-to estimate thefirure popular will, as it were-and then to articulate goals and select leaders who will match these trends. (This is a crude version of the Leninist theory that the Communist Party is the “vanguard” of the “true interests” of the people.) While these two hypotheses are different from each other, they both contrast sharply with the “democratic” model of leaders selected to match the e_ri.sring psychological dynamics of followers.
METHOD Selection of Material Speeches of the General
to be Scored
Secretaries
From the formation of the Soviet Union in 19 17 to its final dissolution in 199 1, four General Secretaries gave a usable “Political Report,” “Organizational Report,” or simply “Report” speech to the first party congress after their election: Josef Stalin (1924; published in Stalin, 1924/1953), Nikita Khrushchev (1956), Leonid Brezhnev (1966), and Mikhail Gorbachev (1986). While Lenin, as paramount leader, did give a “Political Report” to the Seventh Party Congress on March 7, 1918, only months after the Bolshevik Revolution, conditions were so unsettled that this speech cannot be considered comparable to the other four. Hence it was not part of the main analysis, but is included in Table 3 below for comparison purposes. Although Stalin actually became General Secretary of the party in 1922, he could not be said to be a paramount leader of the Soviet Union until after Lenin’s death in 1924; thus his speech to the 13th Party Congress in that year is used. Several other Soviet leaders never delivered a “report” speech to a party congress after becoming General Secretary. For example, Georgi Malenkov, who led the Soviet Union from Stalin’s death until 1955, never held the title of party General Secretary. And neither of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, lived long enough to address a party congress in the role of General Secretary. English translations of the Lenin and Stalin speeches were taken from their collected works. English texts of the other speeches were taken from the Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Literature
of Soviet society
Motive scores for Soviet society were collected from small novels and short stories originally published in Russian at three specific times in relation to each leader’s
Motives of Soviet Leadership and Soviet Society
299
Table 2 Brief Outline of the Scoring Systems for Achievement, Affiliation, and Power Motive Imagery Achievement
Someone is concerned about a standard of excellence: Directly, by words the quality of performance, or indirectly, by actions clearly suggesting a concern for excellence, or by success in competition. Someone is concerned about establishing, maintaining, or restoring friendship or friendly relruions among persons, groups, etc: By expresion of warm, positive, friendly, or intimate feelings toward other people, nations, etc. By expression of sadness or other negative feehngs about separation or disruption of friendly relationship, or wanting to restore it. By affdiative, companionate activities. By friendly, nurturant acts Someone is concerned about having impact. control or influence on another person, group. or the world at large: By taking strong, forceful actions that inherently have impact on other people or the world at large. By controlling or regulating others. By attempting to influence, persuade, convince, make or prove a paint, argue. By giving unsolicited help or advice. By impressing others or the world at large: prestige or reputation. By eliciting a strong emotional reaction in someone else.
l
Affiliation
l
l
l
l
Power
Nore:
Based on Wmter (1991a. p. 63). This outline is not adequate for scoring purposes. A complete manual, together with insrructiona, practice materials, expert scoring and calibration materials, is a available at cost from the second author.
speech: (a) two years before the speech, (b) the year of the speech, and (c) two years after the speech. Texts of literature (short-stories and small novels) were obtained from Soviet Literature (formerly ~~~e~a~i#~uZ Literature), supplemented by literature anthologies for the period before 1931. For each story or short novel, randomly selected full pages were scored for achievement, affiliation-intimacy, and power motive imagery. All literature passages were selected without knowledge of the motive scores of the corresponding speeches. Scoring and Processing of Data All speeches and literary materials were scored for achievement, affiliation, and power motivation according to the manuals developed by Winter (1991a) by a trained, expert scorer who had demonstrated scoring reliability on material pre-coded by experts (category agreement over .85). Results were expressed in terms of motive images per 1,000 words. Table 2 gives a brief outline of the scoring definitions for each motive. To facilitate comparison across speeches and across motives, these speech raw scores were then standardized (h4 = 50 and SD = 10 on the population of four speeches, separately for each motive. (As noted above, Lenin’s 1918 speech was not part of the standardization sample, but was standardized on the basis of the other four speeches in order to facilitate comparison with them.)
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Table 3 Motive Scores of Soviet Leaders
Stalin, May 24. 1924 Khrushchev, Feb. 14, 1956 Brezhnev, Mar. 29, I966 Gorbachev, Feb. 25, 1986
8,702
2.fl4
0.1 I
3.10
33
33
48
46,145 37,136 43,314
1.x9 1.72 I .27
59 57 so
58 59 34
SD
1.11
.69
I.56
I .45
4.07 4. I7 1.88 3.31 .92 8.56
57 51 59
M
5.27 4.57 5.45 4.48
24
53
IO7
Comparison speech of Lenin, Mar. 7, 1918
8,992
1.25
Nofr:* Standardizd on the population of four speeches (Stalin through Gorbachev); overall M = SOand SD = IO
Literature scores were first year, in terms of images per the entire population of year each motive. Such procedures and of Soviet society to a between them.
calculated on the entire body of texts for a particular 1,000 words. These yearly scores were standardized on scores (overall M = 50 and SD = lo), separately for convert the motive levels of the General Secretaries common metric, making possible direct comparisons
Analysis
The three motives are essentially independent or orthogonal. This means that the motive profile of each speech and each year of Soviet literature can be represented as a “point” in three-dimensional space, where each dimension is coordinated with one motive. The standardization process converts the motive scores of the Soviet leaders and Soviet society to a common metric. That is, each standardized score is the number of standard-deviation units that the (raw) score is above or below the mean of the entire standardization population. Thus the similarity or convergence of any two scores (i.e., “points”) can be represented as the three-dimensional “distance” between them. Such distances can be readily calculated by an extension of the Pythagorean theorem into three dimensions:
distance
= J&&Z
, where
a,
h,
and c are the distances
between the two points in one dimension. The closer or more convergent the two motive profiles are, the less the three-dimensional distance between the corresponding points will be.
RESULTS Raw and standardized scores of each General Secretary’s speech are shown in Table 3. The literature scores (standardized form only) are presented in Table 4. The motive discrepancies between each speech and its corresponding three years of Soviet literature are presented in Table 5.
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Table 4 Motive Profiles of Soviet Society Motive profilea Year
Ach
Aff
POW
52 44 43
53 45 44
60 64 53
44 41 53
46 16 62
62 47 49
62 55 48
48 49 39
51 36 38
40 75 37
48 54 38
35 61 44
Stalin 1922 1924 1926 Khrushchev 1954 1956 1958 Brezhnev 1964 1966 196X Gorbachev 1984 1986 1988 Note:
* Each year’s scores are expressed as standardixd entire sample of years.
FCOKS,with M = 50 and SD = IO. Society scores standardized on the
Relating Leader and Society Scores over Time
The right-hand columns of Table 5 show changes in the leader-society discrepancy scores over time. First, change score 1 indicates how this discrepancy changed from two years before the speech to the speech year. Negative scores indicate decreasing discrepancies (i.e., society becoming more similar to the leader’s speech); positive scores indicate increasing discrepancy (i.e., society becoming less like the leader’s speech). If this change score is positive, it means that societal motives were diverging from the leadership motive profile, which would support the notion that Soviet leadership was not a reflection of society. Further, it would suggest that in selecting a leader, Politburo members may implicitly be responding to special circumstances (e.g., a crisis), rather than to the “popular will,” or even that they were deliberately diverging from the larger Soviet society. If the pre-speech to speech change in discrepancy scores is negative, in contrast, it means that society would be moving toward the leadership; further, perhaps, that the Politburo selected a leader to match society. (In addition, or as an alternative, it might indicate that both the leadership and societal motive profiles were influenced by some third factor, such as a war or economic problems.) Change score 2 indicates the change in leadership-societal discrepancy from the year of the speech to two years later. Here the interpretations are the reverse of change score 1: negative scores indicate that society has moved in the direction of the leadership, perhaps
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Stalin
3.008
2.283
Khrushcha
I.881
_.__ 7 358
I .mi I .030
Brwhne\
I .630
2.468
2.782
Gorhache~
I.913
3.164
2.898
M SD Significant of difference from tero
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-.7 I5
+.OIO
i.311
-I ,228
-I .hOS
+.838
+.314
-324
-.413
-1.517
-.725
+ I .2s
I
+.A35 .73x t= I .02 :=I.18
-.266 ,568 f= I .A5 :=I xi7
1998
~.YOY ,679 &.?l?.
,‘-,I0
:=7.6X. p<.o1
as the result of deliberate policy or “molding” effects. while positive scores indicate a drift toward lower levels of leadership-society congruence. Finally, the far-right-hand column compares the two change scores themselves. If the discrepancy had been getting smaller before the speech but bigger after the speech, this score will be positive and large. Such large values would be consistent with the “democratic” model, in which leaders reflect the popular will at the time of their election (although the popular will may subsequently change). On the other hand, if the discrepancy had been getting larger before the speech but became smaller in the years afterward, then this value will be negative and large. This would be consistent with the “totalitarian” model, that the leadership shapes or influences the popular will. This “difference in change-of-discrepancy score, ” then, constitutes the most refined test of the basic research question about the nature of the relations between Soviet leadership and Soviet society. If Soviet leadership reflected the motives of society, or if General Secretaries were selected to reflect society, then this score will be positive. If the leadership shaped society or selected General Secretaries to shape society, or to respond to anticipated future trends, then this score will be negative. If there is no consistent leader-society relation, then this score will be randomly distributed around zero. The summary descriptive statistics at the bottom of Table 5 indicate that there is a tendency for the discrepancy between the motive profiles of Soviet leaders and Soviet society to increase during the two years before the General Secretaries’ speeches. During the two years after the speeches, however, the opposite tendency prevailed-that is, the discrepancy between the leadership and society decreased. The mean of the difference scores between these two tendencies, at the bottom of the far-right-hand column, departs significantly from the null hypothesis of zero (2-tailed p-. 10 for the t-test). Since the four leaders are a complete population rather than a sample, however, the : test may be appropriate, in which case the result becomes more significant (2-tailed ~~01). Overall, this result is con-
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Motives of Soviet Leadership and Soviet Society
s&tent with the interpretation that any convergence between leadership etal motives in the Soviet Union was created more than rejlective. Scores of Individual
motives and soci-
Leaders
The motives scores of the individual leaders are also of interest, given the demonstrated correlates of these motives found in other political psychology research (see Winter, 199 1a, 1992, 1996, pp. 16 l-164). For Stalin and Brezhnev, power was the highest motive score. In Stalin’s case, all three scores were below the overall averages for the four leaders, perhaps as an artifact of his simple “bureaucratic” speaking style, the recency of Lenin’s death (four months before), or the fact that his 1924 speech was an “organizational” rather than a “political” report. Still, the relative ordering of the three scores seems accurate for both Stalin and Brezhnev. High power motivation is consistent with the aggressive foreign policy of both leaders: Stalin’s 1939 invasion of Poland, his 1940 annexation of the Baltic republics, and his domination of Eastern Europe after World War II; and Brezhnev’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, as well as his earlier invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Khrushchev scored quite high on all three motives, and this pattern was also reflected in his political behavior. He engaged in confrontation on many fronts of the Cold War, such as Berlin and Cuba, and forcefully repressed the Hungarian revolution in 1956-all behaviors characteristic of high power motivation. Sometimes he negotiated and made peace, albeit tinged with a “prickly” defensive style, as in Poland in 1956 and after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Both of these tendencies are characteristic of high affiliation motivation (see Table 1 and Winter, 1996, pp. 144-149). Finally, Khrushchev emphasized economic development and peaceful competition, characteristics of a leader with high achievement motivation. Gorbachev’s high achievement motive score is consistent with his emphasis on “new thinking,” restructuring, and reform, especially in the economic sphere. His pattern of low power motive score (in relation to affiliation) is consistent with his ending the Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan, his efforts to improve relations with the U.S. and Westem Europe, and finally his refusal to use military force to maintain communist regimes in Eastern Europe or even to preserve the Soviet Union itself. Lenin’s 1918 speech shows an exceptionally high level of power motivation, although this may be somewhat of an artifact of the revolutionary situation, the ongoing civil and foreign wars, and unsettled conditions. Still, the notion of an extreme drive for power, far in excess of any affiliative concerns, is consistent both with Lenin’s personal style and also the everyday connotations of “Leninism” as a political philosophy or operational code. DISCUSSION Leader-Society
Discrepancy
During the two years leading up motives of Stalin and Soviet society an ongoing process of consolidation Stalin’s power in particular. In the moved away from convergence but
Scores of individual
Leaders
to his speech and the two years afterward, the showed increasing convergence. This may reflect of rule by the Soviet leadership in general and of Khrushchev era, leadership and society initially then moved back toward it. The first trend may
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reflect the sharp break from Stalinist society at the beginning of the Khrushchev era, and the second trend is consistent with Khrushchev’s subsequent success (at least for several years; see Schapiro, 1970, pp, 5.55-582) at institutionalizing that break. During the Brezhnev era, Soviet society moved continuously away from Brezhnev’s motive profile. Finally, for Gorbachev the pre-speech-to-speech divergence grew to a very high level, indicating that at least in motivational terms, Gorbachev and his supporters in the Party leadership were at that time not at all a reflection of Soviet society. (Thus Gorbachev was rumored to have been elected as General Secretary over the right-wing Romanoff by perhaps as small a margin as one vote.) Over the next two years, however, Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Soviet leadership were apparently able to exert an effect on Soviet society, as suggested by the reduction in motive profile discrepancy from 1986 to 1988. In the end, however, Gorbachev’s loss of power after the August 1991 attempted coup is certainly consistent with the continuing rather high level of divergence between his motives and those of Soviet society. Trends in Discrepancy
Scores of Leaders and Society
In three of four cases, the leader-society discrepancy increased during the two years before the leader’s speech. Also in three of four cases the discrepancy decreased during the two years after the speech. Across the four leaders, the mean of the difference scores between these two trends is negative and significantly different from zero, as shown at the bottom of the right-hand column of Table 5. This indicates that overall, in terms of motive profiles, Soviet society came to resemble Soviet leadership and leaders over time (i.e.. in the years after the General Secretary’s selection and speech), rather than the leadership and leaders being a reflection of motivational forces in Soviet society at the time of (or before) the selection and speech of the General Secretary. Such a result tends to confirm the “totalitarian” hypothesis as characteristic of the Soviet political system: either in its strong form, that any convergence between Soviet leaders and Soviet society is created by the leaders and political apparatus; or in a weaker form, that in electing leaders the Politburo functions as a “vanguard” of society. Obviously such a conclusion must remain very tentative in view of the many assumptions of the present study, the small sample of leaders, the single element of personality measured (motives), and the substantial amount of error variance present in the data. At the very least, however, the present study suggests that even in “totalit~ian” or “dictatorial” societies, the leadership does not act in complete independence of the psychological dynamics of their society. In other words, there is likely to be some kind of psychological congruence or convergence between leaders and followers, or leaders and situations (see Bass, 1990; Bern & Lord, 1979; Erikson, 1964, pp. 203-208). Of course the mechanisms for such convergence may be very different from those involved in the “reflection of popular will” democratic model implied by Winter’s (1987) study of U.S. presidents. For example, the present results may involve mechanisms or apparatus of control (filters, outright censorship of literature, or self-censorship by authors and editors), as well as (or instead of) actual powers of persuusirm or shaping on the part of the totalita~an leader. The existence, operation, and relative effectiveness of such mechanisms must be the study of future research, which could take advantage of the present technology for studying leader-follower relations in widely varying political systems.
Motives of Soviet Leadership
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305
An earlier version of this paper was presented by the first author at the annual meeting of the Inte~ational Society of Political Psychology. Washington, DC, July, 1990.
Acknowiedgments:
NOTES 1.
2.
Actually, these same considerations also apply to the United States. A presidential inaugural address or other speech may be delivered by a single person-the president; but it is really a collective product of the loosely-defined group known as “key presidential advisors,” or more generally, a reflection of the “climate” of the presidential administration. Of course the Communist Party exercised considerable control over what was written and published as literature. Thus Stewart’s (1977) caution, that published material is measured, deliberate, and calculated, reflecting “variations in perceptions by the (party] elite of approved, or useful, public images rather than the actual private beliefs and attitudes” (p. 247), may apply to popular literature as well. However, since the motive scoring systems reflect nuances of goal description and imagery rather than ideology, they may reflect dimensions of verbal content that are not under explicit conscious control. In any case, the important empirical question involves the relationship between the two kinds of verbal material, whatever the ultimate sources and controls of each.
REFERENCES Adams, J.S. (1990). Institutional change and Soviet national security policy. In G.E. Hudson (Ed.), Soviet nutiotzal security policy under perestroika (pp. 15l-1 70). Boston: Unwin Hyman. Atkinson, J.W. (1958). motives ir7funtusy, action, and society. New York: Van Nostrand. Bass, B.M. (1990). Buss and StogdilE’s handbook of leadership: Theov, research, and managerial applications (3rd ed.). New York: Free Press. Bern D., & Lord, C. (1978). Template-matching: A proposal for probing the ecological validity of experimental settings in social psychology. Journal ofPersonaZiry and Social Psychology, 37, 833-846. Bishop, W.J. (1990’). Domestic politics and Gorbachev’s security policy. In G.E. Hudson (Ed.), Soviet national security policy underperestroika (pp. 13 l-150). Boston: Unwin Hyman. Brezhnev, L.S. (1966). Report of the Central Committee. Current Digest ofthe Soviet Press, 18( 12), S-24; 1S( 13),3-10. Donkey, R.E., & Winter, D.G. (1970). Measuring the motives of public officials at a distance: An exploratory study of American presidents. Behavioral Science, 15, 227-236. Erikson, E.H. (1964). fnsight and responsibility. New York: Norton. Gorbachev, M. (1986). Political report of the Central Committee. Current Digest ofthe Soviet Press, 38(8), l-2,4-39. Greenwald, A.G., 8t Banaji, M.R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychologjca~ Review, 102,4-27. Hennann, M.G. (Ed.) (1977). A p.~ycholo~~ica~examination of political leaders. New York: Free Press. Hermann, M.G. (1978). Effects of personal characteristics of political leaders on foreign policy. In M.A. East, S.A. Salmore, & C.F. Herrnann (Eds.), Why nations act (pp. 49-68). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Hermann, M.G. (1979). Who becomes a political leader? Some societal and regime influences on selection of head of state. In L. Falkowski (Ed.), Psychological models in internat~onalpoiiti~s (pp. 15-38). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Hermann, M.G. (1980a). Explaining foreign policy behavior using personal characteristics of political leaders. International Studies Quarterly, 24, 7-46. Hermann, M.G. (198Ob). Assessing the personalities of Soviet Politburo Members. Pervonality and Social Ps~~ch,chology Bulletin, 6, 332-352. Hough, J.F., & Fainsod, M. (1979). HOM’the Soviet Union is governed. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Khrushchev, N.S. (1956). Report of the Central Committee. Current Digest of the Soviet Press, N(4). 3-l&29; 8(S), 3-15; X(6), 3-9. Kock, S.W. (1965). ~~)retug,sle~~Fzif~~ rtch tn~fivati~~n [Mcznagrment and motivation]. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki. Lenin, V.I. (1965). Political report of the Central Committee. In Collecred works (Vol. 77, pp. 87109). Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1918). McClelland, D.C. ( 1976). The ffc~zieving society. (2nd ed.) New York: Irvington. (Original work published 1961) McClelland, DC. (1975). Power: The inner experience, New York: Irvington. Rubenzer, S., Faschingbauer, T., & Ones, D. (1996, August). Personality scores cmdportraits of U.S. presidents. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto. Schapiro, L.B. ( 1970). The Communist Party of the Soviet UF&IFI (2nd ed.). London : Eyre & Spottiswoode. Simonton, D.K. (1986). Presidential personality: Biogmphical use of the Gough Adjective Check List. Jotcrnul of Persunutity and Social P.~~lc~~~t~~?, 51, i49- 160. Simonton, D.K. (I 987). Presidential style: Personality, biography, and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 55, 928-936. Smith, C.P. (Ed.). (1992). Motivation and personality: Handbook @thematic content unalysis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stalin. J. (19.53). Organizational report of the Central Committee. In Works (Vol. 6, pp. 199-245). Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. (Original work published 1924). Stewart, P.D. (1977). Attitudes of regional Soviet political leaders: Toward understanding the potential for change. In M.G. Hermann (Ed.), A p.~~ch~logicul exa~n~~l~~ri~~tt ~~f~~(i~it~c~~l leader.5 (pp. 239-273). New York: Free Press. Suedfeld, P. (1994). President Clinton’s policy dilemmas: A cognitive analysis. Political Psychology. 15. X+7---349. Tetlock. P.E. ( 1983). Cognitive style and political ideology. Journal ~~fPer.s~~Fza~;t~j and Social Psychoiog~, 45, I I 8- 126. Tetlock, P.E. C1984). Cognitive style and political belief systems in the British House of Commons. Journal of Personality u~td Social P.ryc’hnlogy, 46, 365-375. Winter, D.G. (I 980). Measuring the motives of southern Africa political leaders at a distance. Pofiticul P.~ychology, 2(Z), 75--x5. Winter, D.G. (1987). Leader appeal. leader performance, and the motive profiles of leaders and followers: A study of American presidents and elections. Jwrnal qf Personaiiry and Social Psychology, 52, 196-202. Winter, D.G. ( 1991a). Measuring personality at a distance: Development of an integrated system for scoring motives in running text. In A.J. Stewart, J.M. Healy, Jr., & 13.5. Over (Eds.), Perspectives in persona/&y: Approache.7 to understanding 1ive.r(pp. 59-89). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Winter. D.G. (199 I h). A motivational model of leadership: Predicting long-term management success from TAT measures of power ln~~tivation and responsibility. ~eader.~~~p Quarterly, 2, 67-80.
Motives of Soviet Leadership
and Soviet Society
307
Winter, D.G. (1992). Content analysis of archival materials, personal documents, and everyday verbal productions. In C.P. Smith (Ed.), Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis (pp. 110-I 25). New York: Cambridge University Press. Winter, D.G. (1996). Personality: Analysis and interpretation of lives. New York: McGraw-Hill. Winter, D.G., John, O.P., Stewart, A.J., Klohnen, E.C., & Duncan, L.E. (1998). Traits and motives: Toward an integration of two traditions in personality research. Psychological Review, 20.5, 230-250. Winter, D.G., & Stewart, A. (1977). Content analysis as a technique for assessing political leaders. In M.G. Hermann (Ed.), A psychological examination of political leaders (pp. 27-61). New York: Free Press. Zullow, H., & Seligman, M., (1990). Pessimistic rumination predicts defeat of presidential candidates, 1900 to 1984. Psychological Inquiry, 1, 52-6 I.
David P. Schmitt Bradley University
David C. Winter* University
of Michigan
We explore the relationship between the motive profiles of Soviet leadership and Soviet society, using the first Communist Party Congress speeches of four Soviet leaders (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev). During the two years before the leaders’ speeches, the societal motive profile tended to diverge from that reflected in the speeches. During the two years after the speeches, however, societal motives tended to converge with leadership motives. These results suggest that in Soviet society, the leadership shaped or influenced societal motives (i.e., the “popular will”), rather than reflecting them.
According to the stereotypes of both political philosophy and everyday ideology, democratic leaders reflect the will of the people, while dictatorships or totalitarian leaders impose their will upon the people. While the “will of the people” is usually understood in terms of sets of policies and preferences, Winter (1987) showed that at the presidential level of the United States political system, there was also a psychological convergence between the leader and the led. Specifically, Winter demonstrated that the greater the correspondence or convergence of motive profiles (that is, levels of achievement, affiliation, and power motivation) between a U.S. president and U.S. society at the time of his inauguration, the greater that presidents’ electoral success (rs = +.60 between convergence and percentage of the total popular vote received, and +.46
* Direct all correspondence to: David G. Winter, Department of Psychology, University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-I 109: e-maik [email protected]. Leadership Quarterly, 9(3), 293.307. Copyright 0 1998 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1048-9843
University
of Michigan,
525 E.
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Table 1 Correlates of the Achievement,
Political Behavior
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AffXiation, and Power Motives Motive
Characferistic
Achievement
Associated
actions
Moderate risks, using information to modify performance, entrepreneurial success. dishonest means when necessary to reach goal
Cooperative and friendly under “safe” conditions, defensive and even hostile under threat
Leadership and high morale of subordinates, if high in sense of responsibility Profligate impulsivity, if low in sense of responsibility
Negotiating
style
Cooperative “rational”
Cooperative under “safe” conditions, defensive and hostile under threat
Exploitative, aggressive
Friends and similar others
Political “experts”
Peacemaking and arms limitation Vulnerability to scandal
Charisma War and aggression Independent foreign policy Rated greatness
Smith (1992, chaps. 13 and 15)
Smith (1992, chaps. 19,21)
Seeks help from:
Technical
Politicalpsychological manifestations
Frustration
Major reference
Smith
SOlUTe:
Adapted
from Winter
(1996,
and
experts
(1992,chap. 9) p. 139)
between convergence and margin of popular-vote victory). In this paper, we apply Winter’s general technique to a study of four major leaders of the Soviet Union-Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev-in order to explore the relationships between the leadership and society motive profiles in a political system organized very differently, as a dictatorship of the Communist Party. The basic research questions guiding the research are these: Over the seventy-plus years of the Soviet Union’s existence, did its party leaders rejZect the motivational forces of Soviet society, or did they create or shupe those forces? More fundamentally, does the answer to the question of whether leaders follow or shape societal trends depend upon the organization of the society’s political system?
MOTIVES
AND POLITICAL
BEHAVIOR
Personality is composed of many different psychological elements: motives, traits, cognitive structures (beliefs, attribution patterns, self-concept, and so forth), and social contexts. Over the past few decades, political psychologists have developed methods of measuring
Motives
of Soviet Leadership
and Soviet Society
295
many of these elements at a distance, without direct access to the persons being assessed (Hermann, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980a, 1980b; Rubenzer, Faschingbauer, & Ones, 1996; Simonton, 1987, 1988; Suedfeld, 1994; Tetlock, 1983, 1984; Winter, 1991a, 1992; Winter, Hermann, Weintraub, & Walker, 1991; Zullow & Seligman, 1990). Motives refer to that element of personality involving broad classes of goals, for which people strive by employing a variety of functionally equivalent but superficially quite different alternative instrumental behaviors. (In contrast, traits refer to bundles of highly intercorrelated stylistic behaviors; see Winter, John, Stewart, Duncan, & Klohnen, 1998). While theories of motivation are as old as Empedocles (a Sth-century B.C. Greek philosopher), there is an emerging scientific consensus that three motives-for power (or dominance), for affiliation (or love), and for achievement-describe the most important dimensions of human motivated behavior (see Atkinson, 1958; Smith, 1992; Winter, 1991b, 1996, chap. 5). Previous research in political psychology has demonstrated that these three motives are related to many important outcomes, as shown in Table 1. For example, power motivation has been associated with war (Winter, 1980, 1993), and the power and affiliation motives have been linked with foreign policy preferences. Thus Hermann (1980b) found that in the late 1970s Soviet Politburo members high in the affiliation motive and low in power tended to favor detente policies more than did Politburo members with the opposite motive pattern. Winter (1991a) has adapted the empirically-derived and validated scoring systems for imagery of these motives in order to measure them at a distance through content analysis: both for individual political actors (using speeches, diaries, and interviews) and groups, collectivities, and even entire cultures (using such collective products as diplomatic documents, folktales, and popular literature). Winter (1987) was able to study the relation of leaders and followers because the motive-scoring technique could be applied to both sources: individual presidents and U.S. society. For presidents, the first inaugural address is a relatively standardized situation, a tahula ram on which the new president is expected to write the goals and sketch the overall tone of the incoming administration (see Donley & Winter, 1970; Winter, 1987; Winter & Stewart, 1977). For U.S. society, Winter took motive scores for each decade from the 1790s through the 196Os, based on popular literature (novels, children’s readers, and hymns), from data previously collected by McClelland (1975, chap. 9).
STUDYING
SOVIET LEADERS AND SOCIETY
In adapting Winter’s technique to studying the Soviet Union, the first problem is to identify the principal leaders. Scholars of the Soviet system are in general agreement that the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party (first secretary or head of the party secretariat), rather than president or prime minister, was the “real center of power” in the Soviet Union after 1924 (Schapiro, 1970, p. 319; see also Hough & Fainsod, 1979), though of course a given person sometimes occupied more than one of these positions. Stalin was chosen General Secretary by the party Central Committee; later General Secretaries were chosen by the Political Bureau (or Politburo) of the Central Committee. While new Soviet leaders did not make inaugural addresses in the manner of an American president, they did make a lengthy speech (usually several hours long), typically titled
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“Political Report [or Organizational Report] of the Central Committee,” to each Communist Party Congress. Party congresses were large gatherings in Moscow of thousands of party officials from throughout the Soviet Union. They occurred every two or three years during the first decade of the Soviet Union, much less often under Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s and then about every four years from Stalin’s death down to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 199 1. These “report” speeches by the General Secretary reviewed events and prospects on a variety of topics, and set the tone for the congress. In an analogy to Winter’s (1987) procedure, we selected each General Secretary’s first speech as General Secretary to a party congress. Soviet Leaders or Soviet leadership?
Whose motives are actually reflected in these speeches? In the American popular mind (during the Cold War, at any rate), all power and policies in the Soviet Union derived from the will of a single omnipotent individual-usually personified in the image of Stalin as absolute dictator. This is, of course, a naive view. Over the seventy-plus years of the Soviet Union’s existence, Communist Party leaders shared power in different ways, varying from “oligarchic” to “bureaucratic.” For example, Schapiro noted the constraints on an individual’s power entailed by the requirement of collective concurrence in appointments (pp. 578-579). Adams (1990) and Bishop (1990) detail the ways in which Gorbachev’s power rested upon a variety of coalitions, constituencies, and organizational mechanisms. For this reason, as Stewart (1977) points out, published statements and speeches such as the General Secretary’s reports must be viewed as measured, deliberate, and calculated, rather than spontaneous-at best reflecting “variations in perceptions by the [party] elite of approved, or useful, public images rather than the actual private beliefs and attitudes” (p. 247). Given these considerations, it seems appropriate to think of the General Secretary’s reports to Party Congress as a collective product; motive scores derived from them, therefore, are to be attributed to the elite party leadership circles as well as (or instead of) only to the General Secretary.’ Conceptual Status of the “Motives”
of Collectivities
Individual persons are said to have motives; but if we apply motive measurement techniques to what are undoubtedly group products, how do we understand the resulting scores as the “motives” of collectivities or groups? In previous research, the techniques used to measure motives in individuals (content analysis of thematic apperceptive or other verbal material; see Smith, 1992), when applied to the verbal productions of collectivities, institutions, or groups (see Winter, 199 la, 1992) generally predict the same kinds of actions or outcomes as they do among individuals. But what do such collectivity-based scores man? We can think of them as a proxy for an aggregation of the scores of those individuals who make up the group or control the institution. (This would be analogous to the procedure of Kock, 1965, who obtained overall motive “scores” for a series of factories by combining the scores of the individual managers of each factory, each weighted by that person’s level of power.) Alternatively, collective scores can also be thought of as reflecting nonmotivational concepts-for example, ideological or psychological climate, values, or even short-term
Motives
of Soviet Leadership
and Soviet Society
297
“mood”-concepts that some researchers may find more appropriate when making attributions to collectivities (see McClelland, 1985, pp. 422, 470). For example, McClelland (1961/1976) suggested that a motive score derived from popular literature could be conceptualized differently: an ideological climate variable which can affect child-rearing but also many other things in the environment of an individual in the society. It shapes...ideas about what is important; it affects the sanctions that a society imposes for various types of behavior; it sets the norms....Thus I find no real difficulty in...renaming [achievement motivation] “the social pressure to achieve”. . when thinking of it as a societal ideology. (p. E)
As
Regardless of the precise conceptual status of collectivity-based motive scores, for present purposes the important point is that they predict the same kinds of actions and outcomes as do the scores based on individual verbal material. Measuring
the Motives of Soviet Society
How can we measure the motives of “Soviet society” over seventy-plus years? Following the work of McClelland (1961/1976, 1975) and Winter (1987), one obvious source of data is popular literature. For reasons of economy in scoring, we were limited to using English-language sources. For the period from 1931 onward, the journal Soviet Literature (titled International Literature until 1946), published in Moscow, gave English translations of current popular literature from the Soviet Union. For the period before 1931, we relied on English-language anthologies of Soviet literature. Framing Hypotheses
Given these particular ways of measuring the motives of Soviet leaders and Soviet society, the research question of interest can be phrased more precisely as follows: What is the relation between the motives of the Soviet leadership, as reflected in the speeches of the Communist Party General Secretaries, and the motives of Soviet society, as reflected in popular literature?2 Of course we have no ultimate criterion of electoral success, such as the vote-margins used by Winter in the case of U.S. presidents and society, but studying leader-society relations over time can enable us to make an equivalent analysis for the Soviet Union. Thus, if the similarity or convergence between the motive profiles of the speeches and those of the society tends to increase (or the discrepancy tends to diminish) during the two years immediately before the General Secretary’s speech, then it suggests that the motive profile of the party leadership may be reflecting the goals and concerns of the larger society. (Alternatively, such a trend suggests that the new General Secretary was chosen, at least in part, because he somehow reflected societal concerns.) Such processes may be deliberate on the part of Politburo leaders, but they may also operate implicitly, outside of direct awareness (see Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). While the mechanisms of leadership influence and leader-selection (deliberation and voting by a small elite group) may be different from those occurring in a democracy, the essential result would then be similar, in the sense that leadership articulation of goals and/or leader selection reflect some kind of leader-society congruence.
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If, on the other hand, the similarity or convergence between the two motive profiles tend to increase only in the two years after the General Secretary’s speech, then one of two alternatives to the “reflection” hypothesis is suggested: 1. Once articulated, leadership concerns and motives might somehow “mold” popular motives. This is essentially the “totalitarian” model, that the leadership creates leader-follower consensus by changing or shaping the motives of the followers. Such an hypothesis suggests that any leader-society match is created by the leadership, rather than being an (implicit) factor in the Politburo’s selection of the new General Secretary. 2. Alternatively, however, in articulating concerns and/or selecting a leader, Politburo members may (at least implicitly) be trying to discern the future motive trends (rather than the past track) of Soviet society-to estimate thefirure popular will, as it were-and then to articulate goals and select leaders who will match these trends. (This is a crude version of the Leninist theory that the Communist Party is the “vanguard” of the “true interests” of the people.) While these two hypotheses are different from each other, they both contrast sharply with the “democratic” model of leaders selected to match the e_ri.sring psychological dynamics of followers.
METHOD Selection of Material Speeches of the General
to be Scored
Secretaries
From the formation of the Soviet Union in 19 17 to its final dissolution in 199 1, four General Secretaries gave a usable “Political Report,” “Organizational Report,” or simply “Report” speech to the first party congress after their election: Josef Stalin (1924; published in Stalin, 1924/1953), Nikita Khrushchev (1956), Leonid Brezhnev (1966), and Mikhail Gorbachev (1986). While Lenin, as paramount leader, did give a “Political Report” to the Seventh Party Congress on March 7, 1918, only months after the Bolshevik Revolution, conditions were so unsettled that this speech cannot be considered comparable to the other four. Hence it was not part of the main analysis, but is included in Table 3 below for comparison purposes. Although Stalin actually became General Secretary of the party in 1922, he could not be said to be a paramount leader of the Soviet Union until after Lenin’s death in 1924; thus his speech to the 13th Party Congress in that year is used. Several other Soviet leaders never delivered a “report” speech to a party congress after becoming General Secretary. For example, Georgi Malenkov, who led the Soviet Union from Stalin’s death until 1955, never held the title of party General Secretary. And neither of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, lived long enough to address a party congress in the role of General Secretary. English translations of the Lenin and Stalin speeches were taken from their collected works. English texts of the other speeches were taken from the Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Literature
of Soviet society
Motive scores for Soviet society were collected from small novels and short stories originally published in Russian at three specific times in relation to each leader’s
Motives of Soviet Leadership and Soviet Society
299
Table 2 Brief Outline of the Scoring Systems for Achievement, Affiliation, and Power Motive Imagery Achievement
Someone is concerned about a standard of excellence: Directly, by words the quality of performance, or indirectly, by actions clearly suggesting a concern for excellence, or by success in competition. Someone is concerned about establishing, maintaining, or restoring friendship or friendly relruions among persons, groups, etc: By expresion of warm, positive, friendly, or intimate feelings toward other people, nations, etc. By expression of sadness or other negative feehngs about separation or disruption of friendly relationship, or wanting to restore it. By affdiative, companionate activities. By friendly, nurturant acts Someone is concerned about having impact. control or influence on another person, group. or the world at large: By taking strong, forceful actions that inherently have impact on other people or the world at large. By controlling or regulating others. By attempting to influence, persuade, convince, make or prove a paint, argue. By giving unsolicited help or advice. By impressing others or the world at large: prestige or reputation. By eliciting a strong emotional reaction in someone else.
l
Affiliation
l
l
l
l
Power
Nore:
Based on Wmter (1991a. p. 63). This outline is not adequate for scoring purposes. A complete manual, together with insrructiona, practice materials, expert scoring and calibration materials, is a available at cost from the second author.
speech: (a) two years before the speech, (b) the year of the speech, and (c) two years after the speech. Texts of literature (short-stories and small novels) were obtained from Soviet Literature (formerly ~~~e~a~i#~uZ Literature), supplemented by literature anthologies for the period before 1931. For each story or short novel, randomly selected full pages were scored for achievement, affiliation-intimacy, and power motive imagery. All literature passages were selected without knowledge of the motive scores of the corresponding speeches. Scoring and Processing of Data All speeches and literary materials were scored for achievement, affiliation, and power motivation according to the manuals developed by Winter (1991a) by a trained, expert scorer who had demonstrated scoring reliability on material pre-coded by experts (category agreement over .85). Results were expressed in terms of motive images per 1,000 words. Table 2 gives a brief outline of the scoring definitions for each motive. To facilitate comparison across speeches and across motives, these speech raw scores were then standardized (h4 = 50 and SD = 10 on the population of four speeches, separately for each motive. (As noted above, Lenin’s 1918 speech was not part of the standardization sample, but was standardized on the basis of the other four speeches in order to facilitate comparison with them.)
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Table 3 Motive Scores of Soviet Leaders
Stalin, May 24. 1924 Khrushchev, Feb. 14, 1956 Brezhnev, Mar. 29, I966 Gorbachev, Feb. 25, 1986
8,702
2.fl4
0.1 I
3.10
33
33
48
46,145 37,136 43,314
1.x9 1.72 I .27
59 57 so
58 59 34
SD
1.11
.69
I.56
I .45
4.07 4. I7 1.88 3.31 .92 8.56
57 51 59
M
5.27 4.57 5.45 4.48
24
53
IO7
Comparison speech of Lenin, Mar. 7, 1918
8,992
1.25
Nofr:* Standardizd on the population of four speeches (Stalin through Gorbachev); overall M = SOand SD = IO
Literature scores were first year, in terms of images per the entire population of year each motive. Such procedures and of Soviet society to a between them.
calculated on the entire body of texts for a particular 1,000 words. These yearly scores were standardized on scores (overall M = 50 and SD = lo), separately for convert the motive levels of the General Secretaries common metric, making possible direct comparisons
Analysis
The three motives are essentially independent or orthogonal. This means that the motive profile of each speech and each year of Soviet literature can be represented as a “point” in three-dimensional space, where each dimension is coordinated with one motive. The standardization process converts the motive scores of the Soviet leaders and Soviet society to a common metric. That is, each standardized score is the number of standard-deviation units that the (raw) score is above or below the mean of the entire standardization population. Thus the similarity or convergence of any two scores (i.e., “points”) can be represented as the three-dimensional “distance” between them. Such distances can be readily calculated by an extension of the Pythagorean theorem into three dimensions:
distance
= J&&Z
, where
a,
h,
and c are the distances
between the two points in one dimension. The closer or more convergent the two motive profiles are, the less the three-dimensional distance between the corresponding points will be.
RESULTS Raw and standardized scores of each General Secretary’s speech are shown in Table 3. The literature scores (standardized form only) are presented in Table 4. The motive discrepancies between each speech and its corresponding three years of Soviet literature are presented in Table 5.
301
Motives of Soviet Leadership and Soviet Society
Table 4 Motive Profiles of Soviet Society Motive profilea Year
Ach
Aff
POW
52 44 43
53 45 44
60 64 53
44 41 53
46 16 62
62 47 49
62 55 48
48 49 39
51 36 38
40 75 37
48 54 38
35 61 44
Stalin 1922 1924 1926 Khrushchev 1954 1956 1958 Brezhnev 1964 1966 196X Gorbachev 1984 1986 1988 Note:
* Each year’s scores are expressed as standardixd entire sample of years.
FCOKS,with M = 50 and SD = IO. Society scores standardized on the
Relating Leader and Society Scores over Time
The right-hand columns of Table 5 show changes in the leader-society discrepancy scores over time. First, change score 1 indicates how this discrepancy changed from two years before the speech to the speech year. Negative scores indicate decreasing discrepancies (i.e., society becoming more similar to the leader’s speech); positive scores indicate increasing discrepancy (i.e., society becoming less like the leader’s speech). If this change score is positive, it means that societal motives were diverging from the leadership motive profile, which would support the notion that Soviet leadership was not a reflection of society. Further, it would suggest that in selecting a leader, Politburo members may implicitly be responding to special circumstances (e.g., a crisis), rather than to the “popular will,” or even that they were deliberately diverging from the larger Soviet society. If the pre-speech to speech change in discrepancy scores is negative, in contrast, it means that society would be moving toward the leadership; further, perhaps, that the Politburo selected a leader to match society. (In addition, or as an alternative, it might indicate that both the leadership and societal motive profiles were influenced by some third factor, such as a war or economic problems.) Change score 2 indicates the change in leadership-societal discrepancy from the year of the speech to two years later. Here the interpretations are the reverse of change score 1: negative scores indicate that society has moved in the direction of the leadership, perhaps
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Stalin
3.008
2.283
Khrushcha
I.881
_.__ 7 358
I .mi I .030
Brwhne\
I .630
2.468
2.782
Gorhache~
I.913
3.164
2.898
M SD Significant of difference from tero
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-.7 I5
+.OIO
i.311
-I ,228
-I .hOS
+.838
+.314
-324
-.413
-1.517
-.725
+ I .2s
I
+.A35 .73x t= I .02 :=I.18
-.266 ,568 f= I .A5 :=I xi7
1998
~.YOY ,679 &.?l?.
,‘-,I0
:=7.6X. p<.o1
as the result of deliberate policy or “molding” effects. while positive scores indicate a drift toward lower levels of leadership-society congruence. Finally, the far-right-hand column compares the two change scores themselves. If the discrepancy had been getting smaller before the speech but bigger after the speech, this score will be positive and large. Such large values would be consistent with the “democratic” model, in which leaders reflect the popular will at the time of their election (although the popular will may subsequently change). On the other hand, if the discrepancy had been getting larger before the speech but became smaller in the years afterward, then this value will be negative and large. This would be consistent with the “totalitarian” model, that the leadership shapes or influences the popular will. This “difference in change-of-discrepancy score, ” then, constitutes the most refined test of the basic research question about the nature of the relations between Soviet leadership and Soviet society. If Soviet leadership reflected the motives of society, or if General Secretaries were selected to reflect society, then this score will be positive. If the leadership shaped society or selected General Secretaries to shape society, or to respond to anticipated future trends, then this score will be negative. If there is no consistent leader-society relation, then this score will be randomly distributed around zero. The summary descriptive statistics at the bottom of Table 5 indicate that there is a tendency for the discrepancy between the motive profiles of Soviet leaders and Soviet society to increase during the two years before the General Secretaries’ speeches. During the two years after the speeches, however, the opposite tendency prevailed-that is, the discrepancy between the leadership and society decreased. The mean of the difference scores between these two tendencies, at the bottom of the far-right-hand column, departs significantly from the null hypothesis of zero (2-tailed p-. 10 for the t-test). Since the four leaders are a complete population rather than a sample, however, the : test may be appropriate, in which case the result becomes more significant (2-tailed ~~01). Overall, this result is con-
303
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s&tent with the interpretation that any convergence between leadership etal motives in the Soviet Union was created more than rejlective. Scores of Individual
motives and soci-
Leaders
The motives scores of the individual leaders are also of interest, given the demonstrated correlates of these motives found in other political psychology research (see Winter, 199 1a, 1992, 1996, pp. 16 l-164). For Stalin and Brezhnev, power was the highest motive score. In Stalin’s case, all three scores were below the overall averages for the four leaders, perhaps as an artifact of his simple “bureaucratic” speaking style, the recency of Lenin’s death (four months before), or the fact that his 1924 speech was an “organizational” rather than a “political” report. Still, the relative ordering of the three scores seems accurate for both Stalin and Brezhnev. High power motivation is consistent with the aggressive foreign policy of both leaders: Stalin’s 1939 invasion of Poland, his 1940 annexation of the Baltic republics, and his domination of Eastern Europe after World War II; and Brezhnev’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, as well as his earlier invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Khrushchev scored quite high on all three motives, and this pattern was also reflected in his political behavior. He engaged in confrontation on many fronts of the Cold War, such as Berlin and Cuba, and forcefully repressed the Hungarian revolution in 1956-all behaviors characteristic of high power motivation. Sometimes he negotiated and made peace, albeit tinged with a “prickly” defensive style, as in Poland in 1956 and after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Both of these tendencies are characteristic of high affiliation motivation (see Table 1 and Winter, 1996, pp. 144-149). Finally, Khrushchev emphasized economic development and peaceful competition, characteristics of a leader with high achievement motivation. Gorbachev’s high achievement motive score is consistent with his emphasis on “new thinking,” restructuring, and reform, especially in the economic sphere. His pattern of low power motive score (in relation to affiliation) is consistent with his ending the Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan, his efforts to improve relations with the U.S. and Westem Europe, and finally his refusal to use military force to maintain communist regimes in Eastern Europe or even to preserve the Soviet Union itself. Lenin’s 1918 speech shows an exceptionally high level of power motivation, although this may be somewhat of an artifact of the revolutionary situation, the ongoing civil and foreign wars, and unsettled conditions. Still, the notion of an extreme drive for power, far in excess of any affiliative concerns, is consistent both with Lenin’s personal style and also the everyday connotations of “Leninism” as a political philosophy or operational code. DISCUSSION Leader-Society
Discrepancy
During the two years leading up motives of Stalin and Soviet society an ongoing process of consolidation Stalin’s power in particular. In the moved away from convergence but
Scores of individual
Leaders
to his speech and the two years afterward, the showed increasing convergence. This may reflect of rule by the Soviet leadership in general and of Khrushchev era, leadership and society initially then moved back toward it. The first trend may
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reflect the sharp break from Stalinist society at the beginning of the Khrushchev era, and the second trend is consistent with Khrushchev’s subsequent success (at least for several years; see Schapiro, 1970, pp, 5.55-582) at institutionalizing that break. During the Brezhnev era, Soviet society moved continuously away from Brezhnev’s motive profile. Finally, for Gorbachev the pre-speech-to-speech divergence grew to a very high level, indicating that at least in motivational terms, Gorbachev and his supporters in the Party leadership were at that time not at all a reflection of Soviet society. (Thus Gorbachev was rumored to have been elected as General Secretary over the right-wing Romanoff by perhaps as small a margin as one vote.) Over the next two years, however, Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Soviet leadership were apparently able to exert an effect on Soviet society, as suggested by the reduction in motive profile discrepancy from 1986 to 1988. In the end, however, Gorbachev’s loss of power after the August 1991 attempted coup is certainly consistent with the continuing rather high level of divergence between his motives and those of Soviet society. Trends in Discrepancy
Scores of Leaders and Society
In three of four cases, the leader-society discrepancy increased during the two years before the leader’s speech. Also in three of four cases the discrepancy decreased during the two years after the speech. Across the four leaders, the mean of the difference scores between these two trends is negative and significantly different from zero, as shown at the bottom of the right-hand column of Table 5. This indicates that overall, in terms of motive profiles, Soviet society came to resemble Soviet leadership and leaders over time (i.e.. in the years after the General Secretary’s selection and speech), rather than the leadership and leaders being a reflection of motivational forces in Soviet society at the time of (or before) the selection and speech of the General Secretary. Such a result tends to confirm the “totalitarian” hypothesis as characteristic of the Soviet political system: either in its strong form, that any convergence between Soviet leaders and Soviet society is created by the leaders and political apparatus; or in a weaker form, that in electing leaders the Politburo functions as a “vanguard” of society. Obviously such a conclusion must remain very tentative in view of the many assumptions of the present study, the small sample of leaders, the single element of personality measured (motives), and the substantial amount of error variance present in the data. At the very least, however, the present study suggests that even in “totalit~ian” or “dictatorial” societies, the leadership does not act in complete independence of the psychological dynamics of their society. In other words, there is likely to be some kind of psychological congruence or convergence between leaders and followers, or leaders and situations (see Bass, 1990; Bern & Lord, 1979; Erikson, 1964, pp. 203-208). Of course the mechanisms for such convergence may be very different from those involved in the “reflection of popular will” democratic model implied by Winter’s (1987) study of U.S. presidents. For example, the present results may involve mechanisms or apparatus of control (filters, outright censorship of literature, or self-censorship by authors and editors), as well as (or instead of) actual powers of persuusirm or shaping on the part of the totalita~an leader. The existence, operation, and relative effectiveness of such mechanisms must be the study of future research, which could take advantage of the present technology for studying leader-follower relations in widely varying political systems.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented by the first author at the annual meeting of the Inte~ational Society of Political Psychology. Washington, DC, July, 1990.
Acknowiedgments:
NOTES 1.
2.
Actually, these same considerations also apply to the United States. A presidential inaugural address or other speech may be delivered by a single person-the president; but it is really a collective product of the loosely-defined group known as “key presidential advisors,” or more generally, a reflection of the “climate” of the presidential administration. Of course the Communist Party exercised considerable control over what was written and published as literature. Thus Stewart’s (1977) caution, that published material is measured, deliberate, and calculated, reflecting “variations in perceptions by the (party] elite of approved, or useful, public images rather than the actual private beliefs and attitudes” (p. 247), may apply to popular literature as well. However, since the motive scoring systems reflect nuances of goal description and imagery rather than ideology, they may reflect dimensions of verbal content that are not under explicit conscious control. In any case, the important empirical question involves the relationship between the two kinds of verbal material, whatever the ultimate sources and controls of each.
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