| During 1976-82, policy disputes existed throughout the Soviet political system over what priority should be given to the West Siberia Petroleum and Gas Complex's development. In the Politburo and Secretariat, most members were motivated to take distinct stands on issues of energy policy strategy, with each member's stand based on his own combination of political, personal, and organizational reasons.; Energy-related ministries and Gosplan departments pursued their own organizational missions and priorities, and obstructed official policies and projects in spite of their inclusion in the Five-Year Plan and widespread support for them at all levels of the Soviet political system. Because the Politburo, Secretariat, and Council of Ministers retained authority over total resource allocations to each ministry, project approval, personnel decisions, and performance evaluation, a ministry probably could not with impunity neglect one project or policy (of priority to some leaders) in favor of another (of priority to other leaders), unless it had support for such behavior from some members of these three bodies.; The energy policy process was strongly influenced by the actions and interactions of the different energy policy groups. Each energy policy group was a cross-institutional cluster of actors consisting of: (a) branch-based supporters of a particular policy orientation based in the corresponding branch ministry or branch department of the Secretariat's apparatus; (b) regional party committees and first secretaries from those oblasti, krays, or republics, that had important economic activities connected with a particular branch; and (c) members of the Politburo and Secretariat, and top officials on the Council of Ministers or in Gosplan.; During 1976-82, the policy process for formulating and implementing Soviet energy policy was best explained by a combination of the orgainizational process model, which operated at the ministry level and to a degree among the regional party secretaries who sat on the Politburo, and (2) the bureaucratic politics model, which operated in Gosplan, the Secretariat, and the Politburo. Even in the highly-centralized Soviet political system, the power to make an authoritative decision in economic policy is not the same as the power to have that decision successfully implemented. |
