The Soviet Agrarian Deba

A Controversy in Social Science 1923-1929

Susan Gross Solomon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367295912
• eBook ISBN: 9781000305616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The first decade of Soviet cultural life was marked by a pluralism unmatched in the subsequent history of the USSR. In many fields of art and science, Party and non-Party "proletarian" and "bourgeois" intellectuals worked side by side, vigorously debating questions of substance and method. In this first major study of a Soviet field of social science in the post-Revolution period, Dr. Solomon examines the controversy that divided social scientists studying the economy and society of the Soviet peasant during the 1920s. The intellectual disagreements in post-Revolution Soviet rural studies were exacerbated by social, political, and professional differences among the contending scholars. The infighting between the groups was bitter. Yet in contrast to recent studies of other Soviet professions in the 1920s, the author finds that in rural studies Marxists and non-Marxists had much in common. Her findings suggest that the coexistence of the "old" and the "new" in Soviet rural studies might have lasted for some time had not external political forces intervened in late 1928, acting as a pressure on the field and eventually causing its demise.

Part 1
The Problem and Its Setting

1. Introduction

The period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1929) was a memorable chapter in the history of Soviet culture. To this brief period belongs a series of outstanding achievements in the arts and sciences. Even more important, Soviet cultural life in the twenties was characterized by a degree of intellectual and social pluralism that far exceeded that of any subsequent period in the nation's history. NEP, as the period was known, was the heyday of heterodoxy in Soviet culture. In field after field, intellectuals argued questions of substance and method, convention and innovation. The variety of views expressed in these disputes testifies to the social diversity of the intelligentsia. For most of the 1920s Party and non-Party, "proletarian" and "bourgeois," antiestablishment and established intellectuals worked if not together, at least side by side, in cultural institutions. In late 1928 this intellectual and social pluralism was brought to an abrupt end by the so-called Cultural Revolution, or the seizure of power in culture by "proletarian" intellectuals.¹ When that revolution had spent its force less than four years later, Soviet cultural life bore but a superficial resemblance to what it had been for most of the NEP period. By 1932 the cultural institutions that had enjoyed a fair measure of autonomy in the administration and conduct of their work were firmly under the control of the Party. The intellectual community had been purged of many of its most brilliant members, non-Party and Party alike. And the content of most fields of culture had been radically altered; traditional concerns deemed "counterrevolutionary" were set aside in favor of new preoccupations that fitted the Party's definition of truth and beauty.²

Among Western students of Soviet history, it is customary to regard the Cultural Revolution as imposed from above, brought about by the intervention of the Communist Party in the conduct of the arts and scholarship.³ According to this view, the fundamental hostility in Soviet cultural life of the 1920s was that between the cultural professions, which were struggling to preserve their autonomy, and the Communist Party, which was seeking to extend its hegemony over every sphere of Soviet life. The debates within the cultural professions under NEP are treated as having had at best a secondary impact upon the fate of culture. To those who hold this view, the period 1928-1931 was but the final act in the drama. As David Joravsky, the most eloquent spokesman for this position, recently put it, at that point the Party "turned from fostering to forcing."⁴ It bent every effort to control culture, and, in the face of such intense political pressure, the intelligentsia capitulated.

Recently some Western historians have begun to reassess the Cultural Revolution—its origins, its conduct, and its impact upon Soviet cultural life. Among the most important features of that reassessment to have emerged to date is the hypothesis that the events of 1928-1931 derived much of their initial impetus from below, that is, from within the ranks of the intelligentsia.⁵ Those who espouse this view have stressed the fact that throughout NEP the cultural professions were rent by conflicts between "bourgeois" and "proletarian" intellectuals. These conflicts were particularly bitter, the historians explain, because divergent political commitments were overlaid with differences in the professional standing and orientation of the disputants. In many a profession, young communist intellectuals new to their field and somewhat ambivalent about its norms found themselves subordinate to noncommunist intellectuals who occupied the major posts and who regarded themselves as the guardians of professional standards. According to the scholars who espouse the new view, the infighting in the cultural professions in the 1920s was inherently explosive. In the pre-1928 period, so runs the argument, that infighting was contained only because the Party discouraged the escalation of conflict; in 1928, when the Party ceased its policy of active discouragement, the communist intellectuals, deeply resentful of their inferior status and position, converted the conflicts into open warfare.⁶ The proponents of the new interpretation of the Cultural Revolution do not deny the importance of the Party's intervention in cultural life in the period 1928-1931, but they emphasize the primacy of the tensions that existed within professions prior to that intervention. Indeed, the foremost exponent of the new view, Sheila Fitzpatrick, maintains that the infighting of the pre-1928 period was so serious that even had the Party not intervened, Soviet culture would have been sapped of its vitality.⁷

At first glance, the difference between the two interpretations of the Cultural Revolution appears to be one of emphasis. Both interpretations accord some importance to the factors of Party intervention and professional infighting; the two accounts seem to diverge only over the weight assigned to each factor. Further reflection suggests, however, that the difference between the accounts goes well beyond the question of emphasis or accent. It is rooted in a fundamental disagreement about the cohesion of the cultural professions in the NEP period. Underlying the traditional view is the assumption that the intellectuals engaged in the disputes were united by a sense of professional solidarity that transcended their express differences. The new view, on the other hand, seems to assume that the cleavages that gave rise to the disputes within cultural fields were so fundamental as to outweigh the tendency to professional solidarity. The disagreement on this point is important, for it raises the more general question of the viability of the NEP experiment in culture. The more recent interpretation of the events of 1928-1931 would suggest that the coexistence of social and intellectual opposites in the twenties was so uneasy that some sort of crisis in cultural life was likely. The traditional view would imply that the NEP experiment did have a chance of success both because there was consensus among intellectuals over the value of pluralism in cultural life and because a feeling of solidarity within the various cultural professions overrode any particular disagreements.

The difference of opinion on the question of the viability of NEP in the area of culture points to the need for detailed examinations of the bases, extent, and dynamics of the controversies that divided intellectuals in various fields. The existing literature on the NEP years does not include such inquiries. Soviet scholars writing on the period have yet to raise the question of the cultural professions.⁸ And Western historians have only begun to study the disputes that occurred within the cultural professions;⁹ until recently, they have been more concerned to explore the organization and content of Soviet art and science in the 1920s.

A comprehensive study of the intellectual controversy in a field would be oriented around a series of related questions. First, there are the questions about the divisions among intellectuals. How did those working in a field divide according to intellectual position, social profile, professional orientation, institutional affiliation, and political commitments? Were the cleavages overlapping or crosscutting? Second, there are the questions about the cohesion of the profession. How much intellectual consensus was there? On what level did that consensus operate? On what factors was it based (agreement on substance, method, important questions, criteria of good work)? How much social solidarity was there in the profession? Were the disputants primarily loyal to their subgroups or to the profession as a whole? What bases for solidarity existed (institutional affiliation, distribution of power and authority in the field, the sharing of professional norms, training)?

A full assessment of the patterns of consensus and cleavage among Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s would require the study of a series of cultural professions. This book is a study of the infighting that occurred in one field of social science—that of rural social studies. There has to date been no full-scale study of Soviet social science under NEP; the two principal views of the origins of the Cultural Revolution described above are based on research in the natural sciences and the arts.¹⁰ It may well be that we shall find in rural social studies a pattern of dispute that differs substantially from either of those presented. As a single case study (the first in social science) this book is designed not to furnish generalizations but to raise questions about the extent to which the category of culture into which a field falls (the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences) defines the nature of the disputes that occurred among its practitioners.

The Case

Social inquiry into the rural sector has had a long history in Russia. As early as the 1860s social statistics on the countryside were being collected systematically;¹¹ in the 1880s and 1890s talented individuals were doing secondary analysis of the statistical data;¹² and by 1910 some courses in rural social studies were being offered in agricultural academies, polytechnical institutes, and universities.¹³ It was, however, the Revolution of 1917 that provided the real impetus for the development of rural social studies. The Bolshevik seizure of power brought with it unprecedented interest in the rural sector, upon which depended both the economic prosperity and political stability of the new regime. With the Soviet government now assuming the role of patron and client of all the sciences, the field of rural social studies grew rapidly. New research and teaching centers were founded, new journals were created, and talented young people were recruited into the field. Ambitious research projects were undertaken, and a range of methods of social research were employed, with varying degrees of sophistication.¹⁴

For the first half of the 1920s, the most vital—indeed, the only fully articulated—area of rural social studies was agricultural economics. Institutionalized in specialized academies and institutes, Soviet agricultural economics in the NEP period was microeconomic in focus and practical in orientation. The major topic of study was the internal organization of the small-scale family farm, and the results of the research were directed at least as much at practicing agronomists as at economic scholars.

In the second half of the 1920s, the field of rural social studies was expanded to include research on questions of rural social stratificaton which had not been dealt with by the Russian agricultural economists of the day. These questions, which focused attention on interfarm relations, were at the core of the specialty known as "rural sociology," although this label was not used by the Soviet researchers who pioneered the new direction in inquiry. Within a short time the sociological perspective in rural studies gained widespread acceptance in Russia.

The emergence of the new orientation to the study of the countryside constituted for Soviet rural studies a dilemma similar to that facing American rural studies at about the same time.¹⁵ At the heart of the dilemma lay the relationship between the economic and sociological approaches to the study of the rural sector. Which perspective would have priority in the field of rural social studies? How, if at all, could the two approaches be combined?

The relationship between the new and the traditional approaches in rural studies was defined during a protracted controversy among rural scholars. The participants in the dispute were divided into two main groups. The first was the Organization-Production scholars, who were agricultural economists. Prominent in the field since the early years of the twentieth century, this group was the establishment in rural studies. Throughout the NEP period it continued to occupy positions of importance in rural studies, despite the fact that its members were not Marxists by conviction. The second group was the Agrarian-Marxists, whose research lay in the area of rural sociology. Committed Marxists, these scholars were considerably younger than their rivals and, for much of the 1920s, occupied positions subordinate to them. Thus, the differences between the groups in intellectual orientation were overlaid with differences in age, professional standing, and political sympathies; consequently, the struggle over the definition of the main lines in rural social studies was at the same time a rivalry for prestige between new and established cadres of rural scholars.¹⁶

The controversy in the field of rural social studies was a protracted one; it began in 1923 and was not resolved until mid-1928. Even the resolution did not bring surcease from strife. Late in 1928 the field of rural social studies experienced the Cultural Revolution. Marxist credentials became a prerequisite for any scholar who proposed to do social research on the countryside, and the Communist Party became the final arbiter of truth in the field of rural inquiry. With these developments, the most productive period in the history of rural social studies in Russia came to an abrupt end.¹⁷

For a consideration of the questions in Soviet history to which this book is addressed, the case of rural social studies has certain advantages. First, the controversy between the contending groups is well documented. Confrontations between the disputants were recorded in the stenographic reports of public meetings and scholarly working sessions, and the issues were aired at length in printed journals and monographs. The value of these ample records is enhanced by the fact that during the 1920s public discussion of the Soviet countryside was relatively frank and free of circumlocution. This extensive documentation will facilitate our assessment of the consensus and cleavage among rural social scholars. Second, within the course of a single decade, the field of rural social studies experienced not only a protracted controversy but also the direct and sudden intervention of the Communist Party in the conduct of inquiry. This will make it easier for us to evaluate the relative impact of professional infighting and political intervention upon the fate of rural social studies.

Implications for the Sociology of Science

In addition to its importance for the question...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Glossary
• Part 1. The Problem and Its Setting
• Part 2. The First Stage of the Controversy, 1923 to 1927
• Part 3. The Second Stage of the Controversy, 1927 to mid-1928
• Part 4. Aftermath and Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index