Political Economy and Soviet Socialism (Routledge Revivals)

Alec Nove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136629266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

First published in 1979, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism is an integrated selection of papers written over the past 12 years of Russian history, which offers a unique insight into some important and controversial issues. Professor Nove discusses the ideas of some of the leaders of the Russian revolution (Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin), the political economy of socialism and the problems of the contemporary USSR. The author addresses the role of traditional Russian ideas in shaping the Soviet Union's social structure and the conceptual problems involved in defining its ruling stratum - whether or not it is a class. He also considers the criteria by which it is reasonable to judge Soviet reality, the performance and prospects of agriculture in communist-ruled Europe, the ability of the Eastern bloc to tackle problems of inflation and the obstacles to economic reform. Looking at the important and original developments of economic thought in the USSR and Eastern Europe, Professor Nove dissects the ideas of the 'new leftists' concerning the role of market forces under a feasible socialism. These papers offer essential reading for students of politics, economics and comparative social structure.

Part One
History of Russia

1
History, Hierarchy and Nationalities:

Some Observations on the Soviet Social Structure

The notes that follow are essentially a series of hypotheses, discussion points, relevant (in my view) to the origins and nature of the Soviet social structure. It is not my intention to assert that any of the points to be made below represent the explanation of a complex phenomenon. For example, the historical past of Russia obviously has some bearing on the present, both in forming the ideas of the rulers as to the behaviour appropriate to rulers, and in affecting the willingness of the ruled to accept what others, brought up in another environment, might well regard as intolerable. However, I am well aware that historical tradition is a many-sided thing, that it includes both Peter the Great and Tsarevich Alexei, Bakunin and Pobedonostev, Stenka Razin and Nikon, Dostoevsky and Gorky, to name at random a few personalities unquestionably part of Russia's past and unquestionably different in many essential respects. This being so, no argument is made concerning the inevitability of Bolshevism or of any part of the social structure of today, even while its specifically Russian background can hardly be discounted.

Let us begin by discussing the relationship between state and rank, between service to the state (gosudarstvo, or gosudar') and status. It is, of course, a commonplace of Russian history that Ivan IV largely destroyed the antonomous territorially based power of the old hereditary nobility, that gradually the descendants of the boyar families became merged with the serving-men, the dvoryane, who held land on condition of, and as a reward for, service, and that two types of landholding became in effect one, linked formally and informally to the duty of service to the state and to the monarch who embodies the state. Peter the Great finally imposed universal service on all the gentry - if 'gentry' is at this period the right word. (Many of the dvoryane in the seventeenth century were still common soldiers and petty civil servants.) Peter formalised the gentry's obligations, divided them into fourteen civil and military ranks, with the duty of service for life. The reasons for this stress on universal service, and for the serfdom which was its economic basis, have also been widely discussed by Russian historians: a sparsely populated area, vulnerable to foreign foes and with an open eastern frontier, a weak economy, a low level of culture and of technique, and so the need for great efforts to maintain a viable state. Along with this went a lack of spontaneous social forces: a traditionalist and illiterate merchant class, great shortage of educated officials, virtually no literature. (It is extraordinary how very few works written in Russian in the period up to 1800 can be read with any pleasure or interest at all, save for antiquarian or philological interest, and this in the age of Racine, Corneille, Moliére, Shakespeare, Milton, Sheridan.)

In no other European country did the state or the monarch so totally dominate the social scene. Of course, the actions of Ivan against the landed nobility did have parallels elsewhere: Louis XI of France acted similarly a century earlier. In France too the nobility was reduced to courtiers, or to the king's senior civil and military servants. But there was much less total dependence on the king, and the hereditary nobility of France had much wider cultural and political horizons than the dvoryane. The French autocracy tolerated, indeed was based upon, a far more developed and more autonomous social life in town and country. In Germany multiple centres of power and prestige developed early, with the emergence of a multitude of independent rulers, large, small and tiny, with a wide variety of internal arrangements (some, as in Prussia, also based on state service and on serfdom). In Poland the szlachta (gentry) was exceedingly assertive of its independence of the (elective) monarchy, with some very unfortunate consequences for that country.

However, the really significant point for us is, in my view, that the service-to-the-state idea lasted well into the nineteenth century. The gentry were freed from compulsory service by Peter III (1761), but in practice most of them continued to work in the civil and military spheres for the tsar. Those who did not had no role in society, and were the 'superfluous men' who figured prominently in Russian novels of this period. At the time of Pushkin and later it was still the custom to use the word sluzhit' (to serve) as a synonym for being in the service of the state. Only much later did work for some private employer 'qualify' for this designation, from which the modern word sluzhashchii (office worker) derives. The legal division into ranks or estates (sosloviya) survived until 1917.

The powers of the tsar and of his officials over the everyday life of the gentry even in the nineteenth century were remarkably tight by any standards familiar in the West. To take just a small example, Count Benkendorff, head of Nicholas I's gendarmeries, was responsible for the behaviour of the gentry in St Petersburg, in the same sense in which the provost-marshal is responsible for the behaviour of officers in the British army. Pushkin's letters contain a reference to some dvoryane young men arrested and expelled from the capital for making a noise (shikanie) in a theatre. (Pushkin, 1887, vol. 7, p. 42.) Imagine such an occurrence in London, Paris or Vienna in 1830! Pushkin even after his political rehabilitation had to apologise profusely to Benkendorff for leaving Moscow for the country without permission, and he was repeatedly denied the right to travel abroad. One of his biographers chose to emphasise the vital role of rank in Russia in the following words, written fifty years after Pushkin's death: 'Our society is so arranged that the greatest artist without rank appears in official society to be below the lowest clerk', and he went on to assert that Pushkin 'was given the rank of Kammeryunker so that his [beautiful] wife could be invited to balls.' (Vol. 1, p. xvi.) It is worth noting the implication that heredity itself did not convey much status.

In an imaginary conversation, a Spaniard questions the author (Pushkin) and puzzles over the meaning of the word 'aristocracy' in the Russian context. 'It seems that your dvoryane are socially equal and there is no restriction on entry into this class. Then on what does your so-called aristocracy rest?' The reply asserts that the ancient Russian dvoryanstvo fell and became a kind of third estate. Some of those who lay claim to aristocratic status have recently been ennobled, but 'we are proud not of the glory of our forefathers but the rank held by some silly uncle', (ibid., vol. 4, pp. 359-60.) Elsewhere Pushkin emphasises that entry into the dvoryanstvo 'is accessible to all'. Military and state service and university degrees easily promote into it men of other classes, (ibid., vol. 5, p. 99.) It is interesting that Pushkin took the view that this was a good thing.

'The aristocracy after Peter contemplated limiting the antocracy; but luckily the cleverness of the sovereigns triumphed . . . and the form of government remained untouched. This saved us from monstrous feudalism and so the people were not divided by an unclimbable wall from the dvoryane . . . Otherwise [the dvoryane] would have eliminated the possibility of freeing the serfs, limited the number of dvoryane and closed off access to state rank and honour to members of other estates.'

(ibid., p. 12.)

It followed from this that Pushkin regarded the freeing of dvoryane from compulsory service in 1761 as a 'disgrace'. Yet he also felt that lack of the hereditary principle was a grave source of weakness. In some of his historical works he wrote (in French) that the lack of de facto hereditary nobility represents 'moyens d'entourer le despotisme de stipendiares dévoués et d'étouffer toute opposition et haute indé- pendance. L'hérédité de la haute noblesse est une garantie de son indépendance. Le contraire est nécessairement moyen de tyrannie ou plutôt d'un despotisme lâche. (ibid., p. 87.) In some very subtle historical commentary, he traces this to the fact that boyars did not become feudal, that 'they lived at the monarch's court, did not fortify their estates, did not base themselves on the small family, did not fight the monarch, did not sell their services to the towns; they were at once courtiers and comrades, formed factions, counted rank by seniority', (ibid., pp. 85-6.) The boyars and hereditary seniority (mestnichestvo) were liquidated under the pressure of the petty (i.e. non-aristocratic) dvoryanstivo, finally by Peter.

So not only was the status of the dvoryane originally one of a hereditary service class - though this status could also be acquired by promotion above a certain civil or military rank - but in their social life they were subject to supervision, even tutelage. The emergence of an intelligentsia of non-gentry status must have been a source of annoyance to officialdom, as it did not fit the normal categories. The label attached to them - raznochintsy ('other ranks') - expressed this perplexity.

As the nineteenth century wore on, these various class and estate (soslovie) distinctions were becoming modified. Thus the close identification between the civil and military service and the landed gentry, which was certainly a fact under Catherine, was only very partially the case under, say, Alexander II, when the politically influential chinovniki could and did take a view which did not reflect any personal interest in land. Indeed, their class nature is something of a puzzle for the analyst. They were not feudal, even more clearly not capitalist. Were they above classes, were they themselves a class?

But it is misleading to look at the gentry and its role vis-à-vis the state only from their own point of view or that of the monarch. Equal interest attaches to the folk view of autocracy and gentry. Aware though one is of the danger of generalisation, the following points do seem relevant to our theme and to have some validity.

First, the peasants until the twentieth century recognised the legitimacy and stood in semi-religious awe of the tsar. The many rebellions were directed, supposedly, at the gentlemen-nobles who withheld the truth from the tsar and twisted his will to their own selfish ends. Authority was necessary, otherwise there would be chaos (chelovek cheloveku volk; homo hominem lupus) and foreigners would come and seize land and people. In the 1890s, as I recall my father telling me, Russian peasant conscripts sang:

The Turkish sultan wrote to us,
He wrote to the Russian Tsar,
I will invade your lands
And come myself to live in Russia

(sam v Rossiyu zhit' poidu).

Instinctively, the bulk of the peasants distrusted the gentry's acquisition of rights. Ivan the Terrible became a folk hero even though (or because?) he shortened the nobility by a head. The 'gentry's liberty' from service was felt to be, and was, a licence to ill-treat the serfs to a greater degree. The tsar could rely, whenever he wished, on support from below against the gentry. Only Peter, by challenging too many of the established traditions, including religious ones (pravoslavnyi tsar', and all that goes with it), evoked substantial personal hostility among many peasants.

The peasants had a duty to those who had a duty to the tsar and the state. This was, after all, the original rationale of serfdom. The continuance of duty to the lord after the freeing of the gentry from the obligation of service was deeply resented. Yet the feeling of some sort of duty to obey constituted authority ran deep, and found expression in two very similar episodes, one in Pushkin's Captain's Daughter, the other in Tolstoi's War and Peace: rebellious peasants, faced with a determined and bold officer, not only submit but also tie up and hand over their own leaders.

The idea, then, of an autonomous 'gentleman' engaged in his own affairs, and challenging instead of serving constituted authority, ran counter to the folk traditions. A merchant was different. He had the right and duty to buy and sell, and might be regarded as a bold and resolute chap (molodoi kupets, udaloi molodets of many folk-songs) in this not very lofty calling. But that educated people should not 'serve' was a new and shocking thought. The unfortunate men of the sixties discovered this, in the course of their heroic and futile 'going to the people'. This attitude may well persist today, since the party conservatives can appeal to the folk against the 'disloyal' literary intelligentsia, and the whole notion of socialist realism can be said to be based less on Marx than on the old idea of universal service to the state, from which writers should be no more exempt than anyone else.

In order to ensure this service, and to tight effectively against subversion from within and from without, the tsar's officials devised controls over expression and movement which, once again, contrasted sharply with what had become normal in Europe in the nineteenth century. I have before me a British passport issued in 1900 (and signed personally, it seems, by Lord Salisbury). Passports were rare in those days, but Russia required one. It bears numerous stamps, showing not only entry and exit (complete with an exit visa) into and out of the empire, but also registration in the appropriate police districts of St Petersburg and Moscow. The parallels between the regulations of the 1840s and those of the 1950s are doubtless familiar to any reader of the reissue of the work of the Marquis de Custine. The system had changed but little by the reign of Nicholas II. The practice of propiska (registration, with residence permits) for Russians in Russian cities existed then, and it exists today. The practice of requiring a kolkhoznik to obtain a species of leave pass before he leaves his village, which so shocks Western observers, has parallels not only with serfdom but also with the situation after 1861, when the peasant society, the mir, had the right and duty of regulating the movement of its members.

Of course, it would be wrong to assert that these or any other restrictions on human behaviour today followed inevitably from the practices of tsarist gendarmes; only that the country was to some extent predisposed or conditioned to such arrangements. Similarly, as a Czech communist once sadly remarked, the behaviour of men in authority, whether communist or no, is always in some degree affected by the memories of how men in authority used to behave in the society in question in the past, 'and the further east you go . . .'.

But let us return to the question of social status and its relationship to service to the state, and for present purposes the party machine and the state can be seen as an integral part of the gosudarstvo (and the Politburo as the collegiate head of the real state). Under the tsars, almost until the twentieth century, it could be said that the vast social role of the state was in large part a consequence (and in some degree the cause) of the weakness of autonomous social and economic entities. This was being corrected by industrial advance, by the creation of large Russian limited companies and banks, cartels and peasant co-operatives, the growth of professional and zemstvo institutions. The revolution, and ultimately the achievement of 'socialism' in the sense of all-round nationalisation and collectivisation, made of almost everyone either a state employee or a collective peasant (kolkhoznik). The practice of allowing only one 'official' professional or artistic association, and of nominating its controllers, further reduced spontaneous activity and the number of organisations within which status could be acquired. The Soviet Union is a country in which the civil and military service can be said to dominate the lives of most men, because they, like the dvoryane of Peter's time, are usually in full-time state employment.

This state of affairs carries with it not only certain specifically Russian features, but also the general, universal logic of bureaucracy. The word is not used in a pejorative sense. Bureaucracies are necessary and play a major role in all countries. The point is that in the USSR, despite distinctions between party, government, social organisations etc., there is an important sense in which all are part of one great single hierarchy. The common link is the system of nomenklatura. This is the great list of appointments of any importance in any sphere of Soviet life and a list of persons fit to hold them, together with the designation of the party committee in whose patronage the given appointment is. The party's personnel departments assign people to jobs in all the sub-hierarchies. It is as if the establishment division of the British Treasury guided or approved all appointments, from the editorship of a provincial newspaper or a trade union secretaryship in Scotland up to a ministerial appointment and down to a managerial post in the Midlands.

So universal an 'establishment' carries with it certain logical consequences. As in any civil service or army, status becomes very closely linked with rank. Exceptions happen, of couise. But rank-consciousness is inevitable, and tends to pervade society to a greater extent if so many are in fact state employees. Inevitably, not only salaries but also material entitlements and 'perks' become attached to rank. A British civil servant who reaches the rank of Assistant Secretary will have his own secretary, a room of defined size, better access to the car pool, a carpet . . . The rules are usually made not only to ensure that promotion receives its due reward, but also so that the reward is not excessive and power is not abused: thus the carpet must not exceed x square feet, and so on. It is quite logical to expect detailed regulation of this character within any bureaucratic hierarchy. If all the society or group is within one hierarchy, a strong tendency develops to carry rank-consciousness and its advantages into family life outside work. One may study this in the peacetime life of a British military garrison overseas. Colin Cross has written of another hierarchical society, that of British India:

'The Simla government issued an elaborate warrant of precedence with 63 ranks - with the Viceroy at the top and a superintendent of telegraph workshops at the bottom. It included military as well as civil ranks, the Archdeacon of Calcutta ranking immediately below a brigadier and immediately above the Tea Controller for India.'

(Cross, 1968.)

Peter the Great would have understood. So it is hardly surprising to find tendencies to carry rank-privilage into everyday life, with some resultant abuses, which those in charge of the system may dislike and seek to remedy. These abuses are facilitated by two features of the Soviet scene. One is the strict state monopoly over distribution, accompanied by frequent shortages of goods in demand, which, to an extent hardly possible under private enterprise conditions, facilitates priority allocation to the men of rank and influence in the region (the head of the retail trade network is one of them, or wishes to ingratiate himself with 'them'). Secondly, for familiar reasons, the single-hierarchy situation, in which the local party and state authorities, newspapers, judiciary and so on are run by the same group of people makes it harder to combat petty abuses.

Mention of the army leads to two other thoughts. One concerns the relationship, conceptually, between the army officers and property and so with class in the Marxian sense. In ...