Economics And Politics In The USSR

Problems Of Interdependence

Hans-Hermann Hohmann, Hans-Hermann Hohmann

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429709623
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

Soviet scholars have apparently stayed clear of meaningful analysis of such touchy subjects as interdependence and conflict in the relationship between economics and politics. Very little has been published on this issue—no surprise in a system that controls centrally both politics and the economy, with an emphasis on rapid economic development. The absence of meaningful Soviet research led the Federal Institute for East European and International Studies in Cologne to sponsor an international interdisciplinary conference on the subject. Contributions to the resulting book cover three main areas. The first includes the impact of traditional Russian political culture on contemporary Soviet economic thinking and behavior, the rank of economic aims in the priority system of Soviet politics, and the function of economic institutions in the implementation of political aims. The second concerns the role of political lobbies in the economy and repercussions of economic change for Soviet politics. Foreign economic relations and the USSR's foreign policy make up the third area. The concluding discussion reviews the state of international research and identifies areas for future study.

1
History, Political Culture, and Economics in the Soviet Union

Alec Nove

Some Methodological Remarks

Man is a cause-seeking animal. All events, institutions, and systems, do of course occur within chains of causation. But it is all too tempting to devise explanations that do indeed fit the facts, but that could with almost equal plausibility "explain" a totally different outcome. If I may begin with what might seem a trivial example: When Glasgow Celtic was defeated in the first round of the European Cup, one reason given was that there is insufficient high-level competition in the Scottish Football League. The next year, when Celtic won the Cup, one reason given was that because there is little high-level competition in the Scottish League, Celtic was able to concentrate its energies on the European cup. Or let us take a much less trivial example. If in 1981 there had been an anti-Soviet free trade union movement in Hungary and not in Poland, we would doubtless be tempted to seek an explanation in the events of 1956, the brutal suppression of the Hungarian reform movement by Soviet troops, while no such unpleasant things happened in Poland, It would sound very convincing. Unfortunately, as we know, what actually happened was the exact opposite.

National tradition is a tricky concept to handle. To deny its importance because it is not measurable would be foolish. But it is not measurable, and it cannot be isolated from other factors. Several contradictory strands may be present. Thus, while few would deny that the causes of Hitlerism are to be found in Germany's past, this same past contains elements that–had Hitler failed to gain power in 1933–would be advanced as a convincing explanation of his failure. It would be a foolish historian who tried to account for Japan's remarkable economic achievements since the war without reference to the peculiarities of Japan's social structure with its roots deep in history. But there is no evident connection between the characters and behaviour patterns of the Samurai and the modern Japanese businessman (or is there?).

Turning to Russia, few doubt that today's Soviet Union has been influenced by Russia's historical experience, and so any argument would turn on the relative importance of the past (and which elements of the past) in explaining the present. Some try to ride two horses at once. Thus Richard Pipes argues both that the USSR is aggressive because of the essence of its Marxist-Leninist ideology, and that its expansionism and aggression follow centuries-old tsarist tradition.

Political Culture

Stalin was said to have been conscious of the people's need for a substitute batyushka-tsar. He most certainly sought to have history written and films made to show the line of succession stretching back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. The historian-politician Milyukov traced the power of the autarky and the weakness of the landed nobility back to the poverty of the land and sparse population of mediaeval Russia: The nobility derived little income from the land and often had to take service with the Grand Duke. As Pushkin pointed out in his historical notes, they "did not fortify their estates," they were not a countervailing power, and Ivan IV had little difficulty in cutting off their heads. Russian feudalism, if that label is applicable at all, was very different from its Western counterpart. True, in the West also strong monarchs reduced substantially the political power of the landed nobility (e.g., Louis XI and later Richelieu and Louis XIV in France), but the nobility (and the growing towns) did have some real social standing and influence, and rights of property were—much of the time—respected. Ivan IV went far to enforce his claims to own the bodies and properties of all his subjects. Peter was able to eliminate the remaining vestiges of hereditary boyar status, and treated all dvoryane as a mobilisable service class, serving him and the state for life. Even in the nineteenth century the differences from Western Europe remained deep. Pushkin, in the already-cited historical notes, asserts that there was no real aristocracy in Russia, since positions depended on rank and rank on the tsar. He was interestingly ambivalent as to the desirability and the consequences. On the one hand, the failure of the nobility (in the reign of Anna loannovna) to secure a share in state power was a good thing, since otherwise it would have made of itself a closed caste and prevented the promotion of talented persons from below. But on the other, it meant a "despotism surrounded by devoted stipendiaries, and the snuffing out of any opposition and independence of spirit." A hereditary high nobility is a guarantee of its independence, "Le contraire est nécéssairement moyen de tyrannic ou plutôt d'un despotisme lâche."¹

The poet Maksimilian Voloshin wrote: "Velikii Petr byl pervyi bol'shevik". Writing in 1926, he must have had in mind both the despotic methods and the mobilizing role of the state, its claim over the lives and property rights of the citizenry. He could hardly have foreseen collectivisation, but, if he had, he would surely have drawn the parallel with the attachment of the peasants to the land, their duty to deliver produce and labour for the state's needs, to catch up to the more advanced West by barbarous methods.

Much has been written about the power of the autocracy and the weakness of "unofficial" social forces, the one both justifying and causing the other. This needs to be linked both with the behaviour patterns of authority and the reactions to them on the part of the ruled. Parallels between the specific characteristics of tsarist and Soviet bureaucracy were made already by Lenin. Trotsky deplored the passivity of the masses (when he ceased to be "the prophet armed"). Lermontov, a hundred years earlier, wrote of the "zhandarmy golubye, i vy, poslushnyi im narod", Chekhov of the need to "squeeze the slave out of ourselves drop by drop". Through the centuries people have been accustomed to internal passports, propiska and its tsarist equivalent, and arbitrariness. Not even the educated classes had much time for the notion of Rechtsstaat, as can be seen in the attitude to law and laws on the part of Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Much has been written too about the specific features of the Russian intelligentsia. Among recent works on the subject in samizdat and in emigration I would note those of Shragin (Protivostoyanie dukha) and "Klenov" (in Sintaksis, No. 12). The tsars needed an educated service elite, to run the country and officer the army, they needed scientists, specialists, educators, but they wished them to be obedient servants. However, a part of the educated strata developed a critical and independent mind, which soon brought them into conflict with authority. At the same time their outlook separated them also from the masses. The peasantry retained, along with tendencies to passivity and obedience, a tradition of rebellion.

Stenka Razin and Emelyan Pugachev are also part of Russian history and folk memory. I have just been reading a fascinating dissertation on the peasantry in Saratov province, by O. Figes, in which he shows that a kind of cult of Razin was still influencing peasants in 1905 and 1918. Peasant violence sometimes took totally destructive forms, and an important difference between bolsheviks and mensheviks was their attitude to this aspect of peasant rebellion: Martov was fearful of and dismayed by the prospect of a twentieth-century version of Pugachevshchina, while Lenin was ready to ride the storm (though it came close to sweeping him away too in 1921).

Fear of revolt from below, fear of anarchy, of bezporyadok, was—perhaps still is—an important factor explaining the acceptance of authority on the part of a large segment even of the critically-inclined intelligentsia. This was noted already by Herzen. Today also some are "prepared to wear their chains for fear of what would happen if the people were unchained."

It should also be noted that the Bolshevik revolution had the quite unintended effect of disrupting the process of "social Europeanization" which was in process at least since the reforms of Alexander II. It did so above all by physically destroying or driving into exile the bulk of the bourgeoisie and professional men, along with landlords and officials.

Shragin made the very interesting point that many who supported the Bolshevik revolution did so for conservative motives: capitalism in town and village was resented as destroying the old ways of life. A contemporary example is that of Iran: the Shah's modernization programme led to conservative revolt. Obviously, the Bolsheviks themselves were not conservative, but, for example, many of the peasant rebels of 1917-1918 sought to destroy the Stolypin reform in the name of a return to older communal forms of tenure. However, Vasili Grossman, in his samizdat work Vsye techet, points quite explicitly at the effects of Lenin's own doctrine and methods in reinforcing and restoring age-old Russian despotic traditions. "Vast was the break-up of Russian life which Lenin carried through. . . . And yet the centuries of Russian history determined, incredible as it may seem, that Lenin preserved Russia's curse: the link of its development with unfreedom, with serfdom (krepost'yu). ... It so turned out that his revolutionary fanatical belief in the truth of Marxism, total intolerance towards those who thought otherwise, caused Lenin vastly to strengthen that aspect of Russia that he himself hated. . . . Lenin's victory turned into his defeat" (p. 180). (I strongly recommend anyone who does not know them to read pp. 153-183 of this remarkable book.) It may well be that this was Lenin's tragedy, which others, Lewin and Deutscher, for instance, have described in the context of his "last struggle" to try to cope with the twin dangers of bureaucracy and of Stalin; but quite clearly Lenin understood neither the cause of the disease nor any method of curing it.

Evidently, the rise of Stalinism is not to be explained solely as the outcome of Russian political tradition and culture. There are other important elements involved: cultural backwardness, the dreadful experience of civil war, isolation in a hostile world, the real or imagined imperatives of industrialization, and, finally, Marxist-Leninist ideology. To the last of these we must now devote some attention.

Marxism-Leninism and Russia

The obvious counter-argument that might be deployed against the stress on Russian tradition would be to stress the "alien" ideology of Bolshevism. This would most certainly be the position of Solzhenitsyn and of some neo-slavophile in Russia itself. Throughout the nineteenth century the radical Russian intelligentsia followed various Western philosophical fashions, and by 1900 it was Marxism which attracted many. In its Leninist version it triumphed in 1917. The revolutionary intelligentsia, much of it non-Russian, imposed this ideology and form of government on the people, having first used popular discontent to overthrow the tsar and the provisional government. There is no Russian precedent for the party, and its political theory and practice ("democratic centralism") can be dated from 1903. "Diamat," the Comintern, the denigration of Russian history, proletarian internationalism, can be regarded as novelities, lacking any roots in national culture.

Yet the contrary view has, in my opinion, more to commend it. Marxism-Leninism was not only Marxism adapted to Russian conditions, but itself developed a strong Russian accent. Many books and articles have traced the influence on Lenin of some elements of Russian populism. The alleged link with Tkachev seems tenuous, but he acknowledged the influence of Chernyshevsky. While it is true that there was no precedent in Russian history for Lenin's concept of the party, there was none in Marxism either. German social democracy was a model to all socialist parties before 1914, but in the end it had much more in common with the menshevik concept of the role and organization of a party than with Lenin's bolshevism.

As for the influence of Marxism as such, probably the most satisfactory discussion of this complex question is to be found in the contributions of Leszek Kolakowski and Mihajlo Markovic to the symposium on Stalinism, edited by Robert Tucker. While they differ in some of their interpretations, both would certainly agree that Stalinism cannot be explained or be "caused" by what Marx had written: It would indeed be extreme idealism to attribute the emergence of a new social order, which Stalinism surely was, to the power of ideas alone. Marxism contained evolutionary as well as revolutionary elements, and has inspired both moderate social democratic and several kinds of bolshevik ideas (orthodox Leninism, workers' opposition, real or imagined Trotskyism, etc.). The relationship between "dictatorship of the proletariat" and parliamentary democracy, as this may or may not have been seen by Marx and Engels, has been a matter of dispute for many decades. The Marxist tradition no doubt made some contribution, some of it negative. I borrow from Marković the notion that Stalin advanced through gaps in Marx's argument. Marx had really very little to say about the politics of transition to socialism, or for that matter about the politics (if any) of socialism itself. Similarly, Marx wrote very little on the economics of socialism, but implied that it would be a simple matter to replace the law of value and the market by some undefined form of control of production and distribution by "the associated producers." Despite some percipient criticisms by Eakunin, Marx did not take seriously the possibility of abuse of power by his workers' representatives and the Marxist tradition has been opposed to "separation of powers," an independent judiciary. It seemed enough to provide for the recall of unworthy representatives. Nothing of substance was said about how power was to be exercised, or how a complex industrial economy was to be run. It seems to have been believed that, given the facts and freed from the distortions of class interest, people would unanimously agree to do the right thing. Lenin's concept of the party was one attempt to fill the "political" gap, no doubt influenced (as argued above) by the specific circumstances of tsarist and revolutionary Russia. As for the economy, Marx never saw the connection between centralization, the elimination of the market mechanism, bureaucracy and hierarchy. Soviet practice had somehow to find a way of coping with the gaps and contradictions in Marx's thoughts about socialism. The process of necessary improvisation was inevitably greatly affected by the specific situation of Russia, but it would be misleading to assert that Marx's vision was in some way distorted by his followers. They could not follow Marx's guidelines, partly because they were absent and partly because they were contradictory. Bureaucratic centralization was a functional necessity in a nonmarket economy, but it also fitted the "Peter the Great" model of state mobilization of material and human resources.

To return for a moment to the Kolakowski-Markovic debate, it would not be unfair to summarize their different conclusions as follows: for the former, Stalinism was one possible progeny of Marx, for the latter it was an illegitimate child of Marx. Both agree that, in the unlikely event of his coming back to life in (say) 1950, Marx would have been rather shocked at what he saw.

Some Further Remarks About Stalinism

This is not the place to debate the controversial issue of whether or not Stalinism is a natural outcome of Leninism. Personally, I tend to the view that Lenin and Leninism facilitated the rise of a Stalin, but that it was no coincidence that he systematically exterminated Lenin's comrades when he had the chance to do so. More to the point in the present context is what could be called Stalin's cultural counter-revolution of the 1930s. In his anxiety to show the non-Russian nature of Bolshevism, Solzhenitsyn has to play down the extent of the changes that took place at this time.

One was the extermination of cosmopolitan bolshevik intellectuals, their replacement (in the main) by Russian men-of-the-people. Another was the elimination of avant-garde art, architecture, educational methods. Traditional values were extolled, similar to Petain's later slogan of "Travail, famille, patrie". History of the Pokrovsky type was denounced, the new histories that were published after 1935 were of a type that older Russian nationalists could find acceptable. Films like "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible" were consciously devised to reconnect Stalin's Soviet Union with traditional Russia. The process was partly explained by the imminence of war, but was then speeded up because of the exigencies of war. "Rodina-mat' zovet". Stalin soon called up the spirits of Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov, Kutuzov. In his speech in 1946, after the dearly-bought victory, he singled out the Russian people, the elder brother. As in most countries, ordinary people and ordinary party officials hold rather conventional views. The difference was (and is) the Soviet party's belief in its right to impose these tastes. As for the doctrine of "socialist realism", in one of its aspects it can be seen as a perversion of the sort of attitude which led to attacks on Turgenev for writing novels carrying no political or social message. There was a tradition opposed to art-for-art's-sake, asserting the author's duty to society. Lenin stressed similar ideas in his frequently misquoted article "Partiinaya literatura"—misquoted because when he wrote it, he referred to the duty of party litterateurs in a situation when there were other parties and other (including non-party) literatures. The Stalin-Zhdanov version of Partiinost' totally distorted both Lenin and the earlier traditions, perhaps another case of an illegitimate child.

The Nakaz of the Empress Catherine begins like this: "Rossiya est' evropeiskaya derzhava" (Russia is a European country), and "the proof of this is as follows". The "proof" was that, when Peter the Great introduced Europeanizing reforms, their success was such that even he was astonished. Suppose we were to say, "Rossiya est' polu-aziatskaya derzhava," and the proof of it is as follows: that when Stalin established a form of oriental despotism, his success exceeded his own expectations. It turned out that the mass of the Russian people accepted an autocrat, shed tears when he died, and now look back with a kind of nostalgia to the days of Stalin, when the great ones in the land trembled and were fearful. Even some critical spirits were caught up in this mood, which was well expressed in Alexander Zinoviev's recent work Nashei yunosti polet.

Economic Strategy Under Stalin

When Peter the Great developed manufaktury, it was to serve the state's purposes. The factories made guns, ammunition, sailcloth, uniforms, also paper for the state bureaucracy to write on. Plans were imposed by the only customer, the state. A large part of the labour force was serf or slave. Not until the nineteenth century was there a sizeable segment of industry producing for the civilian market, notably textiles, and some enterprising serfs succeeding in making themselves millionaires. Much has been written about the large role of the state...