Small treatise on Soviet glories in the world-systems perspective.
by Georgi M. Derluguian
Well, couldn't we bring a little world-systems perspective into this network?
Andrew defends valliantly a historical anti-systemic ideology, which is
respectable, and he also equates this ideology with a specific twentieth
century state, which is naive. It would be very interesting to discuss
sociologically why so much of the Western Left was and is (perhaps, more so
today) combatively naive. After all, sheer romanticisation of its causes
and allies contributed to the demise of the Left as political force. This
is important because a) Andrew is undeniably very intelligent and an astute
debater b) Western Left in general consistently associated the USSR with
socialism one way or another and unwittingly followed the lines of
capitalist propaganda -- loudly defending the tarnished image of the USSR
allegedly misrepresented by the mainstream media.
Psychologically it is very difficult to part with the illusions which in my
case happen to be also patriotic (I mark in the US affimative action
papers "Yes, veteran of overseas wars though from the opposite side",
sometimes I tell my sons the stories of those exotic medals which one of
the uncles received for shooting down half-a-dozen American airplanes over
Korea, and I keep the Soviet General Staff map of Chicagoland -- but I am
also rather happy we never put it to use.) Well, it is quite impossible to
identify with Mr. Yeltsin and the tri-couleur.
The USSR inherited Russia's ambiguous position within the global division
of labor. In the eighteenth century, when Russia has joined the capitalist
world-system, it immediately became a heavy-weight due to its capacity to
mobilize extremely large (over one million) standing armies armed with
relatively simple muskets and bayonets. The apogee was reached in 1815 when
Russian Cossacks rode into Paris. At the same time two things were
happening: the organization of production in the core takes a major turn
(industrial revolution) while the growing Russian nobility (under Peter I
alone it grew tenfold in numbers due to the practice of granting nobility
to the officers from the company commanders up) encountered problems in
financing its now European upper-class consumption. Serfdom was driven to
near plantation slavery. The state, fearing the nobility revolt like in
December 1825, tightened the repression and switched to the policy of
morose bureaucratic promotion into the elite.
In various forms and projects since the 1850s every sector of Russia's
"educated" society realized the need to "modernize", i.e. compensate with
industrialization for the declining/stagnating incomes of the Europeanized
elites (Russian officer was paid twice lower than his French or British
colleague at the time, most estates barely fed their lords) and the visibly
inadequate military capability of the state. Grosly there were two projects
corresponding to two camps: those educated men who made it into the
bureaucratic establishment and logically advocated reforms from above
(conservative counterreforms being reforms nonetheless) -- and those who
didn't make it and eventually formed the educated counterestablishment, the
famous Russian intelligentsia, whose projects involved more or less
revolutionary restructuring of the state as condition for catching up with
the "progressive states of Europe".
Ottoman empire was experiencing similar strains but the Ottoman
intelligentsia was more narrow and deeply fractured along ethnic lines due
to the old "millet" system. Young Turks, logically in their situation, read
Durkeim about organic solidarity (Ataturk was a Durheimian buff, but not he
alone) and looked at France for the example. Russians traditionally
gravitated towards German culture, hence the infatuation with Hegel, later
Marx, and deep envy/disgust of German order and cleanliness.
In 1917 -- very late considering that intelligentsia had been waiting for
three generations -- the buraucracy at last faltered surprisingly suddenly
and easily. Russian state completely disintegrated by the end of 1917, it
was hard to believe how rapidly such a monstrosity could lose coherence.
The intelligentsias were invited and rushed into power.
basically, there were two projects: provincial intelligentsias pursued
local nationalism, the centrally located groups pursued universalist
imperial projects. Bolsheviks did it more effectively, or were luckier --
it is really the key mystery of the Russia revolution how the Bolsheviks
survived during the first year in power. Their coming to power was easy
and easily explained. Their still being there in December 1918 is a very
poorly studied problem.
Part of the explanaton is enthusiasms of various sorts -- class (largely
the brief peasant jubilation after being allowed to spontaneously
re-division the land) and national (since most nationalisms in the Russian
empire were nascent, Tatars or Bashkirs, though not Poles or Finns, were
content with the promise of ethnic niche in the larger framework of
socialist Russia). Radical factions within the old intelligentsia,
especially artistic, joined for the pathos, providing the most glorious
ideological images and forms of the period.
But at least no less important was the Bolshevik institution-building. By
the end of 1918 Red Army was an army, not a set of militias, with the
discipline enforced by terroristic methods once denounced, later praised by
Trotsky. Isaac Babel, undeniably a devoutedly Bolshevik author, left
poignant romantic descriptions of the Civil War violence. (See Babel', I.
(Isaak), 1894-1941. Konarmiia. German translation: Budjonnys Reiterarmee.
<Dusselforf> Suhrkamp <1965> Babel', I. (Isaak), Red cavalry. London :
Bristol Classical Press, 1994.) This violence -- and the relative lack of
it during the collapse of 1988-92 -- puzzles me immensely. In Maikop, a
town near the place I was born, the local Reds first executed all families
which had cars (there were few), then began killing basically all aliens --
educated professionals, Jews including Bolsheviks, Circassians as
"counterrevolutionary Asiatics". Since most natives resided in the
mountain villages, 38 were shelled by Red artillery and burnt by punitive
expeditions. Naturally, this provoked a revolt where the natives
(Circassians) supported the officers and gymnasium graduates (the washed
one, the White bone, as they were called) fleeing from the town. In June
1918 the Whites took Maikop over and in revenge massacred 3 thousand men
and women from among "the unwashed one" out of the total population of 8
thousand. Just in three days and nights. In one small provincial town.
In 1991 Yeltsin abolishes the USSR -- and not a single general marches on
Moscow!
Not a single Jewish pogrom occurs. Even in Chechnya and Karabagh -- less
than 5 thousand combat deaths in each war (majority of victims being the
elderly who hid in the basements and were buried alive by heavy shelling)
Trotsky instilled some order into this bloody chaos -- not much but enough
to win. This order rested on ruthlessness and often blind obeience -- the
intervening means must be systemically adequate, mustn't they? For
instance, in January 1919 Trotsky sends the telegram warning local Soviet
authorities in Southern Russia that Cossack populations were likely to
support the advancing Denikin Volunteers. In a village called Popovka (I
just happened to read those documents, similar incidents were many) 67 men
and women were put in preventive custody, that is, in the basement of local
schoolhouse. Arrests were laregely random -- the local Bolsheviks, mostly
recently returning from the WW I fronts soldiers, grabbed in one morning as
many people who looked suspicious as they managed. But what to do with the
detainees? How even to feed them? Next day Trotsky sends another circular
cable urging the local commanders to "excel in revolutionary resoluteness
in crushing the Cossack Vandee". They likely didn't know the word vandee,
but they surely understood "resolutness". The chief of local soviet drank
moonshine with his comrades for the rest of the day. They weren't yet
sufficiently brutilized. At night, in his own words, he took the machine
gun and "grounded the prisoners into fine dust". Trotsky replied that the
action was probably excessive though justified under the circumstances. In
the future he demanded the execution lists to be senct for saction at least
to the district command.
What matters in such stories is that these relatively young men with the
Civil War experience formed the ethos of Soviet cadres in the 1920s and
1930s. They largely perished in the purges, but they also killed as easily
themselves. The theshold of admissible violence was very low in the first
decades of Soviet modernization.
That it was modernization, not an effort to 'better' the lives of Soviet
population, was very clear to the Bolshevik leadership itself. Better life
wasn't even part of the sloganry until much, much later. The main slogan
was greater country.
Now, Russia wasn't as underdeveloped as oftain portrayed. Its indicators
and the general picture was rather extremely contradictory. Yet, it was
before 1917 a country with pockets of advanced industry and world-class
science and arts. Imperial Russia was somewhat more "backward" than Germany
but far "ahead" of Turkey. Russia tested the first multi-engine bomber
airplane, Ilya Muromets, before 1914. Igor Sikorsky, its creator, later
emigrated to the US where he later built mostly helicopters (Bell-Sikorsky)
but dozens of his colleagues remained. (Also see a very informative book
Bradley, Joseph. Guns for the Tsar : American technology and the small arms
industry in nineteenth-century Russia. DeKalb, Ill. : Northern Illinois
University Press, 1990.)
What Bolsheviks really achieved was military-industrial state that in the
1930s became an uneasy ally of the US in Europe. The Kinney prototype tank
was sold by Henry Ford to Russia with the approval (or connivance) of
Washington. The calculation was perfectly sober -- massive tank armies of
Russia could reach Berlin but hardly Washington. In 1932 Hitler comes to
power and America recognizes Soviet Russia. In the 1930s the USSR, with all
the sacrifes and efforts, produced less than ten thousand combat airplanes.
Most were outdated by 1941 and anyway perished in the first months of the
war. having lost one half of its industrial base, the USSR nevertheless by
1944 fielded ten times more airplane and huge armored armies. Ironically,
the massive US aid which helped to really set up the Soviet
military-industrial complex and win the war, remained largely unmentioned
-- figure out yourself in whose interest such transfers of technology and
material could become declassified and publishable during the Cold War?
After 1945 the USSR accomplished the secular goal. For the second time
since 1815 Russia was the most milarily important power of Europe. The
geopolitical balance was restored at the new industrial level.
Militarization and industrialization required mass production of skilled
workers and cadres, with the appropriate life-styles. In this respect the
literature on similar transformations in " properly capitalist" societies
is very illuminating -- beginning with Gramsci's idea of Fordism. As the
ideology of war communism was being exhausted and domestic terror could no
longer support it, consumerism became first the internal agenda of the
Soviet elite (statistical analysis will tell very little -- as former
employee of Gosplan, I know the value of our statistics, especially in such
sensitive areas)
As Braudel said, the comforts of modern life have the tendency to trickle
down into the masses a generation later. In the USSR this happened very
rapidly. My mother had no shoes until the age of 14, in the fifties she had
a pair of work boots issued by her post-office, in the sixties there were
Czech-made shoes, in the seventies Austrian leather boots became the dream.
Partly, because of the general expansion of the fifties, partly because in
the 1970s the USSR financed with oil-revenues the consumer goods imports in
order to prevent protests. The prospect of mass protests was much more
immediate than presumed back at the time when such instances were isolated
and assiduosly muffled. But the Politburo knew what actually happened in
Novocherkassk and several other industrial towns in 1962, and it is no
coincidence that in 1962 Politburo sanctioned "as exceptional measure" the
purchase of grain from the US. As you know, these imports never stopped.
The most meaningful way of interpreting the demise of the USSR is by
comparing it to firm bancruptcy dynamics. In 1945 the USSR struck gold. It
invested heavily into producing and maintaining exactly the kind of land
army that Rommel and Guderian would envy. Only this army had nobody to
fight with. We pondered seriously the Maoists (I fondly remember packing
the ryucksack in February 1979 waiting to be airlifted to North Vietnam for
what we wryly called The First Socialist War -- but we were young and
really wanted to beat the .... out of Chinese. Our colonel was warning:
"Boys, don't sit on your asses, volunteer! This war might be over before
you manage to earn any medals.") Then Afghanistan was selected as an easier
practice. The maps of Pakistan were being studied in February 1980, 2
months after. Why not linking up with fraternal India? Wasn't Pakistan an
artificial invention of British imperialism anyway?
The firm, specialized in geopolitical aggrandizemnet and export of
protection costs which may be called USSR, Inc. simply pursued the road of
its success and heavily overinvested in the increasingly obsolete area
(heavy mass-produced weapons; remember that A-bombs were mass produced,
too). The firm, however, had to keep its workforce and cadres content and
tame which was becoming increasingly costly. Then a recession inevitably
arrived (in the late seventies) which forced Moscow to choose between
cutting the military (a very costly operation in itself) or heeding to the
consumer expectations of the population in order to preserve legitimacy.
Fluctuations within this constrained choice was the story of perestroika.
But, as a satirist observed, the USSR fell apart not because its citezenry
was given to read 'Doctor Zhivago", but because it was given "Doctor
Zhivago" instead of sausage.
Here, I believe, lies the big hope for the opponents of capitalism -- it is
not as nearly dangerous for an expanding and expansive historical system
when a group of people (say, class) refuse to live under it. Far more
dangerous is when a lot of people (say, population of the Third World)
actually demands to live under such system demanding that it fulfills its
ideological promise and delivers the goods.
Uf-f-f! Forgive me, I claim to have overfullfilled my productive quota and
I drop from the authors of ephemeral debates on the destiny of the world.
Yours,
Georgi Derluguian
Georgiļ M. Derluguian
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
USA
FAX (1-847) 491-9907
tel. (1-847) 491-2741 (rabota)