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From New International, Vol. XXI No. 1, Spring 1955, pp. 63–68.
Marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
How Russia Is Ruled
by Merle Fainsod
Published by Harvard University Press
Terror and Progress
by Barrington Moore, Jr.
Published by Harvard University Press
Both How Russia Is Ruled by Merle Fainsod and Terror and Progress by Barrington Moore, Jr., are Harvard publications, and both authors are associated with the Russian Research Center at that university. It also happens that these two books more or less supplement each other. Fainsod’s work, running to 500 pages, is primarily a descriptive and detailed study of how the Russian totalitarian system works, while Moore’s book is an attempt to theoretically comprehend its dynamics.
However, both books overlap. Fainsod writes his version of Bolshevik origins in order to explain genetically the present totalitarian order and also engages in a bit of theorizing on the social function of terror. Moore provides pertinent material to reinforce some of his arguments. Of the two, Moore’s book is the more valuable and interesting.
While we are tempted to recommend Fainsod’s How Russia Is Ruled as a source book on Russia in the Stalin and post-Stalin eras, we must sound a warning against the early chapters of the book dealing with Bolshevism before the conquest of power and the post-revolutionary period up until, say, Lenin’s death. His presentation is definitely misleading. Fainsod simply does not show the objectivity demanded of a historian and social scientist dealing with what is admittedly controversial material. He presents a carefully filtered-out picture of ideas and events since he is interested in showing that Lenin, not Stalin, is the real villain of the piece. The one-party state had its origins, in Fainsod’s view, in the monolithic party.
For him, Lenin’s dictatorial concepts and practices begin with What Is To Be Done. His interpretation of Lenin’s famous polemic leads him to say, “Democratic management, Lenin held, was simply inapplicable to a revolutionary organization.” This, to put it kindly, is a wilful misreading of Lenin’s view. What Lenin did believe and said in What Is To Be Done was that under conditions of autocracy it was impossible for Russian revolutionary socialists to build the kind of open political organization the Social-Democrats in Germany had created. Fainsod fails to mention that What Is To Be Done is filled from beginning to end with unrestrained paeans of praise to the German Social-Democratic Party is a model to be followed by revolutionary Marxist organizations operating under conditions of parliamentary democracy.
Lenin’s practices fare no better than his ideas at Fainsod’s hands. Turning to the post-October period, Fainsod centers his attention on the events leading up to the fateful 10th Party Congress in March 1921, when factions were outlawed. On the basis of this undeniable fact, our author says the following: “The Party faction was anathema to him [Lenin], and in the Resolution on Party Unity, which he had drafted for the Tenth Party Congress, he did everything in his power to destroy the embryonic development of a two- or multi-faction system within the framework of the single-party dictatorship. He could find a place for criticism in his organizational scheme only if it presented no political challenge to the party leadership and if it was ‘practical’ criticism which served to improve the efficiency of the party machine.”
We regret wearying the reader with this lengthy quotation, but it is needed to show how far from objectivity an American scholar can stray when dealing with hotly disputed questions. Fainsod does not quote Lenin at the same 10th Party Congress, replying to a proposal by Riazanov on the question of political struggles inside the party by saying:
“The present Congress can in no way and in form engage the elections to the next Congress. And if, for example, questions like the Brest-Litovsk peace arise? Can we guarantee that such questions will not arise? It cannot be guaranteed. It is possible that it will then be necessary to elect by platform. That is quite clear.”
Lenin’s explicit reference to Brest- Litovsk makes his meaning clear. At the outset of the party dispute over Brest-Litovsk, as we have pointed out in reviewing Rostow’s book, Lenin was in a minority. Furthermore, the Left Opposition issued its own papers and controlled the Moscow Party organization. Lenin’s triumph over his party opponents was not achieved by outlawing them, but by winning the party membership over to his views. More important, to refer to Brest- Litovsk was to indicate that factional struggles were inevitable and necessary when serious issues divided the party.
Lenin made this point even more explicit elsewhere during the same period, when he said:
“But if deep, fundamental disagreements of principle exist, we may be told: Do they not justify the sharpest factional action? Naturally they justify it, if the disagreements are really very deep, and if the rectification of the wrong policy or of the working class cannot be otherwise obtained.” (Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, Pt. 1, page 47. Russian edition—quoted by Max Shachtman in The Struggle for the New Course, page 142.)
What Fainsod says about Lenin’s abhorrence of factions is simply not in accord with the facts. But even more serious is Fainsod’s failure to mention Lenin’s preparation to join Trotsky in a struggle at the 12th Party Congress against Stalin and his cohorts. That Lenin died at that time is an historical accident; that he realized the gravity of the party crisis, and the need to struggle against the bureaucratic danger is not. Such a struggle could only have proceeded in the form of an open factional contest at the top, enlisting the ranks of the party to achieve success. Whether Lenin and Trotsky would have dislodged Stalin and his bureaucratic clique we will never know, but Fainsod never mentions the fact that Lenin was preparing to enter a factional struggle against Stalin. To have done so would have compelled him to abandon his simplistic notion of the monolithic party and the dictatorial Lenin.
There are other points in Fainsod’s narrative where he lapses from a fully- rounded picture of the complex developments in the post-October period, such as his treatment of the relations between the Bolsheviks and the other parties. But enough has been said to indicate his bias. And having entered our reservations, we repeat our initial comment. Fainsod’s How Russia Is Ruled is a good source-book for those who want a factual description of how the present-day Russian totalitarian system operates.
LIKE EVERYONE ELSE THESE DAYS, Barrington Moore is interested in the future of totalitarian Russia, and Progress and Terror is his contribution to the discussion now going on. The book is definitely worth reading, not so much for Moore’s prognosis of three alternative paths he sees open to the ruling class (he does not believe revolution from below is likely in the foreseeable future), as for his method of diagnosis, the way he treats his subject matter. Moore has a real feeling and grasp of some of the contradictions immanent in the Russian social system.
Before commenting directly on the book, at least a word of praise is in order for Moore’s objectivity in handling some charged questions. True, Moore shares the bias of his Harvard colleague, Fainsod, when it comes to Bolshevism and its relation to Stalinism. But still, on each question he tries to present all the relevant facts and he shows respect for ideas with which he does not agree. It is refreshing, after all, to hear an American bourgeois writer candidly admit that the heated atmosphere in this country tends to distort and prejudice the scholar’s view of things Russian. It is also a rare experience these days to read a sober discussion of Lenin’s philosophical ideas and see them weighed on their merit. And, to anticipate somewhat, Moore’s brief treatment of the connection between terror and socialism is one of the high points of the book. Mistaken though he is in his definition of socialism (nationalized economy), and confused in identifying revolutionary and totalitarian terror, still he does come to an important and correct conclusion. He says:
“The Soviet case cannot therefore be made to support the argument that any form of socialism will require organized terror to maintain it.”
In discussing the origins of totalitarian terror in Russia, Moore makes the following observations:
“The answer may be hazarded that organized terror, in its beginning stages at any late, does not stem from any particular type of economic structure, but from the attempt to alter the structure of society at a rapid rate and from above through forceful administrative devices.”
Furthermore:
“It is necessary to distinguish between centralized economic control that is forcibly imposed in order to carry out a policy opposed by most of the population and one that is the consequence of an attempt to find a more satisfactory way of meeting the wishes of the population. Organized terror in the Soviet Union belongs quite clearly in the first of these two categories.”
The distinction Moore is groping toward, clumsy and confused though his language be, is between the revolutionary terror that accompanies a social upheaval and the totalitarian terror of the Stalinist counterrevolution imposed from above. This distinction is the beginning of wisdom? And although Moore does not follow his thought through to the end it does enable him to see there is no inherent connection between centralized planning based on democratic socialism and totalitarian terror.
Moore finds the reasons for the continued existence of totalitarian power in the fact that all impulses for growth in Russian society come from the center, from the regime. The lower levels of the economic bureaucracy tend to lapse into routinism, and are forever trying to escape the imperatives of the plan. The ability of the regime to shake up the apparatus plays the same role in the Russian economy that market competition plays under capitalism.
The key to Moore’s method is given by his statement in the opening chapter that:
“For about the past twenty years Soviet society has been one enormous bureaucracy. The state has swallowed society. The behavior of nearly every adult male during his waking hours is heavily determined by his place within this bureaucracy which confronts him with a set of alternatives in such a way as to make many of the choices among them obligatory.”
As it stands, this definition of the Russian social system is inadequate since it tends to blur the distinctions between rulers and ruled, to ignore class antagonisms which explain the decisive need for the totalitarian terror. But Moore corrects himself in part on this point at a later stage in his study.
All the crucial areas of this bureaucratic society, such as the factory, the collective farm and the world of the intellectual are analyzed in terms of three master concepts: power, technical and economic rationality and tradition.
By power Moore means the totalitarian power of the regime, exercized through the party, the secret police, and the economic and administrative apparatus. No one is exempt from the terror. All members of society, bureaucrat as well as worker and peasant, are potential victims of its arbitrary use. The aim of the totalitarian power is to atomize society and render everyone dependent on the regime. The effect of the use of this terror, however, if carried too far, is totally disruptive, since it makes the continued functioning of the economic and social system almost impossible.
Moore next dwells on the existence of “rational,” “technical-economic” tendencies within the Russian system. These tendencies are in conflict with the arbitrary operation of the totalitarian system. By “rationality,” Moore means the need for social stability, regularity, and a reasonable relation between effort and reward demanded by a modern industrial society. Here Moore has drawn heavily on the ideas of the German sociologist, Max Weber, who stressed the rational nature of economic and social institutions under capitalism. Economic accountability, technical efficiency, a wide-spread division of labor, and a system of hierarchic relations within the process of production and administration are typical of modem industry.
In discussing the visible signs of this tendency within the Russian system, he calls attention to the way the Malenkov regime is stressing “law and order.” We believe Moore’s application of this idea is the weakest part of his analysis. The trends he discusses exist, but they are in no way incompatible with the continued existence of the totalitarian terror. Here an analogy can be brought into play that is as much a criticism of Weber’s idea as of Moore’s use of it. Under capitalism, order and rationality exist within the factory, but the irrationality of capitalism is expressed in the anarchic play of the market. In like manner, the Russian regime demands that the factory administrator produce in an “economic” fashion, but as Moore himself has shown, it enforces this demand by the use of the totalitarian terror.
The regime must use terror to discipline the bureaucracy in the direction of efficiency because it has no other way open. The economic bureaucracy will continue as in the past to build and administer wastefully, to lapse into routinism, and to evade the plan so long as the workers and peasants do not exercize democratic control over production and planning. Democratic control from below is the only alternative to police terror from above. Moore sees the contradiction between the “irrational” police power and the “rational”’demands of a modem industrial system. He does not see altogether that these two tendencies are organically linked. The modem “rational” industry of Russia rests on the “irrational” basis of slave labor. This is the extreme expression of the total denial of political and economic rights to the workers and peasants.
The third category Moore applies is that of tradition. Under this heading he discusses the development of clearly defined classes, and within the multi-national framework, of a superior nation, the Russians. It is here that he locates the tendency toward stagnation and routinism. Once the bureaucracy ties its rewards to property or social status, there is no need to bow to the extreme demands of the regime for impossible results. What Moore has to say is supported by a well-organized array of facts and examples. But as Moore himself understands, this is one tendency that is least likely to prevail.
In the final chapter of the book, entitled Images of the Future, Moore proceeds to lay down three possible lines of development based on the tendencies he has discussed. Each of these tendencies when pushed to the extremes, excludes the others. They are: (1) A continuation of the monolithic, totalitarian dictatorship, if the succession crisis is resolved; (2) the evolution into a technocracy, in which the “managerial,” “economic,” bureaucracy gets the upper hand over the secret police and the party. Having conquered, it will introduce elements of legal order and economic rationality without going so far as to altogether dispense with the secret police or yielding a complete democracy; (3) Degeneration into a traditional despotism. Clearly defined classes emerge, based on some form of property or social (quasi-religious) function, and/or the Russians emerge as the superior and ruling nation within the empire. The hold of the central, totalitarian regime weakens and the dynamic compulsion for continued growth from the center is gradually frustrated. A process of stagnation and disintegration would set in.
Moore does not believe any of these tendencies will be pushed to the extreme. But he does think the managerial, technocratic tendency will get the upper hand. However, Moore qualifies 'his prognosis with the following remarks: “Yet another reason for stressing the strength of the totalitarian tradition and totalitarian institutions lies in a certain instability of the rationalist and technical order, that is manifest even in our own society and might legitimately be expected to be much stronger in post-Stalinist Russia. The essence of the matter lies in the fact that the mere existence of a powerful industrial state dominating much of the Eurasian continent would be a potential threat to other nations, and primarily to the United States, no matter how peaceful its behavior and apparent intentions.”
The ideas in this passage, couched though they are in cautious language, are a credit to Moore’s ability to think some questions through to the end.
Although we don’t want to end on an ungracious note, we would like to call attention to one piece of unintentional humor. In his last chapter, Moore applies some current sociological concepts with disastrous results. Discussing what we would call Stalinist “ideology,” that is, the system of beliefs the regime wants to impose on society, Moore uses the related notions of the “in-” and “out-group.” Members of the in-group are bound by solidarity, but treat the out-groups in a predatory manner. Moore then translates the history of Bolshevism from its inception into terms of in- and out-groups, and the results are pretty funny. For example, Lenin’s “definition of the in-group was so narrow that it is scarcely an exaggeration to assert that on many crucial occasions it included only himself.” Again:
“The seizure of power in the November Revolution compelled the Bolsheviks to extend their definition of the in-groups. In at least a few limited respects, all of Russia became included within the in-group.”
And finally:
“To what extent the Party Presidium’s private definitions of the in-group, one of the key unspoken assumptions in any policy decision, have changed under the impact of experience is a question for which no certain answer exists.”
Still, we think this book is worth reading.
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Last updated on 15 August 2019