Alternative Pasts, Future Alternatives?

Alternative Pasts, Future Alternatives?Author(s): Georgi M. DerluguianSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 535-552Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1520342 .

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Alternative Pasts, Future Alternatives?

Georgi M. Derluguian

The [1989] forces of change were yet to realize that the road of ruthless "economizing"-namely the monetarist ideology-was leading them not to the promised land of North America but to the harsher realities of South America or worse.

-Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, "1989: The Continuation of 1968."

Admittedly, I was one of those Soviets who once engaged in smuggling Ste- phen Cohen's biography of Nikolai Bukharin.1 Early on a dark morning in January 1985, when our currently reigning invalid was Konstantin Cher- nenko, the customs officers at Sheremetevo-2 looked particularly gloomy. Perhaps taken by our own wild looks or possibly just feeling sleepy, they casually waived in the procession of oddly tanned and malaria-thinned men, a few still dressed in jungle camouflage, who were returning from a tour of "internationalist duty" in the People's Republic of Mozambique. They asked only the pro forma question whether anybody was carrying a gun. The photocopy of Cohen's book was better contraband, for it could be used as currency on the intellectual barter market of banned literature. Moreover Cohen's substantial argument that the Soviet political structures could be different turned his book into a clandestine bestseller.

Cohen achieved that rare privilege for a historian of influencing the actual course of history through his writings. His argument resonated not only with the Moscow intelligentsia or Mikhail Gorbachev himself but, as I documented in my fieldwork, during 1986-1987 it also animated the spate of "Bukharinist" discussion clubs that sprang up in many Soviet provinces, including such future hotbeds of nationalism as Tatarstan and Chechnia. This influence, however, proved fleeting.

Instead of updating its political and economic structures, the Soviet edifice was caught in 1989 in the cascading chaos that lasted in the majority of splinter republics until the mid-1990s and even then the chaos was overcome only imperfectly. But, as the visionary spontaneous sociologist Andrei Amalrik first argued back in 1969 and the American historian Stephen Kotkin recently concurred, the outcome could have been far more disastrous.2 Amalrik, Kotkin, and many other analysts saw in the

The epigraph is taken from Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Waller- stein, "1989: The Continuation of 1968," in George Katsiaficas, ed., After theFall: 1989 and the Future of Freedom (New York, 2001), 43. Note that this essay was originally circulated in

July 1992. 1. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-

1938 (New York, 1973). 2. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York, 1970); and Ste-

phen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford, 2001). For the

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end of socialist historical optimism the frightening potential for sending the Soviet establishment down the road of aggressively chauvinistic reaction-what has in fact materialized in the desperate decline of Serbian apparatchiks. This stark potentiality seemed plausible all along, and it evidently still lingers in Moscow these days. We should thus credit Cohen with helping to bolster the countervailing historical optimism at a critical juncture where, fortunately for us all, other contingencies such as the Afghanistan quagmire that discredited military options, the patriotic re- straint exercised by the Polish army in suppressing Solidarity, or Gorba- chev's personal dispositions enabled a different structural possibility.

This more optimistic possibility has also existed since at least the early 1960s. It derived, on the one hand, from the stable geopolitics of the Cold War that was rather like the "Cold Peace" first attained by the superpower truce ending the battle for Korea and then by the set of mutual understandings drawn from the Caribbean crisis. In the 1970s detente and the windfall of petrodollars set the stage for the advantageous integration of the Soviet bloc into the world-system's core. A decade later a hopeful Gor- bachev knocked on the gates of the west and soon suggested knocking down the whole wall. As long as the USSR managed to maintain a semblance of military and economic parity, that is, until the autumn of 1989, its joining the European club of diminished but comfortable former "powers" alongside Germany, France, and Britain still seemed a realistic possibility.

On the other hand, optimism derived from the rapid coalescence of the large classes of new intelligentsia and skilled workers in the capital- intensive industries in the postwar era of prosperity and rapid growth. These Soviet-made classes felt that the Communist Party's dictatorial, all- encompassing hold over production and social life was preventing them from effectively deploying their technical capabilities and from gaining status and power commensurate with their growing significance. In the early phase of perestroika, the formation of Bukharinist clubs marked a spontaneous response of this social force to Gorbachev's expansion of new legal opportunities. The movement, which had parallels in other socialist countries, expressed an essentially social democratic set of aspi- rations calling to institutionalize the public discussion of political and cultural matters while taking for granted the state's provision of stable jobs, welfare, and public order. The conditions for such optimism persisted until the autumn of 1989. Subsequently, following the interplay of shifting opportunities and individual strategies based on different kinds of social capital, the early members of reformist clubs evolved into the post-Soviet capitalists rising from the entrepreneurial nursery of Komsomol or into nationalist politicians in the non-Russian republics, or, for that matter, into professors of sociology in America. After 1991, however, the majority got trapped in what Michael Burawoy called the industrial involution.3

analytical reconstruction of alternative pasts, it might also be profitable to revisit George W. Breslauer, Five Images of the SovietFuture: A Critical Review and Synthesis (Berkeley, 1978); and Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (New York, 1983).

3. Michael Burawoy, "The Great Involution: Russia's Response to the Market" (un- published paper, 1999) available at http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/burawoy/ (last consulted 29 April 2004).

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The example of Cohen's biography of Bukharin mightily underscores the practicality of writing alternative histories. This exercise serves to ex- pand the range of imaginable routes at what Alexander Gerschenkron called the nodal points when the system can go in several different di- rections.4 What Cohen is doing now seems legitimate, both in terms of the professional struggle among the old Sovietologists (debates regarding failed predictions are integral to social science) and because this forces us to think beyond the ideological orthodoxy of the day. But Cohen's recent efforts strike me as vulnerable on two major counts.

Cohen's title-"Was the Soviet System Reformable?"-reflects the false antinomy that holds a central place in the unilinear evolutionary paradigm of nineteenth-century liberal imagination, especially its Anglo- American hegemonic variety.5 By engaging in the prudishly moralizing discourse that limits the world to the dichotomy of "perversity" versus "normalcy,"6 Cohen unwittingly accepts the terms of debate by which he can hardly ever win. This happens because Cohen has for many years been enjoying eminent proximity to the nexus between the fields of political ideology and academic knowledge. In the late 1970s and 1980s, his own symbolic capital was exceedingly high, which contributed to his becoming such a prominent target in the 1990s. Yet, he is now up against what Dmitrii Furman wryly calls istmat naoborot, which is perhaps best ren- dered in English as antihistorical antimaterialism.7 Cohen's right-wing opponents can bear no burden of proof because their position is more than orthodox; it stands as the common sense of the age and thus requires no serious argumentation insofar as its shared understandings are inscribed in the very dispositions and institutions of contemporary social power. In short, it is what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu singled out as symbolic domination beyond ideology, or doxa.8

Furthermore Cohen's defense suffers from poorly analyzed arguments. Typically, he identifies personages or processes before perestroika and then cites what they have become since, or what became their close analogies in the less traumatic central European transitions (curiously, the different example of Yugoslavia goes unmentioned). But he hardly ever ex-

4. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

5. Possible ways of overcoming the legacies of this nineteenth-century paradigm of deterministic social laws and unavoidable unilinear progress are discussed by Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984) and Immanuel Waller- stein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). But one might as well have fun with the witty and erudite essays of the pale- ontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York, 1996) or explore the paradoxes of the new understanding of the physical universe together with the Nobel laureate in chemistry Iliya Prigogine and his collaborator Isabelle Stengers, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York, 1997).

6. See Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1991).

7. Dmitrii E. Furman, Nashi desiat' let: Politicheskii protsess v Rossii s 1991 po 2001 gody (Moscow, 2001).

8. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chi- cago, 1992); and Pierre Bourdieu, "A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism," New Left Review 1/227 (January-February 1998): 125-30.

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plains the causal connections and how one gets from historical point A to point B (the actual outcome), or how one could have obtained the alternative B+ (a hypothetically better world) or B- (a worse outcome, possibly all the way to Armageddon). To use sociological jargon, missing from Cohen's exposition are the social mechanisms involved in formulating and spreading competing discourses, the structural coalescence of poten- tially contentious groups and their actual mobilizing, the institutionaliza- tion of political gains, elite and oppositional brokerage, geopolitical configuration, or shifts in economic flows.9

These are not just sociological quibblings. Cohen engaged in con- structing counterfactual history in Bukharin's biography, and he does ex- plicitly here as well. This is, as I said, a legitimate and sometimes practical analytical exercise, but it is fraught with two temptations that often dis- credit the whole idea. One is alternative history as utopia, the grandest example of which might be Arnold Toynbee's speculation regarding what might have happened if Alexander the Great had survived his mysterious illness in Babylon and proceeded to unite the whole ecumene under the benevolent empire that would have ensured eternal peace and the conti- nuity of civilization, of course, to the exclusion of what was troubling Toynbee most: the catastrophes ensuing after August 1914. Another example might be the stark antiutopia presented in the popular novel Fa- therland by Robert Harris in which the Nazi Reich in 1965 dominates the whole continent to the Urals (and, incidentally, feels pretty much like western imagery of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War). A related variety is alternative history as revenge: for example, what if the Serbian knights had crushed the Ottomans on Kosovo Polje.

The discipline imposed by analyzing social mechanisms, providing a reasonably detailed outline of possible trajectories, and judiciously developing comparisons to the actual historical instances constitute the necessary safeguards against mere wishful thinking. If we adopt these tools, then historical alternatives can be explored meaningfully and the proce- dure might find its place in the repertoire of our methods. Exploring alternatives helps to test our propositions regarding what actually occurred by contrasting it to the routes that were not taken-but it is obligatory to detail what established those routes, what factors determined the opening or closing of particular opportunities, and how the closure of alternatives might have shaped the actual course of events (for example, by denying resources to groups that might otherwise have driven the historical system

9. For the conceptualization of political processes as the "concatenation of social mechanisms," see Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, Eng., 2001). Also see the incisive methodological essays of Arthur Stinch- combe, "Tilly on the Past as a Sequence of Futures," postscript to Charles Tilly, Roads from Past to Future (Lanham, Md., 1997), 387-409, and "Ending Revolutions and Building New Governments," Annual Review ofPolitical Science 2 (June 1999): 49-73. Even more strongly recommended is the classic example of Stinchcombe's theoretical sarcasm, "On Soft- headedness on the Future," Ethics 93 (October 1982): 114-28. Finally, a good summary of recent work on the theories of revolution (that includes a chapter on the east European rebellions of 1989-1991) is provided byJeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolu- tionary Movements, 1945-1991 (Cambridge, Eng., 2001).




in a different direction.) There is also a stringent limit to how far we can reasonably expect to gaze down the corridors not taken because in a complex relational system changing a few parameters multiplies exponentially the possible consequences that affect each other in turn. It is what natural scientists romantically call the "butterfly effect" in which small inputs into an open turbulent system (like the earth's atmosphere) magnify into major alterations down the road.

Let me demonstrate how these theoretical propositions might trans- late into the practice of research by briefly replaying the whole Soviet trajectory and highlighting the nodal points Cohen might have selected himself. These are not full-blown hypotheses but rather sketches of hypotheses, a working document intended to stimulate discussion and indicate potential paths toward a more systematic exploration of Soviet history in the context of the world transformations of the twentieth century.

1917

If we remove Vladimir Lenin from the picture, what is left of the leading insurrectionary party?

Until the summer of 1917, Lev Trotskii was still running his own faction of mezhraiontsy and would probably not have dared to forge the Red Army on his own because he had deeply internalized the constraints of anti-Semitic prejudice. Presiding over the Bolshevik organization in Pet- rograd was the narrowly "ouvrieriste" Aleksandr Shliapnikov, who was soon joined by Iosif Stalin, whose own record as an independently thinking politician was at best mixed. Bukharin was a brilliant polemist and, had he not been a professional revolutionary, he would likely be remem- bered as a social scientist in the generation succeeding the pioneering co- hort of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (the same could be said about other theoretical lights of international socialism, such as Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotskii, Antonio Gramsci, and perhaps Mao Zedong). But, frankly, Bukharin's tactical acumen was even more suspect than Sta- lin's. At the same time, the left socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists, each in their own way, remained parties of the old type, that is, ill prepared to seize state power when it was dropped. Various kinds of in- surrection were still likely, but failure was just as likely, similar to the contemporary experiences of Germany, Hungary, or Spain.

Lenin in 1917 gives us the rarest example of a personality changing the course of history. But even then, this became possible only because Lenin and his co-conspirators had forged the mighty lever of the party of professional revolutionaries and because this peculiar organization obtained its window of opportunity in the unwinding chaos produced by the interactions among the effects of wartime mobilization, the semireformed structures of the Romanovs' absolutism, and the agrarian revolt (or ethno- agrarian in many regions) multiplied by the expansive demography of pre- ceding decades.

The Bolshevik opportunity arrived quite contrary to the Marxist expectation of mounting contradictions within the capitalist mode of produc-

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tion. The breakthrough theories of Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol explain what provided this revolutionary opportunity in Russia.10 This opportunity was itself strongly predetermined by the emergence of modern bureaucratic institutions, nations, and classes that had spread from the west to the semiperiphery like Russia, Spain,Japan, and the Ottoman empire by the early twentieth century. Not only were governments and capitalist organizations actively learning from each other, but so were the various revolutionary circles, whose reach, through emigration and the dissemination of translated literature, became no less global."1

This progressive diffusionary process was followed by the apocalyptic collapse of the international order in 1914. Memoirists and historians have traditionally explained the outbreak of pan-European slaughter in 1914 as a grotesquely tragic juxtaposition of chance, patriotic madness, and folly. But this explanation focuses on the events while disregarding less evident and slower moving structures-and here Fernand Braudel's famous disdain for the conventional histoire evenementielle seems particularly justified. To appreciate the world-historical factors that coalesced in the Bolshevik revolution, one has to turn to Karl Polanyi's classical commentary on the nineteenth-century "Great Transformation" of world markets as well as the more recent scholarly achievements of Giovanni Ar- righi, and also to Michael Mann's intricate neo-Weberian pursuit of the causes and forces leading to August 1914.12

1919

The nodal point of 1919 remains largely ignored, yet, it was in the crucible of the civil war through which the key features in the peculiar taxonomy of the Soviet state emerged, in large part-for example, the national republics-completely unanticipated by the Bolsheviks themselves.13 The

10. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966); and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Rev- olutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, Eng., 1979). Ran- dall Collins, Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the LongRun (Stanford, 1999) provides a synthesis of the new state-centered theories of revolution with the neo-Weberian theory of geopolitics.

11. Nader Sohrabi, "Global Waves, Local Actors: What the Young Turks Knew about Other Revolutions and Why It Mattered," Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (2002): 45-79.

12. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944) or, better still, the second edition published in 2001 by Beacon Press with the thought-provoking foreword by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist of the World Bank, now turned its critic. A strong counterpoint is provided by the leading economic formalizer of world- systems analysis Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994). Standing on its own is the tremendous world-historical exposition of Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation- States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993).

13. The paradoxes of the nationality question in the former Russian empire are bril- liantly analyzed by Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993) and the definitive account was achieved by

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bout of revolutionary organizational inventiveness performed under co- lossal pressure and during a compressed formative period is what really made the Soviet Union. It is also what has undone the even likelier historical alternative at the time-Russian fascism.

What is really surprising is not that the Bolsheviks seized power but that they were still in power two years later. Far more likely was a reactionary dictatorship led by a general from the old regime like Anton Denikin. This outcome had numerous analogies across Europe (think ofJozef Pilsudski in Poland, Gustaf Mannerheim in Finland, or Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain). One may doubt that a more progressive military mod- ernizer, perhaps Aleksandr Kolchak or Nikolai Iudenich, could have become the Russian Ataturk-Russian peasant nationalism was inadequately developed to carry such a project. Even less warranted seemed retrospec- tive hopes for a liberal parliamentarian Russia. The proponents of such a hypothesis would have difficulty explaining how Russia could have become the exception to the contemporary authoritarian trends and how its putative liberal government could have dealt with the worker, peasant, and national revolts while keeping at bay the militaristic "saviors of the Motherland." Furthermore, given Denikin's abysmal political record in dealing with the same challenges, a purely militaristic regime of restoration probably would not have lasted very long. Through an internal mu- tation or coup, a more activist fascist movement would have sought to cor- rect the failure. In embryonic form, such movements were present in the White armies and later in emigration.

Fascism carried its own coercive solution to the agrarian problems and was one possible program for rapid state-led industrialization centered on armaments production, such as occurred in Benito Mussolini's Italy or the contemporaryJapan. But given that fascist revolutions from above bred vir- ulent aggressiveness, one must wonder what might have been the consequences of attempted conquests of former imperial borderlands, possibly including the renewed pursuit of pan-Slavism or the Eurasianist project.

A fascist Russia would not have necessarily welcomed Nazi and Japa- nese expansionism. Geopolitical rivalry takes precedence over ideology at the level of world-historical causality.14 Besides, the Nazis themselves were none too eager to spread their ideological model.15 But could a non- Bolshevik Russia have survived a direct clash with such an enemy? Could it have gathered the requisite industrial potential, organization, and popular enthusiasm? Perhaps, a key difference would have been American willingness to pour resources into a continental state opposing the Nazi

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923- 1939 (Ithaca, 2001).

14. Randall Collins, "The Geopolitical Basis of Revolution: The Prediction of the So- viet Collapse," Macrohistory, 37- 69.

15. For a general discussion of the nonproliferation of Nazism, see the historical so- ciologistJohn Markoff, Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996), and Eric Hobsbawm, "The End of Liberalism," The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York, 1996).

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bid for world power. An American-Russian alliance in World War II was strongly determined by the historical pattern of capitalist balance of power. Medieval Venice, the early modern Netherlands, Britain during the Napoleonic challenge, and America facing the German quest to re- place the declining British empire consistently chose the same strategy: direct naval domination over the commercially important seas combined with the acquisition of allies for the ultimately murderous land warfare.16

But if this model had prevailed, would scholars still be discussing, by the late twentieth century, whether Russia was reformable? It might prove difficult because, although geopolitically successful conquerors become more relaxed in their imperial grandeur, they also become resistant to change due to the conservative effects of what Max Weber called Macht- prestige (the power-prestige).17 This resistance to change, of course, ap- plies equally to communist-ruled Russia after 1945. But no less likely seems the possibility that the question of democratization would not have arisen at all in the alternative world that might have ended a Nazi world- empire or a dichotomous Nazi-American cold war secured by the nuclear deterrent. I would remind those whose ideological preferences might lead them to intensely dislike this line of reasoning that, for all the actual hor- rors of the twentieth century and Stalinism as its part (of which I, the de- scendant of both Armenian refugees from Turkey and the starved and de- ported Kuban Cossacks, do not need to be reminded), we may still have missed the worst.

And that is because the Bolsheviks won the civil war. Through a combination of ferocious determination to escape the fate of the Paris com- mune and the adoption of bureaucratic wartime economic measures, they achieved victory. Taking their political discourse from Karl Marx, the Bol- sheviks followed other Germans in their organizational practice: Chan- cellor Walther Rathenau and General Erich Ludendorf. The combination of a strong collectivist ethos with a future orientation and the centralized bureaucratic expropriation of Russia's vast resources made possible the Bolsheviks' glories as well as their infamies.18 The architecture of the Soviet state was determined in the main by the three institutions that had most contributed to the Bolshevik victory in the civil war: the centralized and all-encompassing nomenklatura system of political-bureaucratic appoint- ment that helped to harness the segments of the former imperial bureau- cracy, army, and industry; the forced mobilization of economic resources and manpower for the war effort that saved Soviet rule at least twice, in 1919 and again in 1942, before running it down toward the 1980s; and the

16. See the classic Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle, translated from German by Charles Fullman (New York, 1962) and the recent theoretical synthesis by Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, et al., Chaos and Governance in the Modern World-System (Minneapolis, 1999).

17. On the effects of power-prestige, see Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge, Eng., 1986).

18. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Social Science and the Communist Interlude," The Essen- tial Wallerstein (New York, 2000), 374-86.

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establishment of national republics to tame the peripheral nationalisms, though only at an accumulating cost that would explode after 1989.

1929

Despite my admiration for Cohen, I fail to see how a Bukharinist regime would have differed substantially from the Stalinist one. If Bukharin had proven less murderous than Stalin, this might have saved many lives, yet it is doubtful that Soviet industrialization could ever have been less des- potic, because its character seems fully determined by the war-economic configuration of the Soviet state, its antagonistic relation to the peasantry, and the contemporary geopolitical context. Perhaps a less terroristic regime might have later facilitated a less oppressive political climate in the USSR. Could this have led to a more democratic and orderly overcoming of the Soviet developmental dictatorship? "Possibly" seems the only rea- sonable answer.

Much confusion derives from the optimist misreading of the New Eco- nomic Policy (NEP) experiment. Although NEP resembled the Chinese "four modernizations" after the death of Mao, the world-historical context was entirely different. The Bolsheviks' embrace of the gold standard during the 1920s flowed from the same revolutionary combination of bureaucratic pragmatism and messianic expectation. In the 1920s the belief in the modernizing power of free markets was experiencing a worldwide renaissance before the Great Slump. By 1929 the hope for foreign invest- ment and domestic peasant-driven market revival had been exhausted. In the 1930s the Soviet state embarked on a quest to build a modern industrial base without capitalists, whether domestic or foreign. A major factor in this decision was the expectation of another world war. Soviet developmentalism thus became fundamentally military-industrial in character rather than export-oriented as it could be in China in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the words of Stephen Hanson, the Bolsheviks managed something that Max Weber himself could not have imagined-a charismatic bureau- cracy that negated the dichotomy between "utopia" and "development."19 This major innovation had its roots in three western organizational break- throughs: bureaucratic government, bureaucratic economic trust, and the bureaucratically directed mass political party. Yet the Bolshevik innovation itself was nothing exceptional. Taking their cues from Wilhelmine Germany (rather than from the peculiar Anglo-American pattern of capitalism under a minimal state), both Soviet Russia and Japan in the 1920s discovered the model of state-led industrial modernization or a "developmental state."20 After 1945 the model proliferated around the "develop-

19. Stephen Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997), 19.

20. The concept of a "developmental state" as neither pure market nor pure planned economy was originally proposed by ChalmersJohnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford, 1982). See the richly elaborating essays in Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., The Developmental State (Ithaca, 1999).

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ing" world periphery in a variety of Marxist, anti-imperial nationalist, and hybrid forms that are summarized in Immanuel Wallerstein's expression "Leninism with Marxism or without."21 The organizational diffusion of the model that, on the merits of its industrial, military, and educational achievements was regarded a great success during the 1950s and 1960s, in- duced the ideological impression of socialism's progressive march around the planet.

To restate it as a positive theoretical proposition, the purges and personality cult did not grow out of Stalin's head but rather from the newly achieved centralization of political, military, economic, and ideological structures. Such a degree of centralization-usually achievable only in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, or similar upheavals-in turn produced its charismatic embodiment in great hero/villain figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte in one historical situation or Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, Musso- lini, Juan Peron, Mao,Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Ruhollah Khomeini in their different but broadly comparable situations. It remains to be investigated whether there may also exist a special receptiveness to such national-statist rituals in predominantly agrarian populations during periods of rapid socioeconomic restructuring. The terroristic and "totalitarian" tendencies of twentieth-century developmentalism flowed from the same conditions: the unusually high autonomy of a state apparatus forged in the brutal ordeals of revolutionary struggle; the tremendous concentration of all powers in the same apparatus; and the burning desire to validate the developmental project and past sacrifices by delivering at a historically unprecedented rate modernizing victo- ries without concern for the costs.22

1942

Could the Nazi armies have won in that year? After Blitzkrieg's ignomini- ous failure, the Germans mounted a much more serious offensive that swept across southern Russia all the way to the Caucasus and the Volga. At that point Stalin withdrew from the actual command and recast himself as the imperial icon he would subsequently remain. The Red Army and the remaining industrial bases were allowed to transform themselves into the patriotic fighting machine, and the official ideology followed suit. Thus what might conditionally be called totalitarianism proper lasted only five years: achieved in the purges, it was overcome in Stalingrad. The Stalinist dictatorship simply failed to work as designed. In the pain of defeat and annihilation, the Soviet people had to be allowed to organize their country's defense using the tools and skills forged during industrialization.

21. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Marx, Marxism-Leninism, and Socialist Experiences in the Modern World-System," Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 84-97.

22. For theoretical rigor, clarity, and robust generalization, the best explanation of Soviet collectivization, in my opinion, isJames Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998).

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This latent movement of patriotic self-organization in the Soviet army and economy marked the early maturation of the new classes of specialists, intelligentsia, and workers. The "hidden" class power would endure and grow, its further effects becoming the driving force of democratization after Stalin. The social histories of Soviet experience, many of which were inspired by Cohen's pathbreaking work, do not extend beyond the 1930s. This remains a task for the coming generation of scholars.

1945

The overlooked puzzle after the war is that the Soviet Union remained socialist. Plenty of circumstantial evidence exists that Stalin himself or an opportunistic successor like Lavrentii Beriia might have been entertain- ing the possibility of rejoining the political and economic structures of the capitalist world-system.

Had this historical route been taken, the prospects might appear no less dazzling than what is now happening in China. Kolkhozes would have been abolished to the rejoicing of peasants who would then have engaged in the Bukharinist enterprise of self-enrichment. Soviet industries could still have relied on the countryside for a frugal and fairly disciplined labor force, and in the new epoch could obtain a substantial domestic market in the emerging farmer class. Moreover, the technical modernization of the Soviet economy achieved during industrialization and the war promised to make export-oriented manufacturing viable. Imagine today's western consumers choosing among automotive brands such as the Pobeda, Moskvich, or Volga and watching television on Rekords, Rubins, and Go- rizonts.23 The isolated success of Soviet-made watches in the 1960s and 1970s proves that such a possibility might have existed.

The USSR would still not have emerged as a democractic state for at least another generation. An export-oriented Soviet state under Beriia would instead be a fabulously corrupt regime of crony capitalism presided over by a dictator of the South Korean variety or, closer perhaps, a Taiwan- ese collective dictatorship-after all, from its inception the Kuomintang has been a Leninist party, albeit without Marxism. Hegemonic western ideology misrepresents, for its purposes, the connection between capitalism and democratization. Once capitalist enrichment becomes a possibility, the ruling elite may find it even more profitable to retain a monopoly on political power. Sociological studies of the historical west show that a long and sometimes acute struggle is the necessary condition of genuine democratization (as opposed to the superficial emulation of parliamen- tarism imposed under external pressure as in postwarJapan).24 Capitalist development in the long run, however, is indeed conducive to democra-

23. Special thanks to Oleksandr Fisun for suggesting this gag. 24. See Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn H. Stephens, andJohn D. Stephens, Capital-

ist Development and Democracy (Chicago, 1992); Charles Tilly, "Democracy Is a Lake," Roads from Past to Future (Lanham, Md., 1997), 193-215; and the theoretical summary in Mark- off, Waves of Democracy.

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tization but not because of the free markets that are presumably necessary for the capitalist take off-how free were the markets in the East Asian route to capitalism or, for that matter, in Germany and Scandinavia? De- mocratization emerges for a complex variety of causes operating in different historical contexts, but chief among them seems to be the emergence of an organized working class, an autonomous intelligentsia, and the groups deriving income from the lesser-scale market occupations: commercial farmers, professionals, petite bourgeoisie. In the twentieth century, democratization seems strongly related to the self-affirmation of the industrial proletariat that was documented across a large number of countries: Spain, Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, and Poland.25

Why did the USSR not shed the remains of the Bolshevik utopia after 1945? Damn Nikita Khrushchev? The ideological staying power of Le- ninism should not be underestimated, nor the particular inertia of its "priests" -the political wing of nomenklatura. Yet, the two major barriers to the USSR going capitalist after the war were both external rather than domestic. First came the clear unwillingness of western governments, especially Washington, to welcome the Soviet Union on the capitalist side. For the sake of space, I shall omit the military considerations and ideological prejudices, although they certainly played a role in the postwar exclusion of the Soviet bloc.26 Yet, if economic interests had gone the other way, geopolitical and ideological obstacles might have been malleable- as they proved to be in the west's relations with communist China and will hopefully prove to be with Iran in the future. After 1945 America considered the Soviets' economic potential too expensive and redundant to be restored and incorporated into western markets. The battered but still viable industrial bases of western Europe and Japan were more promising in the post-1945 restoration of world capitalism; moreover, they were better controlled and indirectly subsidized by the heavy presence of the U.S. military bases. Only in the 1970s, when manufacturing, productivity, and labor costs in Japan and Europe reached or surpassed American levels, did the need arise to look for cheaper and less rigidly organized new industrial bases overseas. For many historical and geographical reasons, continental East Asia provided the best available match.27

The second reason why the USSR after Stalin rediscovered its progressive socialist mission (if no longer the pursuit of world revolution) was the totally unforeseen activism in the countries that the architects of the Cold War on both sides considered a residual category. For want of a bet-

25. Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge, Eng., 2003).

26. The relevant iconoclast analyses are by Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Mod- ernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order (New York, 1997); and Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1981-90).

27. Slavicists may be excused from looking beyond their area, but since the Chinese alternative to the Soviet collapse emerges time and again in discussions, it would be useful to consult the illuminating works of Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Sel- den, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London, 2003); and Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York, 1997).

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ter label, this very diverse geopolitical grouping was called the Third World. In India, Egypt, and Ghana, and especially in Vietnam and Cuba, Moscow found the opportunity to assert its superpower status along with the ideological validation of its self-image as the leader of the anti-imperialist forces.28 This was national developmentalism at its highest level of historical optimism, when Khrushchev's escapades at the United Nations and the new party program that pledged to overcome America garnered applause across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.29

1968

The failure of democratic effervescence in 1968 seems almost too easy to explain. The movements for socialism with a human face were poorly organized and politically naive; at no time did their bureaucratic opponents lose control of coercive resources. Yet, why was there such tremendous spontaneity and, in retrospect, such a lasting impact from essentially a defeat? And what were the missed opportunities?

A clear correlation exists between the strength of democratic dissidence around 1968 across eastern Europe and the successful democratization after 1989. Just as 1905 served as the dress rehearsal for 1917 in Russia, the abortive revolutions of 1968 prepared the cadres and the networks for 1989.30 (A significant variant can be found in Yugoslavia, however, where a series of democratizing upheavals in the late 1960s and early 1970s institutionalized the framework of ethnic confederation that, after 1989, enabled the ultranationalist derailing of further democratization in all republics save Slovenia.) Furthermore, the economic experimenta- tion of the 1960s, where it could be sustained (in Hungary and, to some extent, in Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as in less overt forms in the Baltic republics), later paved the way for a less disastrous monetization of former socialist economies and their integration in the long-familiar western direction.

Yet the main impact was in the ideological sphere and within society at large. The effervescence of 1968 marked the rise to class consciousness of a new intelligentsia, technical specialists, and educated workers. Their demands hit at the weakest point of socialist dictatorship-its hypocriti- cal claim to represent popular democracy and material progress. After 1968 fundamental change became inevitable even in the eyes of the no-

28. Another iconoclast example is Ted Hopf, Social Construction ofInternational Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, 2002).

29. Khrushchev's personal trajectory and outlook encapsulate the contradictions and high hopes of the developmental quest to catch up with the modern west. See the wonder- fully researched and penetrating biography by William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003).

30. See Grzegorz Ekiert, The State against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East-Central Europe (Princeton, 1996). Also see Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi, and Eleanor Towns- ley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Postcommunist Central Europe (London, 1998); Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish Opposition (Minneapolis, 2003).

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menklatura whose presiding conservative elders could only hope to delay this moment beyond their lifetime. We need more research on the processes developing within Soviet bloc societies and among their elites during the 1970s. Here we may expect fascinating discoveries regarding how classes and nations really come into being, despite the most oppressive political regimes, or how the political structures of control eroded to the point of sudden and surprisingly peaceful transformation.

1985

Could Gorbachev have instead been a Deng Xiaoping? In other words, could perestroika have affected only the economy while leaving the dictatorial prerogatives of the Communist Party largely intact? This is very unlikely for at least two major reasons. One is that China shifted toward state capitalism after its Cultural Revolution had battered the nomenklatura and thus left considerable freedom of action to the presiding reformer. Another is that China remains a largely peasant country. Let alone, once again, the differential of international context: the overseas Chinese capitalists were a formidable and well-connected class without a country, and China's relations with America followed a different calculus of power.

By contrast, any Soviet ruler in the 1980s would have had to deal with three huge accumulated costs of the sort that China did not face. The first was the geopolitical cost of the arms race with the vastly wealthier west (and let us not forget the Soviets' paranoid concern with Chinese "hege- monism" in the east). In addition there were the costs of supporting a spate of clients in the Third World.

Second, the Soviet proletariat itself became a major concern and burden, especially after the brutal but indecisive suppression of the Novo- cherkassk strike in 1962 and the similar events that were regularly occur- ring elsewhere in the USSR and on a grander scale in eastern Europe, where worker resistance culminated in the establishment of the Solidarity Trade Union in Poland. Unable to bargain legally for better remunera- tion, socialist proletarians engaged in the tacit but pervasive withdrawal of their labor. The notoriously shoddy quality of east European goods became in large part the triumph of this perverse class struggle expressed in the infamous joke "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." For its part, the socialist dictatorship, ideologically and institutionally un- equipped to wield the whip of unemployment nor any longer willing to risk the degree of repression that would be necessary to force the workers to work diligently, opted instead to buy internal legitimacy and shopfloor compliance with increased subsidies.

The third cost became the institution of nomenklatura itself. Their individual consumption, served by the special shops or the increasingly rampant corruption and black markets, might be regarded as negligible. But the true cost lay in the entrenched bureaucratic networks that, after the relaxation of repression and the Brezhnevist introduction of de facto life tenure in office, collectively acquired the power to protect their posi-




tions from unwanted central interference.31 Forgive the tautology, but a command economy needs a supreme commander to steer it. Without such a leader, with Moscow becoming merely the central nexus of intra- bureaucratic bargaining for resources and plan expectations, the Soviet economy became a wasteful and blindly inert behemoth. This is the perverse triumph of class struggle, albeit waged by the executive elite in search of bureaucratic paradise.

Therefore any leader who desired to reform the Soviet Union would have had to begin with a big purge. Having learned from Iurii Andropov's failure, Gorbachev added a populist twist to his campaign of forced re- tirements, rustication, and in some instances (namely Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) major anticorruption busts. Soon he had to allow glasnost and competitive elections to managerial and political office. This shrewd move actually killed three birds with one stone. It put pressure on the nomenklatura who hurried to please the new boss, generated enthusiastic support among the intelligentsia and younger technocrats who previously felt their talents stymied, and puzzled the western establishment with the question of whether the USSR could really be reformed into a democracy from above? The latter may have mattered the most to Gorbachev because producing the impression of democratization on the west directly served his hope for economic reform. His "Europeanist" vision was one of du- rably institutionalized detente and expanded cooperation with the statist business conglomerates of Germany, Italy, and France, sort of Fiat-Lada and pipes-for-gas exchanges forever. Gorbachev, or any other Soviet leader at the time, would have regarded as insulting the proposition that the USSR could be turned into the supplier of cheap toys and garments. The superpower enjoyed its geopolitical weight and, besides, would Soviet workers ever accept Chinese wages and working conditions?

1989

Together with many other commentators, Cohen has examined the revolutionary situations that perestroika provoked in the multiple political units under direct and indirect Soviet jurisdiction. Explaining how these revolutionary situations played out in my native Caucasus and why, after all the sacrifices and achievements of the Soviet period, it all ended in such a disastrous recoil to the world-system's periphery required a mono- graph, but here I shall endeavor to be brief.32 What really did not happen in 1989, 1991, or later was a revolutionary outcome that could swiftly reconsolidate the state's legitimacy and governing capacity.33 Instead, a many-sided political stalemate ensued that provoked a massive run by the

31. Peter Rutland, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Lo- cal Party Organs in Economic Management (Cambridge, Eng., 1993).

32. Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu 's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biogra- phy (London, 2004).

33. The terms revolutionary situation and revolutionary outcome are used here as con- ceptualized by Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford, 1993).

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midranking nomenklatura and simply the nimble opportunists acting as fixers in the process of grabbing the Soviet state's assets.34 The USSR was brought down neither from above nor from below but rather from the middle by the disoriented and opportunistic nomenklatura in a moment of panic and political chaos.

Could things have turned out differently? Yes, to varying degrees. Co- hen identifies Gorbachev's failure to formally split the Communist Party into the reformist and conservative wings. Why he failed and whether this was at all a realistic option will continue to puzzle historians. Another possibility was a mass political movement emerging from the provinces to give force to the democratic faction in the transitional parliament. This is the classic road of democratic revolutions, whether in 1789 France or in 1989 Poland. But it seems to me that the collapse of nascent Russian democratization and the state itself was the heavy price paid for aborting the democratic movements of 1968. Unlike Poland's Solidarity, there were no pre- existing networks in Russia that could deliver to the grassroots activists instructions and mobilization resources and carry the energy of popular contention back to the capital city.

The networks of requisite density and mutual moral obligation existed, however, inside many Soviet republics, which is why after the 1989 failure in Moscow the political focus devolved to places like Tallinn, Kiev, or Tbilisi.35 Unlike Cohen but like the leading experts on national federalism, I see exceedingly little prospect for the continuation of the Soviet Union after 1989. Such a possibility would have existed only if Gorbachev had already succeeded in entering capitalist Europe and if membership in the Soviet Union had become a collective condition for the European membership.

The possibility is not entirely fatuous if one remembers how troubling the Catalan and Basque separatist movements appeared in Spain after the death of Franco. But Spain and the Soviet Union (or, for that matter, Yu- goslavia) differed not only in size and geographical proximity to the Eu- ropean heartland. By the late 1980s, the world political context had become very different from the mid-1970s. And this difference arose from the neoliberal counterrevolution in the west itself. Spain could still hope for an advantageous admission if the Francoist bureaucrats and the socialist and communist opposition managed to restrain their respective radi- cal fringes from resuming the Spanish civil war. Then a social democratic transition from the dictatorship to European integration could be sup- ported by the sympathetic and influential political forces in France and Germany. By contrast, Soviet perestroika could not expect such an invitation in the new epoch of global competition and financial stringency.

To conclude this whole discussion, after 1989 imaginable alternatives disappeared, not only in eastern Europe, but in the whole world. Neolib-

34. The best analyses are Steven Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, 1999).

35. Suny, The Revenge of the Past; Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (New York, 1998).




eralism became a mighty discourse of disempowering states and denying key controls in the moments when good steering was essential. What Co- hen describes at length as possibly better solutions did not seem credible to Gorbachev, the plotters of August 1991, or whoever might have dreamt of saving the USSR. Caught in the collapsing economy and the dual power struggle between the governments of Gorbachev and Boris El'tsin, Mos- cow had no strength to negotiate either with the west or with its own erst- while subordinates. In the meantime, national self-determination and free markets became the only discourse admissible in that world of ours. The Bukharinist social democratic evolution lost its reference points.

The Soviet Union was unlikely to be preserved, but not because it was inherently wicked and unreformable. Its national federalism was surely a major liability in the transition, but no less surely could the dissolution have been less traumatic. The problem was really that Gorbachev's political authority abruptly lost its legitimacy as the main agent of progressive gradual change. After this point, neoliberal shock therapy presented itself as the only solution to a desperate situation. Free markets were expected to automatically sort out the mess, eliminate the nomenklatura's hold on resources and popular sloth, and generate the capitalist dynamic that would take Russia where Gorbachev had failed to take the Soviet Union to the democracy and prosperity enjoyed by the west. This fabulous uto- pian vision failed to foresee how the former nomenklatura might fight back and divert market pressures or what the side effects might be of the state's abrupt withdrawal from economic and social regulations.

2010

Let me conclude with two observations. Imagining more hopeful alternatives is once again possible; in fact, it is urgent. Vladimir Putin's presidency embodies one possible alternative, albeit retrograde. Drawing on the example of his spiritual mentor Iurii Andropov, the Russian leader is trying to return Russia to the situation before perestroika, which evidently reso- nates with large domestic constituencies. Whether this alternative to post- 1991 history will work remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen what sort of dissidence might emerge in the circles of Russian westernizing intelligentsia and, now, among the new bourgeoisie and what kind of political collisions are still awaiting Russia. One thing is clear: the restoration of state governance is the order of the day. We may only hope that the costs and further consequences of Putin's authoritarian restoration on balance do not deliver a monster but rather at least a semblance of Soviet-style governability.

The second observation pertains to the rapidly changing global situation. By all indications, neoliberal globalization is already over. The talk of American empire is deeply troubling, and not only because democratic values could be threatened by the rise of a new iron fist. What is really troubling is that every serious scholar who analyzes the prospects of Amer- ican hegemony ends up predicting instead failure and global chaos. This is true not only of such radicals as Immanuel Wallerstein but also of the

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brutally realistJohn Mearsheimer, or of Michael Mann, once a major critic of Marxism; of the acclaimed historical sociologist Richard Lachmann; of the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi; or of the French historical de- mographer Emmanuel Todd, who back in 1976 largely correctly predicted the USSR's "Final Fall" (the title of Todd's book).36 If their theoretically grounded worries are any indication, we might yet expect to see major abrupt changes in world geopolitics and especially in global finances. If these were to occur, by 2010 or 2020, Russia might yet become a welcome addition to Europe. Much worse outcomes are also possible, but I would rather not discuss them now. What matters at times like these is to explore more hopeful alternatives.

36. Emmanuel Todd, The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, trans. John Waggoner, preface, Jean-Francois Revel (New York, 1979); Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, trans. C. Jon Delogu, foreword, Mi- chael Lind (New York, 2003).



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Alternative Pasts, Future Alternatives?