The paradox of soviet socialism was that it succeeded as one of the most inspiring and among the most brutal development projects in history. But can it be said that the world capitalist system determined the direction of this paradoxical soviet development project to the same extent as did internal political forces, as Robert Cox implies (Cox, 1991:174)? This paper will suggest that while external conditions did influence Bolshevik party socialism, particularly at specific historical junctures, internal factors generally determined the direction of development when choices were available. The purpose here is not to delineate where socialism ends and repression (or capitalism) begins, but to evaluate the approach to development and the choices made in terms of opportunity, necessity and sustainability. Thus the necessity for key campaigns (war communism, NEP, collectivation, rapid industrialization, the post-Stalin opening) will be briefly reviewed to determine whether there were choices available. The sustainability of these key campaigns will be assessed because this should suggest whether the right choices were made.

When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they began with a program to install a state of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". This rule by "the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors" (Lenin, 1976:107) replaced the Czarist regime, a creaking autocracy that had failed to implement credible land reforms. The new state -- an alliance of workers and peasants, in the Leninist development framework -- was expected to "break the agricultural barrier to expanded development" by increasing rural productivity so that the labour force could be shifted into the more dynamic urban industrial sector (Cox:177). Lenin described the new power as "electricity plus soviets", but quickly abolished the soviets (Frank:89).

While this was the formulation, the period which began in 1917 and continued into the New Economic Policy (NEP) was not a Bolshevik blueprint for socialist development, except in the sense that the future developmental state was at risk: Survival was the immediate priority both in confronting internal civil war and external foreign interventionary armies that attempted to reverse the soviet republic and re-integrate it into the world capitalist system. Survival came to mean redirecting resources to establish the Red Army and "war communism".

War communism expropriated grain supplies to provide food to the towns and military forces engaged in the civil war, but it also involved nationalization of industry (arguably a developmental strategy). Less convincing as socialist doctrine, but effective for productivity enhancement, Lenin reformulated the trade unions as disciplinary organizations which would guide labour relations within the public service. As Cox notes, justified or not, a foreign threat often "privileges those internal forces that appear effectively to respond to them" (Cox: 172), and this appears to have been an early excuse for the beginning of the militarization of the labour force. Many of these immediate Bolshevik military and economic strategies were reasonable policy decisions if the republic was to continue beyond the toppling of the Czar, but some became institutionally enshrined and (problematically) contributed to the subsequent bureaucractization and monolithic characterization of the soviet state.

War communism did contribute to the driving off of foreign armies and counterrevolutionary forces, but its consequence was also rebellion by the peasantry against expropriation of their grain. The New Economic Policy (NEP) which followed, was intended as a temporary concession to the peasants. It was a successful developmental strategy because the limited reintroduction of market forces did re-establish a food supply, some limited industrial capacity and foreign trade. However this concessionary period, in the absence of the anticipated world revolution was a "necessary surrender and concession to the country's most numerous class and the one on which the revolution had to depend for physical survival" (Cox:173).

The "scissors crisis" brought on by the NEP period was an indication that regression towards capitalism, in this case economic growth based upon a peasant market economy, could at best be only an interim economic policy which would eventually "regenerate the capitalism just overthrown", (Hobsbawm, 1994:380). Stalin's strategy for an economic reconstruction and development program was called for, but the next two and a half decades of horrific repression and impressive industrial modernization were surely not the only combination available.

Stalin was "an autocrat of exceptional, some might say unique, ferocity, ruthlessness and lack of scruple" (Hobsbawn, 1994: 380), but while tempting, it is still not sufficient to attribute the character of his era entirely to a single person's megalomania. The "socialism in one country" project of reconstruction was new but the Stalinist hierarchical management structures in industry and the resultant "revolution from above" still resembled mechanisms of the capitalist segmentation of labour process (Cox, 180). These similarities, however, do not lead automatically to the conclusion that Soviet industrialization was developing deterministically and inevitably in the direction of restored capitalist relations of production.

Nor does it appear that the most significant incentive for rapid industrialization was a paranoid fear of further invasions, as is suggested by Cox: "The Soviet system in its form of state and production as well as its armed force was shaped in the consciousness of military threat" and thus was essentially an effort "to prepare the military basis for resisting the inevitable attack" (Cox, 174). The vast industrialization-collectivization project was too large, too elaborate and too prolonged to be mainly driven by an invasion that might not come.¹ It is true that the Soviet system was a "product of the world [capitalist] system" and of "internal political forces", but the weight of external influences was uneven and internal factors, more often than not, were continually beckoning and dominant.

For instance, while it is true that external military threats sometimes appeared when the soviet regime needed to mobilize popular support for a new campaign, yet real or imagined internal "enemies of the state", "fifth columnists" and saboteurs were more often the target. Capitalist models of industrial relations (such as Fordism had been) did offer provocative standards for productivity that soviet modernization and statist management could try to match. However, overall, the soviet experiment was in relative isolation from the world capitalist system which had fallen into severe crisis in the 1930s. The veracity of statistical data issued by Stalin is in question, but by all accounts, output in the USSR appeared to outpace the failing Western economies, at least during the immediate post-crash period (Stalin:229; Hobsbawn, 1994:382). Isolation was partly self-imposed and partly the result of embargo. Nonetheless, as Hobsbawm notes,

The first thing to observe about the socialist region of the globe was that for most of its existence it formed a separate and largely self-contained sub-universe both economically and politically. Its relations with the rest of the world economy, capitalist or dominated by the capitalism of the developed countries, were surprisingly scanty (Hobsbawm, 1994:374).

In other words, there were domestic political choices that could be made, and during the Stalinist period, the experiment in "command industrialization", with all its failings, still produced an impressive level of development in what had once been a backward country. There were dramatic improvements in the availability and distribution of work, food, clothing and housing, health and education, as well as a narrowing (at least initially) of levels of compensation. This transformation of a peasant backwater², into the modern USSR was "by any standards, a towering achievement" (Hobsbawm 1994: 382).

Stalin's rapid industrialization project was also spurred on by the absence of a complementary world revolution and thus a dearth of friendly trading partners. Few believed Russia could make it on its own or that the socialist development program that Lenin had proposed could be successfully completed "in one country". But, as noted by Kemp (63), "Stalin maintained that Russia had everything 'necessary and sufficient' for the building of socialism".³ Stalin's substitute for an alliance of revolutionary states was the militarization of labour, and centralized state control and ownership of the economy, industry and agriculture -- all of which was directed by a monolithic, single party system⁴.

Coercion was an easy result of this Bolshevik centralizing authority but reached pathological levels in Stalin's hands. Coercive measures were also practical and effective as a means of increasing the pace of transformation of the economy from peasant commodity to collectivized, state-owned agriculture. Collectivization was itself intended as a contributor to the process of industrial transformation, and in fact the urban labour force was expanded on the basis of a proletarianized peasantry. Yet nothing indicates that soviet socialist development necessitated, let alone justified, the exercise of excessive repression and violence by the Bolshevik party and its security apparatus. Thus it is not clear that Stalin's level of coercion could even be rationalized for productivity reasons, particularly considering the alienation, paranoia and demoralization that it caused. And neither was it acceptable to proceed at "breakneck speed regardless of human costs" (Kemp, 68) even if the costs were truly comparable to those borne in capitalist market economies, as Cox seems to imply (Cox, 177) or (as Kemp, page 69, notes) were "more or less willingly borne" [emphasis added]⁵. The horrors were astounding, but do not seem to have been without purpose, for Stalin's "terrifying career makes no sense except as a stubborn, unbroken, pursuit of that utopian aim of a communist society..." (Hobsbawn, 1994: 390).

The planned, modernization economy in the Stalinist period was demonstrably not a failure. In part, this is because its emphasis on production of the means of production, its attention to heavy industry and energy production, infrastructure and self-sufficiency, together with near complete state centralization and ownership, enabled the Soviet Union to survive the harrowing experience of the Nazi invasion⁶ and to successfully rebuild the economy in the post-war period -- what amounted to a second industrialization campaign.⁷ The result was the creation of the 2nd largest developed industrial economy on the globe, albeit advantaged by a substantial base of natural resources. While sustained independently and without substantial foreign aid or capital, soviet state development did not preclude "borrowing" technology, nor turnkey purchases from capitalist industrialized countries (Hobsbawm, 1994:381; Kemp:74). These factors might have been substantive enough for the development project to succeed further than it did, and without the excessive sacrifices, discipline and bureaucratization imposed by Stalin that ultimately contributed to the later decline (Kemp:70). It should be remembered, however, that the success of sputnik is evidence that technical progress, and indeed "superiority", is sometimes possible even when "encircled".

Bukharin's kinder and gentler model of "gradual transformation" (Hobsbawm 1994:378; Kaser:63; Kemp:62), if it had survived Stalinism, might have provided the theoretical foundation for a competing alternative form of socialism. Bukharin proposed slower-paced industrial modernization by means of a less repressive, less ruthless, yet Bolshevik party regime. That slower pace might have offered a more palatable and still sustainable developmental model. However, (as Stalin was quick to point out) it conceded a preference for "market forces and material incentives, almost certainly to the advantage of the kulaks" (Kemp:62). This was also the proposal of Preobrazhensky who held that the Soviet economy was "obliged to intensify its economic, especially its trade, links with world capitalism, with the world market" (Kaser:71). Stalin's choice for rapid industrialization ultimately won favour, but at the same time, this was a turn in policy in the late 1920s that "would not have been possible, and cannot be understood, in isolation from [the] political struggles" between Stalin, Bukharin and Trotsky and the opposition groups (Kemp: 63)⁸.

On the other hand, the choice made in the agricultural sector -- forced collectivization into cooperatives and state farms -- while wielding an inexcusable level of brutality upon millions of peasants by starvation, deportation and labour camps, was also a failure in economic terms. The surplus expected from rural transformation (via state ownership and mechanization) for industrial investment, was supplemented with (if not derived primarily from) low wages, forced labour and large-scale construction projects. This was not the expected "primitive socialist accumulation" to be derived from the successful expropriation of farm profits (Kemp:68). Grain and livestock outputs dropped significantly, resulting in a famine in the early 1930s⁹. The mechanization process was inefficient, and except for brief periods of surplus, such as in the immediate post-WWII period, soviet collectivized agriculture was perpetually faced with the inability to feed its own people.

Collectivization per se was not inherently misguided, as the Israeli kibbuzim experiment has shown. Its implementation in the Soviet Union seems to have been bungled and there is reason to conclude, therefore, that the Soviet policies of compulsion, dubious Lysenkoist theories, the "elimination of the kulaks as a class" -- all predominantly Stalinist political decisions -- and the subsequent alienation of the farming sector, were what failed. There were options available that were missed: As Cox suggests, the Chinese model afforded an example by which rural development proceded side by side with industry, and in which a leadership was cultivated as part of the effort to develop the relations of production, a strategy that would be "more relevant than the Soviet way for economically backward Third World countries" (Cox:176), albeit producing a less developed, less interconnected, possibly less mechanized result (Johnson:60).

After Stalin's death, and by the 1970s, a telling indictment of Soviet collectivized agriculture was the state's reliance on foreign grain imports (Hobsbawm 1994: 383). A series of regimes (Khruschov and Brezhnev in particular) toyed with the idea of loosening the strings down at the farm. But in agriculture, as in Industry, "the phase of extensive development ended with the death of Stalin and no real solution has been found to the new problems presented by intensive development" and consumer demand (Kemp:74). What appears to have continued through from the Stalin period was a sizeable bureaucracy and bureaucratic methods of work -- in the late 1930s, the size of the state administration had outpaced the general increase in employment by two and half times (Hobsbawm, 1994: 384). But what is also evident is that the stagnation that surfaced in the late1950s soon became prevalent. Higher investment ratios failed to produce growth (Cox:177). This was the result of an inability to modernize industry beyond its heavy industry base and "old style production technologies" (Kemp:72; Frank:89), a problem exacerbated by large expenditures on armaments that followed a perilous arms race with the United States¹⁰ (Cox:176; Frank:99). Significantly, the post-Stalin economy was quickly becoming integrated into that of the Russian-dependent East European Bloc -- the Bloc itself being more closely integrated into the world capitalist economy. Technology was imported from the West, but without the capacities in place for purchase (Frank:94,97), resulting in a substantial debt load, debt servicing and eventually the slide from stagnation into permanent crisis -- a scenario borrowed from the experience of the economies of the South. As notes Frank, the command economies deprived Russia and the Soviet Bloc of the flexibility that countries "disciplined" by market economies had, but it was the crisis and not the command economy that was new. As suggested by Hobsbawm, "Russia and Eastern Europe were all viable economies and would have remained viable if they could have been kept insulated from the rest of the world"¹¹ (in Frank:108).

There is evidence to conclude, then, that the capitalist dominated system did play a key role at specific pressure points after the Bolshevik revolution . This was true during those political phases where internal conditions were so grave, the Bolshevik party so vulnerable, or survival so tentative, that only limited domestic options were available. World capitalist system factors seemed to have exerted their most influence on the developmental strategies from 1917 through war communism and the NEP periods; during WWII; and after the death of Stalin. However, as the direct (external) military threat subsided, political choice increased internally, and thus the key approaches to rapid industrialization and to collectivization were consequences primarily of domestic political decision-making. Despite the Stalinist horrors, a new and successful, developed industrial powerhouse was achieved which was substantially insulated from the world capitalist economy. Bureaucratic, democratic and technical shortcomings eventually contributed to the post-Stalin, post-sputnik decline and the failure of the soviet model to achieve sustainable development. The result was a re-opening of the soviet borders, and the acceleration of economic, political and social collapse, culminating in the dissolution of the Union and Bolshevik party power. This was the fateful closure of the soviet development project.

Cox, Robert W. "'Real Socialism' in Historical Perspective." Socialist Register 1991 - Communist Regimes - The Aftermath, eds. R. Miliband and L. Panitch, London: Merlin, 1991, 169-193.

Frank, André Gunder. "Soviet and East European 'Socialism': What Went Wrong?" Regimes in Crisis - The Post-Soviet Era and the Implications for Development, eds. Barry Gills and Shahid Qadir, London: Zed Books, 1995, chapter 7, 87-114.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.

Hobsbawm, Eric. On History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997.

Johnson, Juliet. "Should Russia Adopt the Chinese Model of Economic Reform?" Communist and Post-Communist Studies, XXVII, 1 (1994), 59-75.

Kaser, Michael. "The Soviet Ideology of Industrialization: A Review Article." Journal of Development Studies, III, 1 (October 1966), 63-75.

Kemp, Tom. "The Soviet Model: A Critical View." Industrialization in the Non-Western World, 50-83.

Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976.

Sayers, Michael and Kahn, Albert. The Great Conspirary. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1946.

Stalin, Joseph. "Report to the Seventeenth Congress" (excerpts), The Essential Stalin, ed. Bruce Franklin, Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972, 224-299.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy. Rocklin, California: Prima Publishing, 1996.
 

¹ In fact the "impending" threat was realized in the form of a Nazi invasion, and while there were strategies and appeals, a non-aggression treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, and extensive (likely damaging) purges of the armed forces and the Bolshevik Party, many have suggested that Stalin was still not ready for the war with Germany. Others have argued the opposite (see, for instance, The Great Conspiracy, Sayers and Kahn, Little, Brown and Company, Boston:1946).

² 82% of the population was rural in 1913 (Hobsbawm, 1974: 379). Kemp notes (1989) that "one-fourth of the labour force is still employed on the state and collective farms" (Kemp,1989:74).

³ Marxists (including Lenin and Stalin, at least initially) "unanimously" doubted the ripeness of the productive forces and relations of production in Russia for a proletarian revolution (Hobsbawm, 1997: 46; Kemp: 56; Kaser: 73). However, as the survival of Stalin's soviet state wore on, many skeptics reconsidered the viability of "socialism in one country", even in the context of a "capitalist encirclement". After the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union from 1989, many marxists returned to the proposition that the project was doomed from the start. Others claim to have pronounced their disenchantments all along.

⁴ Critics have pointed to Stalin's substitution of the dictatorship of the "vanguard party" for the dictatorship of the proletariat and ultimately his own absolute dictatorship (Volkogonov, 1996:418.)

⁵ Stakhanovism became a parody, rather than a celebration of soviet productivity (Volkogonov, 1996:233).

⁶ Many historians also argue that it was the Soviet Union which was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany (see for instance Richard Overy's Russia's War, Penguin, New York: 1998).

⁷ ..and, it should be noted, without the aid of an equivalent Marshall Plan.

⁸ In addition to strategic alliances within the party, the Bolsheviks witnessed large change-overs in membership and leadership. The communist party was submerged with new recruits after Lenin's death, during the "Lenin enrollment". More ominously, the 18th Party Congress in 1939 "contained a bare 37 survivors of the 1,827 delegates who had been present" five years earlier (Hobsbawm, 1994: 391).

⁹ Numbers vary as to deaths caused by famine, related to campaigns against real or imagined sabotage or from political purges, but Hobsbawm notes ("without comment") that the population in the 1937 census showed a reduction of 16.7 million people, as compared to the demographic forecasts of the second Five-Year Plan (1994:393).

¹⁰ Frank argues that the arms race was designed by the U.S. to outspend the Soviet Union "to its knees".

¹¹ Frank does not agree with this analysis by Hobsbawm, arguing that the Soviets 'removing themselves from the world economy' is impossible. He seems to deny any significance to the 25 years of virtually independent development during the Stalinist period.