In 1967, at the half-centennial of the
Russian Revolution, the Royal Institute of international Affairs (RIIA) in
London published a book “The
Impact of the Russian Revolution” with a star cast of authors. The book’s objective
was to assess how internationally influential was the Russian Revolution. A
very long and brilliant introduction was written by Arnold Toynbee. Neil McInnes
wrote about the Soviet influence on trade unions and political parties in
Western Europe, Hugh Seton-Watson on nationalism and imperialism, Peter Wiles
on economic influence of the Soviet model, and Richard Lowenthal on the political
(authoritarian party) influence of the Bolsheviks.
It does not seem that being published
by RIIA was unrelated to some of the themes running through the book. Several authors
(including Toynbee) tend to regard the communist ideology, the modified Marxism
as defined by Lenin, as a particularly mischievous trick whereby Russians were
able to appeal to the colonized nations of the world and bring the British
Empire to an end. The Russian Revolution
is seen as an episode of the Great Game. As Toynbee writes: “Marxism affected
the mood of the non-western peoples when these were ripe for revolting against the
western dominance. It is a creed of western origin that indicts the western
establishment. It is thus able to express their will to revolt against the West
in terms that, being western, have prestige”.
Although the authors seem melancholic
about the outcome (the British Empire being, In their view, a preferred option
to independence), they do have a case. Lenin’s reconfiguration of Marxism to
combine left-wing policies with anti-imperialism, including the alliance with national
bourgeoisies, so long as they were anti-colonialist, was probably one of the
most important events in the 20th century (a century not lacking in
important events). The discussion of the relationship between the original
Marxism, its modification by Lenin, Lenin’s “Imperialism:
the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and the role of China—as the most important
country where communism, beginning in the 1920s, played its anti-imperialist
card both with the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China—is present in
all five contributions.
The level of that discussion, as well
as of the others, is very high. Hugh Seton-Watson, a renowned student of
nationalism, has an excellent chapiter on Marxist approach to the “nationality
question” and how it was “solved” (as we know now, through dissolution of the countries)
in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Peter Wiles, who likewise had studied communist
economies for years, has a first-rate, if whimsical, chapter (which I will
discuss below). Richard Lowenthal discusses the model of the Leninist totalitarian
state. Neil McInnes’ chapter on the Soviet influence on Western European
politics is well informed but marred
by his excessive anti-communist zeal. A
Soviet is being seen under every bed, a nefarious hand of secret agents present
in every strike.
I would like to cover in greater
detail Peter Wiles’ economics chapter. Let me start with his most interesting
point. Overall, Wiles argues, Soviet influence was very limited and the main
reason is not that the product was badly “packaged” (the main lines of the
economic “product”—nationalize, centralize, plan—were very clear) but that “the
salesmanship” was dishonest: those who wanted to apply the Soviet model were
not told by the Soviets what were the real pitfalls and problems, things to beware
and fix, but were presented a sanitized version of events that was not helpful
at all. Contrasting American and Soviet influence in the Third World, in a
language that may be considered somewhat ribald in a more puritan world of today,
Wiles (I think rightly) summarizes it thus:
[The
Soviet technician] keeps himself apart after hours, haunts his own embassy, and
generally fails to enter into the spirit of things. His descriptions of the
life back home are constrained and peculiar. Compared with the drunken,
bottom-pinching, tax-dodging, and perhaps racist American technician, his
behavior is faultless, and this is just what is wrong.
Where, according to Wiles, Soviet experience
did have an influence was in placing economic
growth at the forefront, not only through the first-ever macro models of growth
that were developed in the Soviet Union, but because success in growth informed
the competition between the two systems.
Wiles then reviews several concrete
policy experiences as to study the extent to which Soviet example mattered. The
most important influence was on Mexico, on Lazaro Cardenas’s agricultural cooperatives (ejidos)
that mimicked Soviet kolkhozes even if their importance was always small: at
the time of writing, only 4% of agricultural labor force worked in collectivized
ejidos. The complicated relationship between Cardenas and the Soviet
Union is nicely analyzed—including such interesting,
and rather unlikely, details that Cardenas managed to be Trotsky’s protector, to
condemn Soviet attack on Finland in 1940, and then to become the laureate of
the Stalin Prize in 1956 (under Khrushchev).
The second example of the Soviet influence
is on UK nationalizations after the War. Physical target planning by Labour in
1946-47 is seen as directly following the Soviet model. As Wiles writes: “The
choice of things to nationalize—coal, iron and steel, railways, the central
bank, gas and electricity, much of road transport—resembles strongly Lenin’s choice
in 1917 (not [emphasis in the original] the wholesale nationalizations
of 1918)”. However that influence quickly waned because the use of physical targets
proved inefficient.
The next case is India. The point in case
is the famous First Five-Year plan and the use of Marx’s schemes of extended reproduction
and his two-sector model (production of the means of production, and of
consumption goods). That influence came through a common, both to the early
Soviet planners and people around Mahalanobis, interest in economic growth as a
way to catch-up, and most effectively to do so through investment in production
of the means of production. Other international influences however were
more important: Charles Bettelheim, Ragnar Frisch, R. M. Goodwin, and Oskar
Lange.
The next two cases (Ghana under
Nkrumah and Guinea under Sekou Touré) are not taken very seriously, the
Soviet conditions being substantially different from those in Africa. “The
economy [in Ghana] just ran on as it had under British rule, with much more government
expenditure and corruption, and rather more nationalization”.
Wiles’ discussion of the Soviet influence
(fifty years after the Revolution) is instructive not only for historical reasons—especially
now when the Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia is capitalist, but
because it helps us think about the potential Chinese influence. The main
problem faced by Chinese “export” of its model to the rest of the world is, as
I argued in “Capitalism, Alone”, the difficulty of “packaging” it into
several simple and mutually-reinforcing policies. The reason for that is that
the model was developed heuristically, by trial-and-error and reflects specific
Chinese conditions that are difficult to replicate elsewhere. To see that compare
(whatever you think of it) the simplicity and internal logic of the Washington Consensus
to any possible policy combination suggested by the Chinese experience. To say
that the state should have a greater role in the control of credit or that it
should stimulate ICTs does not really tell to (say) Tanzanian government anything
new nor does it explain how it should do it.
China might have benefited from its experimental
approach where reforms were tested in different areas (e.g., dual-track pricing
policy) or different territorial units, but that was made possible by the size of
the country and at the same time ability of the Party to keep centralized
control. This is what Chenggang Xu
called “Regionally Decentralized Authoritarianism”. But how can Laos, Egypt,
Paraguay or Serbia apply such an
approach? It is not at all clear. So far only Ethiopia seemed to have benefited
from Chinese experience. If China plans to “export” its model, the way that the
USA and the Soviet Union did, she needs to define it in a way that, at least in
principle, may be applicable under very different conditions.
It is here that we encounter the main
difference between the Soviet Union then and China today. The peak of Soviet
influence was from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The model was consistent,
but the sellers were dishonest (as argued by Wiles). After around 1965, it
became obvious that the product itself was deficient, so the demand declined. For
China, however, we all observe that the product works. But we do not fully know
why, nor how to apply it elsewhere. And the seller is not really telling us
much as he insists on “Chinese specificities”. So long as one puts “Chinese”
first, and not “general”, the model may be admired, but it will not be imitated.