Re: Soviet balance sheet

["Ricardo Duchesne" <RDUCHESN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date sent:      Tue, 31 Mar 1998 15:48:21 -0500
> Send reply to:  pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> From:           Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxx>
> To:             pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Copies to:      rosserjb@xxxxxxx
> Subject:        Re: Soviet balance sheet

Wojtek:

> Following the line of argument I outlined in my response to the 'ethnic
> question,'  we need to put those things in a proper perspective.  I think
> it is plain wrong to attribute all that 'collateral damage' to Stalinist
> policies.  This belief  implies that, absent Stalinist policies, the
> "collateral damage" would have been averted.  That, I believe, is false.
> Given the size, level of diversity, centrifugal tendencies etc. existing in
> Russia, a nation building process under ANY regime would result in a
> 'collateral damage."  The proper question thus is: "which regime would have
> the lowest social cost of economic development?"



Collateral damage?!  Stalin's crimes, and of the Communist Party
under him, were not "collateral" (citation marks or not). Neither
were they mere economic costs. They were part of a *political*
process of amassing absolute power, the likes of which history
had never seen before. Collectivization, the policy of mass starvation
against the Ukraine, and the great Terror were not necessary "costs"
of economic development. The were pure crimes agaisnt
humanity committed by a self-styled communist state. And there is no
"balace sheet" agaisnt such crimes. ricardo



> To answer that question we need to comapre Russia to a proper unit that is
> comparable in geographical size, composition of the population,
> center-periphery relationship (pardon my world-systems lingo), level of
> economic development, etc.  This is an alternative to Barkley's suggestion
> of the counterfactual which will always be hypothetical, if we considered
> Russia alone.
>
>
> While no exact counterparts can be found here, it is fair to believe that a
> major colonial power CUM its colonies may come reasonably close.  So while
> comparing the 18th century England to the 20th century Russia may sound
> like abomination to a bourgeois pundit -- it makes a lot of structural
> sense.  There are a lot of similarities in center-periphery relations (from
> the struggle between the crown and the gentry to the core-colony
> relationships) ethnic diversity, population size of the empire.  One
> ostensible dissimilarity is that while Russia's colonies were nominally
> included in the country's national borders, which was not the case of the
> British empire.  But this is mostly legalistic distinction.
>
> Another difference that is more substantive is time sequencing - while
> England was the vanguard of the industrial  revolution, Russia was trailing
> far behind.  It has been argued (cf. Gerschenkron) that entry sequence
> affects the strength of the push toward indutsrialization, the later the
> entry the stronger the push.  That suggests that ANY regime trying to
> industrialize Russia would have push hard for industrialziation, thus
> increasing potential social cost of that industrialization.
>
> >From that perspective, to evaluate the social cost of Stalinist policies,
> we need to compare it to the social cost of British colonialism, not just
> in the UK, but throghout the entire empire.  I suspect that the Brits would
> not compare favorably with Stalin in that respect, unless we want to
> discount their deeds in Africa, India or Australia.  To my knowledge, the
> Brits simply dumped their colonies, conveniently leaving the devastation
> they created beyond their national borders (thus shedding any
> accountability), while the Russians hauled their entire colonial baggage
> with them, trying to improve the lot of the peoples the tsars colonised.
> Even if the total loss of life due to British colonialsm was smaller than
> the number of people who died during Soviet industrialziation, we must also
> take into account the effect of Russia's belated entry to the
> industrialization race.
>
>
>
> To summarize, what I am suggesting here is changing the way how the Soviet
> balance sheet question is framed in the follwoing way:
>
> - by comparing Soviet policies to real, not ideal alternatives;
> - by assessing those real alternatives by comparisons with STRUCTURAL,
> rather than national equivalents (i.e. by comparing not nation-states
> alone, but nation-states with the economic-political structures they
> actually control, regardless where national boundaries happen to be drawn
> at any particular moment); and
> - by factoring in the effect of belated entry into the industrialization
> race, that would increase the social cost for ANY regime, not just an
> ostenssibly 'socialist' one.
>
> Regards,
>
> Wojtek Sokolowski
>
>
>