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The USSR as a “Weak State”: Agrarian Origins of Resistance to Perestroika

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Don Van Atta
Affiliation:
Hamilton College
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Abstract

The party-state apparatus's structure, which makes it incapable of implementing systemic reforms, is a principal source of resistance to Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of radical reconstruction (perestroika) in the USSR. This apparatus took form in the struggle to subdue the peasantry in the 1930s. Its basic means for managing agricultural production (and, to some extent, industrial production as well), is the mobilizational campaign. But campaigns are by nature intermittent and thus ineffective at eliciting subtle, long-term changes in organizational or individual behavior. For perestroika to succeed, alternative instruments for policy implementation which offer effective political and economic incentives for increased production must be developed. Despite its pervasiveness and intrusiveness, the Soviet state is incapable of effectively implementing many kinds of change in society. In that sense, it is a “weak state.”

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1989

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References

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3 For instance, a recent Time magazine poll of 1,000 Muscovites found that 20% thought perestroika had, “in substance, been braked”; 56% thought it was “experiencing major difficulties”; 15% thought it was “experiencing some difficulties”; and only 2% thought “pere-stroika is developing without problems.” Vsevolod Marinov, “What the Comrades Say,” Time, 10 April 1989, 62–63.

4 Andrei Nuikin has made the most striking version of this argument in an essay, “Idealy ili interesy? Po stranitsam gazet i zhurnalov” [Ideals or interests? From the pages of newspapers and magazines], Novyi mir, No. 1 (January 1988), 190211Google Scholar, and No. 2 (February 1988), 205–28, which sometimes seems to echo Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed.

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7 Discussing the Soviet “state” in this way raises a terminological problem. Students of the USSR often counterpose the “state,” i.e., the structure of Soviets and ministries, to the role of other agencies, most notably the Communist Party but also the competing hierarchies of trade unions, secret police, “people's control,” etc. “State” in the context of state theory refers to all that is not civil society, the whole complex of devices for political input, decision making, implementation, and verification. In that broader sense, the Soviet state is of course much more pervasive than the state in any Western country.

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9 Unfortunately, Moore never extended this analysis to the Soviet Union. See his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar, esp. the preface and chaps. 7–9.

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11 The memoirs of Ivars Jansons, a veteran of collectivization in Latvia, underline these microfactors and emphasize the variability of peasants’ response to collectivization. K. Pa-kalin, “Gody i sobytiia—protivorechivye, slozhnye, vseliaiushchie nadezhdy: geroi sotsialist-icheskogo truda Ivars Ianson o nachale kollektivizatsii v bauskom uezde,” Sovetskaia Latviia, 16 March 1988, 2–3.

11 In their mixed motives the 25,000ers Viola studied seem very like the urban Chinese youth sent down to the countryside in the 1970s, described, for instance, in Chan, Anita, Madsen, Richard, and Unger, Jonathan, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao's China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

13 The “Ipatov method,” named for the district in Stavropol’ region where it was first used, called for the operation of large groups of agricultural equipment around the clock to speed up harvesting. The party district committee became the harvest headquarters (shtab) directing all supply, transport, and operations for the whole harvest. The method's success in 1977, quickly noted and approved by Brezhnev, helped to single out Gorbachev as a candidate for Central Committee agriculture secretary when the post unexpectedly came open the next year.

14 “V Politbiuro TsK KPSS,” Pravda, 19 November 1983, 1.

15 See also Manning, Roberta T., “Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh, PA: Russian and East European Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh, 1984)Google Scholar.

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17 The concept of de-skilling, an attack on workers’ political power embodied in their peculiar and personal knowledge of their trade without which management could not manage, comes from Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974Google Scholar).

18 Moshe Lewin, “‘Taking Grain': Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements Before the War,” in Abramsky, C., ed., Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (Hamden, CT: Archon Press, 1974CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

19 For instance, Nemakov (fn. 10), 180, describes the fate of N. K. Solov'ev, a 25,000er convicted of a right deviation by his district party committee for refusing to take all the peasants’ grain after his farm had fulfilled its plan.

20 Although both Viola and Kaplan touch on it, this dilemma has been examined more systematically by scholars of the People's Republic of China, where access to farms and/or peasants has generally been easier. See Madsen, Richard, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 7280Google Scholar.

21 See, for instance, the reported reflections of Viktor Gulov, one of the first kolkhoz chairmen to convert his farm into a “cooperative of cooperatives” during the current campaign. He was struck by how even the best-known farm chairmen constantly had “to overcome, to evade, to defend” in order to preserve their farms’ relative freedom of action. What chance, he asks, would an unknown chairman of a not-very-successful farm have of doing so? Vladimir Fomin, “Po vsem krest'ianskim pravilam” [According to all peasant rules], Don, No. 7 (July 1988), 129.

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24 Although the Ministry of Agriculture became part of the USSR State Agro-Industrial Committee (Gosagroprom) in 1985, and Gosagroprom was itself abolished in March 1989, Kaplan's point remains valid because farms still retain their dual subordination to the central and district authorities.

25 Berliner, Joseph, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957CrossRefGoogle Scholar), is the classic description of “storming.” H'ia Zemtsov recalls a particularly blatant example in his Partiia Hi mafiia: Razvorovannaia respublika [Party or mafia: the stolen republic] (Paris: Les Editeurs Reunis, 1976), 39–40. In order to fulfill its annual plan, which had already been reported, the Baku Electrical Appliances Works, one of the largest factories in the city, collected all its employees’ refrigerators, irons, and other home appliances on December 30 and 31, hastily repainted them, and included them in its annual production figures. The employees got their property back after the success had been verified and bonuses for plan overfulfillment paid.

26 V. Orlov, “Stil’ rukovodstva: Radi gladkogo otcheta,” Sel'skaia zhizn', 22 August 1986, 2.

27 See Wadekin, Karl-Eugen, “The Re-emergence of the Kolkhoz Principle,” Soviet Studies 41 (January 1989), 2029CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 V. la. Uzun, “Melkogruppovaia i semeinaia formy organizatsii proizvodstva i truda v sel'skom khoziaistve” [Small-group and family forms of organization of production and labor in agriculture], Vestnik sel'skokhoziaistvennoi nauki, No. 6 (June 1987), 4Google Scholar. 1984 was, of course, the year before Gorbachev took over as general secretary. Data for later years are unavailable, but the continuing poor Soviet harvests even as the statistical yearbook reports a rising percentage of workers organized in collective contract brigades indicates that Orwell's year was no fluke.

29 This alternative has been most passionately espoused by Alexander Yanov. See his The Drama of the Soviet 1960s: A Lost Reform (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, n.d. [1984]).

30 “Arendnyi podriad—kratchaishii put’ k prodovol'stvennomu dostatku: Vstrecha v Tsentral'nom Komitete KPSS,” Sel'skaia zhizn', 15 May 1988, 1–4.

31 Erik Whitlock, “Face to the Countryside: Further Developments in Soviet Agricultural Policy,” Radio Liberty Research, 515/88, 15 November 1988.

32 M. S. Gorbachev, “Perestroika agrarnoi politiki—revoliutsionnaia strategiia partii,” Pravda, 17 March 1989, 1–3; “Zakliuchitel'noe slovo M. S. Gorbacheva na Plenume TsK KPSS 16 marta 1989 goda,” Pravda, 18 March 1989, 1–2.

33 V. Tikhonov, “Perestroika: Shag za shagom: Chtoby narod prokormil sebia …” [Perestroika step by step: so that the people should feed themselves …], Literaturnaia gazeta, No. 31 (3 August 1988), 10.

34 M. S. Gorbachev, “Potentsial Kooperatsii—Delu perestroiki,” Sel'skaia zhizn', 24 March 1988, 2–4.

35 The Baltic republics are all discussing legislation to allow private farms. This decollectivization is justified by the particular history of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, where individual farmsteads rather than peasant villages as in Russia were usual before the Soviet annexation. At this writing, there is no indication that true individual peasant farming will be allowed to spread throughout the Soviet Union. For the Latvian draft law on peasant farming see Sovetskaia Latviia, 29 January 1989, 3, as translated in FBIS-SOV, 10 February 1989, 49–54. The Lithuanian draft law is in Sovetskaia Litva, 21 February 1989, 1–3.

36 Whether lease collectives should exist only within state and collective farms was the most hotly debated point in preparations for the March 1989 plenum. That meeting did not settle the matter, fudging the issue with a call for diversity in forms of agricultural organization. However, the plenum resolution lays the groundwork for abolition of the kolkhozy as they have existed since the 1930s by urging their restructuring into “cooperatives of cooperatives.” “Ob agrarnoi politike KPSS v sovremennykh usloviiakh,” Pravda, 1 April 1989, 1–2. Soviets would probably think of such a system as a different kind of socialism rather than capitalism. See V. A. Tikhonov's comments on “cooperative socialism” in Igor’ Abakumov and Valerii Gavrichkin, “Budet li u zemli khoziain?” Ivestiia, 20 December 1988, 2.

37 The evening news tape of the speech showed him saying this, although it was cut from the published text. See FBIS-SOV, 17 May 1988, 84, for a translation of the news broadcast.

38 Tikhonov (fn. 33).

39 Bill Keller, “Moscow's Other Mastermind,” New York Times Magazine, 19 February 1989.

40 See especially E. Verigo and M. Kapustin, “Lichnost’ v kontekste istorii: Gibel’ i vos-kresenie Nikolaia Bukharina” [A person in historical context: the death and resurrection of Nikolai Bukharin], Sovetskaia kul'tura, 6 October 1988, 6.

41 Nina Andreeva, “Pis'mo v redaktsiiu prepodavetelia leningradskogo vuza: Ne mogu mstupat'sia printsipami,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 13 March 1988, 3. A history of this curious doc-iment is given by Chicsa, Giuletto, “Secret Story Behind Anti-Gorbachev Manifesto,” Unita, 23 May 1988Google Scholar, as translated in FBIS-SOV, 31 May 1988, 55–58.

42 Zbigniew fc. Brzezinski, , The Permanent Purge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Oallin, Alexander and Breslauer, George W., Political Terror in Communist Systems Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970Google Scholar).

43 Gustafson, Thane, Reform in Soviet Politics: Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981CrossRefGoogle Scholar).