Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, Verso, London, 2005
ISBN-10: 1-84467-016-3
Very nuanced, but totally wrong-headed book on the Soviet system of Government. In particular, the author for the first time uses the numerical data on the size of CPSU apparatus and its cost from recently declassified archival sources. The description of society and government under Stalin is brilliant, but his general ideas about Soviet era are borrowed from revisionist school (S. Cohen, J. Hough, etc.) and are complete trash. For instance, in accordance with Soviet-era textbooks and American revisionist historians he describes pre-revolutionary Russia as a barbaric semi-medieval nation. These perceptions were deliberately cultivated by the Soviet propaganda as to justify the violence of the Bolshevik coup and low living standards in the USSR. In fact, just before the World War I, Russian Empire edged Austro-Hungary as a fifth leading industrial power of the world after the USA, Germany, Great Britain and France.
The author seems to adhere to a strange theory, in which Soviet Party-State was replaced in the 1960s by the domination of the technical bureaucracy of the Council of Ministers. The whole idea of the struggle for the primacy of the two competing hierarchies: that of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers is a pure concoction of the revisionist school and has no particular factual basis. The relationships between the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers could be obscured at times, because several important ministers (Foreign Affairs, Defense, State Security, Heavy Industries and Internal Affairs) at times also held high ranks in Party hierarchy. However, the primacy of the Party apparatus was never much in question from the early 1920s to the time of disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Yet, for all its shortcomings, this book provides the most sophisticated depiction of the inner workings of the Soviet system of government, which has been so far available in English.
1 comment:
To grasp the sheer ludicrousness of the author’s assumption that USSR Council of Ministers replaced the Party as a main operational institution in late post-war years, I provide approximate American analogue. It’s as if a foreign researcher would suggest that, during the Cold War, the real power migrated from the President and Congress to Rand Corporation, or national laboratories or Joint Chiefs.
Post-war Soviet branch ministries were just that—counterparts of think tanks, government research centers and national labs—they developed technical and accounting standards for the assigned industries. All strategic decisions were made by the apparatus of the Central Committee. In fact, out of three most important agencies in charge of Soviet economical and social management, one, the Department of General Affairs of CC CPSU, was a major part of the Central Committee apparatus and the Council of Ministers supervision of the two others: the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) and NKVD-MVD-KGB, was purely nominal. The first took care of the most of the civilian economy and municipal affairs, the second—of the oversized defense sector, i.e. practically all of manufacturing, and the third provided social control over the population but also directly supervised a few strategic industries: in 40s and 50s—construction of dams, power plants, mines and railroads, operation of airfields and the nuclear industry. Lore of the Soviet bureaucracy contains stories of branch ministers using back channels to procure information from the Secretariat of the Central Committee (CC) on the major policy or career decisions affecting their industries. Moshe Lewin’s theory of a tug of war between CC and the Council of Ministers is entirely an concoction of revisionist Sovietology.
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