11 The title song from the old musical, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky Guys’: see James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia. Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays and Folklore 1917–1953 (Bloomington IN: Slavica, 1995).
12 ‘Did something bad happen here?’: see Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (London: Pimlico, 2002). Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century.
Part II
Introduction
1 Socialism would come, not in backward agrictural Russia: at the very end of his life, disappointed by the slow pace of revolution in England and Germany and the USA, Marx reassessed Russia’s political potential. But he did not alter his analysis of the economic prerequisites of socialism. See Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the peripheries of capitalism’ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
2 But it also created progress: see, to take the most famous of many passages, the paean to the ‘most progressive part’ played by the bourgeoisie, for which read capitalism, in The Communist Manifesto (1848).
3 It would be a world of wonderful machines and ragged humans: as portrayed, for instance, in Marx-influenced turn-of-the-twentieth-century fictions of the future such as H.G.Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards.
4 All the ‘springs of co-operative wealth’ would flow abundantly: ‘and on its banners society would inscribe at last … according to their needs.’ Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, 1875.
5 It was going to be an idyll: Marx’s own hunting and fishing and criticising version is from The German Ideology (1845–6). For a late nineteenth-century elaboration of the idyll into a full utopia, see William Morris, News from Nowhere; for late twentieth-century Marxian idylls, try Ken Macleod’s The Cassini Division (London: Legend, 1998), and any of Iain M. Banks’s ‘Culture’ novels, especially Look to Windward (London: Orbit, 2000).
6 A tiny, freakish cult: the membership of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was ‘several thousand’ in 1903, swelled in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution to a maximum of maybe seventy-five thousand by 1907 (but this was while temporarily reunified with the Mensheviks), and then (separate again) plunged during the period of disillusionment and police repression that followed, until by 1910 no Bolshevik branch anywhere in the country had more than ‘tens of members’, and from his exile Lenin could contact no more than thirty to forty reliable people. See Alan Woods, Bolshevism – The Road to Revolution: A History of the Bolshevik Party (London: Well Red, 1999). In 1912, when the Bolsheviks held a separate party congress in Prague, the membership was around five hundred, and according to the delegate from St Petersburg, Lenin could count on 109 supporters in the city. See R.B.McKean, St Petersburg Between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1990). That was the nadir, and membership was higher by 1914; but it was the First World War that really changed things.
7 There was in fact an international debate in the 1920s: useful summaries of, and commentaries on, the socialist calculation debate can be found in Mirowski, Machine Dreams, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Whither Socialism? (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994) and Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Economics and Utopia: Why the learning economy is not the end of history (London: Routledge, 1999), especially ‘Socialism and the Limits to Innovation’, pp.5–61. Von Mises’ opening criticisms are to be found in Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922, translated by J. Kahane (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981). For Hayek’s initially ignored but deeply influential contribution, see F.A.Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, The American Economic Review vol. 35 issue 4 (September 1945), pp. 519–30. For late rejoinders by two Western socialists, see W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell, ‘Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again’, Review of Political Economy vol. 5 no. 1, July 1993, pp. 73–112; and Cockshott and Cottrell, ‘Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek’, Research in Political Economy vol. 16, 1997, pp. 177–202.
8 Investment for industry, therefore, had to come the slow way: a policy particularly associated with Nikolai Bukharin, ‘Rightist’ Bolshevik and theorist of the NEP. See Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
9 Slave labour was a tremendous bargain: see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York: Random House, 2003).
10 Ever to leave the kolkhoz: the collective farm, in theory an independent co-operative selling food to the state, in practice a mechanism of forced labour under an appointed director.
11 A society in a state of very high mobility: see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the USSR 1921–1934 (Cambridge: CUP, 1979); Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 85–8.
12 Then a middle-class life beckoned in short order: for the new respectability of the Stalinist bougeoisie, see Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 1976), and T. L. Thompson and R. Sheldon, eds, Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1988); Fitzpatrick again.
13 And a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear: for the wearable dimension of the Stalinist good life, see Djurdja Bartlett, ‘The Authentic Soviet Glamour of Stalinist High Fashion’, Revista de Occidente no. 317, November 2007; and ibid., ‘Let Them Wear Beige: The Petit-Bourgeois World of Official Socialist Dress’, Fashion Theory vol. 8 issue 2, pp. 127–64, June 2004
14 And it did grow. It was designed to: a point made in Mark Harrison, ‘Post-war Russian Economic Growth: Not a Riddle’, Europe–Asia Studies vol. 55 no. 8 (2003), pp. 1,323–9. For a consideration of the specific window of opportunity that was open to a command economy in the middle of the twentieth century, see Stephen Broadberry and Sayantan Ghosal, ‘Technology, organisation and productivity performance in services: lessons from Britain and the United States since 1870’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics vol. 16 issue 4 (December 2005), pp. 437–66.
15 Indeed, there was a philosophical issue here: for the planners’ philosophical fidelity to Marx, despite everything, see Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002).
16 This made it difficult to compare Soviet growth: there is a whole specialised literature, spread over fifty years, on the difficulty of assessing the USSR’s growth rate. For an accessible way in, see Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR, and Paul R. Gregory and Robert C. Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th edn. (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). For Western calculations during the Cold War, see Abram Bergson and Simon Kuznets, eds, Economic Trends in the Soviet Union (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928, RAND Corporation report R-371-PR (Santa Monica CA, October 1963); Franklyn D. Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1962). As a useful retrospective, see Angus Maddison, ‘Measuring the Performance of a Communist Command Economy: An Assessment of the CIA Estimates for the USSR’, Review of Income and Wealth vol. 44 no. 3 (September 1998), pp. 307–23. For Soviet reassessments of the historic growth record during perestroika, see Tatyana Zaslavskaya, ‘The Novosibirsk Report’, English translation by Teresa Cherfas, Survey 1 (1984), pp. 88–108; Abel Aganbegyan, Challenge: The Economics of Perestroika, translated by Michael Barratt Brown (London: I.B.Tauris, 1988); and most pessimistic of all, G.I.Khanin’s calculations, as described in Mark Harrison, ‘Soviet economic growth since 1928: The alternative statistics of G.I.Khanin’, Europe–Asia Studies vol. 45 no. 1 (1993), pp. 141–67. Then, for Khanin’s response to the Western studies, see G.I.Khanin, Sovetskii ekonomicheskii rost: analiz zapadnykh otseno
k (‘Soviet economic growth: an analysis of western evaluations’) (Novosibirsk: EKOR, 1993). And finally, for Khanin’s revisionist reappraisal of his own previous pessimism, see Khanin, ‘1950s – The Triumph of the Soviet Economy’, which proposes a completely new growth metric based on fuel consumption.
17 People in the West felt the same mesmerised disquiet: for the analogy between Western reactions to Soviet growth and to the growth of Japan/China/India, see Paul Krugman, ‘The Myth of Asia’s Miracle: A Cautionary Fable’, Foreign Affairs vol. 73 no. 6 (November/December 1994), pp. 62–78.
18 Set about civilising their savage growth machine: see Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
19 There was a devil in the detail: the figures in the discussion that follows come from Gregory and Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure.
II.1 Shadow Prices, 1960
1 ‘Is this heresy?’ said Leonid Vitalevich: the speech I have given him here is a patchwork of elements, heavily edited and simplified, from his real speeches to the conference on mathematics and economics really held by the Rusian Academy of Sciences in April 1960. Texts from Kantorovich, Kutateladze and Fet, eds, L.V.Kantorovich: Chelovek i Uchenii, pp. 117–26. For coverage of the conference, see P. Zhelezniak, ‘Scientific Conference on the Application of Mathematical Methods in Economic Studies and Planning’, Problems of Economics (translated digest of articles from Soviet economic journals, International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 3 no. 7, November 1960, pp. 3–6; originally in Planovoe Khozyaistvo no. 5, 1960.
2 Thought Academician Nemchinov, watching from the back of the seminar room: Vasily Sergeyevich Nemchinov (1894–1964), geneticist turned economist, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Economic, Philosophical and Legal Sciences in the Academy of Sciences, patron and institutional godfather of the mathematical revival of Soviet economics. I have slightly exaggerated the extent to which the conference was his idea: it actually originated with an initiative by Kantorovich himself. For a sample of his adroit political footwork during the transition to a mathematical economics, see V. S. Nemchinov, ‘Value and Price Under Socialism’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 4 no. 3, July 1961, pp. 3–17; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 12, 1960. For a gathering of the scientists to whom he acted as co-ordinator, see V.S.Nemchinov, ed., The Use of Mathematics in Economics, edited in English by Alec Nove (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964). One of the most important names to be found there is completely missing in this narrative: V. V. Novozhilov, Leningrad economist and close intellectual ally of Leonid Kantorovich, whose work on the relative efficiency of investments found a more-or-less politically acceptable way of reintroducing the idea of capital’s productivity, and who provided a vital connection to the pre-revolutionary tradition of Russian economics. He is missing here for storytelling reasons. But see V.V.Novozhilov, ‘On Choosing Between Investment Projects’, translated by B. Ward, International Economic Papers 6 (1956), pp. 66–87, and V.V.Novozhilov, ‘Calculation of Outlays in a Socialist Economy’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 4 no. 8, December 1961, pp. 18–28; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 2, 1961; and V.V.Novozhilov, Problems of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Optimal Planning, translated by H. McQuiston (White Plains NY, 1970). For a contemporary Western appraisal of what the alliance of Kantorovich and Novozhilov might mean, see R. Campbell, ‘Marx, Kantorovich and Novozhilov: Stoimost’ versus Reality’, Slavic Review 40 (October 1961), pp. 402–18.
3 Telling when the party line in their subject was about to change: for discussions of academic politics in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, see Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), and Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. For a fictional reflection, see the experiences of the particle physicist Viktor Shtrum in Vasily Grossman’s moral monument of a novel, Life and Fate, translated by Robert R. Chandler (London: Harvill, 1995).
4 A letter of terrifying frankness to the most powerful person he could think of: according to his daughter, in conversation with the author in St Petersburg in 2004, he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov.
5 A hand had gone up: though this confrontation is a device to dramatise the ideological conflict over Kantorovich’s ‘heresy’, the conference really was marked by sharp antagonism between him and Boyarskii, who had published a very hostile review of his Best Use of Economic Resources in the journal Planovoe Khozyaistvo (‘Planned Economy’) the year before. The intervention I have given Boyarskii here, however, is based on an equally hostile article of his from 1961. See A. Boyarskii, ‘On the Application of Mathematics in Economics’, Problems of Economics (translated digest of articles from Soviet economic journals, International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 4 no. 9, January 1962, pp. 12–24; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 2, 1961. Whatever form the real exchange between Kantorovich and Boyarskii took, it is clear that Kantorovich won it. ‘This is not the first such review on Comrade Boyarskii’s conscience but following my reply and judging by the audience’s reaction and that of Boyarskii himself, I have a feeling he won’t be writing any more reviews of this sort in future’: Kantorovich, in his speech to the Presidium of the Academy, 20 May 1960, in Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich: Chelovek i Uchenii, vol. 1. Or, for another hostile commentary on the book, see A. Kats, ‘Concerning a Fallacious Concept of Economic Calculation’, Problems of Economics vol. 3 no. 7, November 1960, pp. 42–52; originally published in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 5, 1960.
6 Shadow prices: the multipliers on which Kantorovich’s solution to optimisation problems depended. Essentially, they were opportunity costs: they represented the cost of choosing one particular arrangement of production in terms of the amount of production forgone by choosing it. Their ideological significance lay in the way that, without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured.
7 Any increase in the requirements of some article: see L. V. Kantorovich, The Best Use of Economic Resources, translated by P. F. Knightsfield (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1965).
8 ‘For example! Do you see my tie?’: the parable of the necktie is completely invented. Kantorovich’s habit of seeming to wander off during lectures, however, is genuine. A witness in Akademgorodok in 2006 described to me the disconnected fragments he would appear to be uttering, and the perfect sense they would turn out to make when you studied your notes afterwards.
9 ‘It’s true that there is a formal resemblance’, said Leonid Vitalevich: his next point is, again, a slightly modified quotation from The Best Use of Economic Resources. It is worth noting that there is no way at all of telling how sincere the real Kantorovich was being when he asserted that his shadow prices had a ‘meaning’ completely different from market prices. As was pointed out to me in conversation in Akademgorodok, he was notable for the care with which he confined himself in writing to the practical and mathematical aspects of his work, and never even hinted at what he considered to be its social or ideogical implications. The same witness gave as his opinion that Kantorovich, as a brilliantly intelligent man, must have been wholly sceptical from the beginning about Soviet socialism – but there seemed to me to be a danger of anachronism in the judgement, and Kantorovich’s tenacity as a system-builder argued for the rather different interpretation of him which I have made here.
10 ‘Coat, winter, men’s, part-silk lining, wool worsted tricot, cloth group 29–32’: there was a Ministry of Trade retail handbook, and it will have had a listing for better-quality men’s overcoats very like this, but my source – Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928 – happens to track the prices only of better-quality’s women’s overcoats among its basket of c
onsumer goods, so I have confabulated the men’s coat’s entry from that.
11 Granite giants holding up the Academy’s facade: so far as I know, there are no muscle-bound stone Atlantids straining to support the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Those are all in Leningrad/St Petersburg. But the symbolism is too good to miss; and if a fairytale would be improved by giants, it gets giants.
12 And his manuscript goes up and down in the world, round and round: the story of the manuscript’s alarming adventures at Gosplan can be found in Abel Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain. It should be noted that it was the head of Gosplan’s prices department himself, when he later became Aganbegyan’s doctoral supervisor, who told him the story, which suggests that the reaction to the book at Gosplan (at least in the prices department) was, though just as uncomprehending, significantly less thuggish in reality than in this burlesqued version.
13 Popped them out into a fist-sized mushroom cloud: Kantorovich was part of the mathematical team under Academician Sobolev on the Soviet A-bomb project.
14 ‘Quite a nice package,’ said Nemchinov: see Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
II.2 From the Photograph, 1961
1 But the BESM-2 is hard at work; and so is its designer: for the histories of the BESM and of Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev, see Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, ed. Anne Fitzpatrick, trans. Emmanuel Aronie, pp. 1–22. Available at www.sovietcomputing.com. See also D.A.Pospelov & Ya. Fet, Essays on the History of Computer Science in Russia (Novosibirsk: Scientific Publication Centre of the RAS, 1998), and the chapter about Lebedev and the very first Soviet computer in Mike Hally, Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age (London: Granta, 2005), pp. 137–60.
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