HY 150 BISK
THE RUSSIAN MODEL OF MODERNIZATION
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskrussia.htm

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A. BEFORE SERGEI WITTE, THE FIRST STEPS
1. A MULTI-NATIONAL EMPIRE
In Russia, unlike Italy and Germany, there was no need to build a single state out of a jumble of principalities. The Russian Empire was already an enormous multinational state, a state that contained all the ethnic Russians and many other nationalities as well. As in the United States at mid-century, the long-term challenge facing the government was to hold the existing state together, either by political compromise or military force. Thus, Russia's rulers saw nationalism as a subversive ideology in the early nineteenth century, and they tried with some success to limit its development among their non-Russian subjects.

2. MODERNIZATION
Before the Russian Revolution, there had been a long period of European expansion, which spread Western modernization. Its essence was the survival of the fittest through national enlargement. The non-Western world, and Russia is half Asian, was awed not just by superior technology but also by the European ideals and slogans—and this transferred European values to the non-Western world. But some followed the Western model not merely by imitating but by equaling the European's pride in his native accomplishment, culture, and spiritual independence. To these people, power came from cultural superiority, and vice versa. The beginnings of this anti-Western revolution were dimly visible by 1914. Lenin, for example, when scrambling for allies, hoped to take advantage of this approaching revolution.

3. THE "GREAT REFORMS" AND ALEXANDER II (r. 1855-1881)
a. Serfdom
In the 1850s, Russia was a poor agrarian society with poorly developed industries. Almost 90 percent of the population lived on the land. Agricultural techniques were backward: the ancient open-field system reigned supreme. Serfdom remained the basic social institution. Bound to the lord on a hereditary basis, the peasant serf was little more than a slave. Landlords regularly sold individual serfs and serf families, with and without land, in the early nineteenth century. Serfs had to provide labor services or money payments as the lord saw fit. Moreover, the lord could choose freely among the serfs for army recruits, who had to serve for twenty-five years, and he could punish a serf with deportation to Siberia whenever he wished. Lords commonly sexually exploited female serfs.

b. The Crimean War, 1853-1856
Serfdom had become the great moral and political issue for the government by the 1840s, but it might still have lasted many more years had it not been for the Crimean War. The war began as a dispute with France over who should protect certain Christian shrines in Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire. Because the combatants fought the war mostly on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea, Russia's transportation network of rivers and wagons failed to supply the distant Russian armies adequately. France and Great Britain, aided by Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire, inflicted a humiliating defeat on Russia.

c. Need for Reform
The military defeat marked a turning point in Russian history. The military had built the Russian state, and Russia had not lost a major war for a century and a half. This defeat showed that Russia had fallen behind the rapidly industrializing nations of western Europe in many areas. At the least, Russia needed railroads, better armaments, and reorganization of the army if it was to uphold its international position. Besides, the disastrous war had caused hardship and raised the specter of massive peasant rebellion. Reform of serfdom was urgent, and, as the new tsar, Alexander II told the serf owners, it would be better if reform came from above. Military disaster thus forced Alexander II and his ministers along the path of rapid social change and general modernization.

d. Freeing the Serfs
The first and greatest of the reforms was to free the serfs in 1861. The tsar had abolished human bondage forever, and the emancipated peasants received, on the average, about half of the land. Yet they had to pay fairly high prices for their land, and because the peasants jointly owned it, each peasant village was collectively responsible for the payments of all the families in the village. The government hoped that collective responsibility would strengthen the peasant village as a social unit and prevent the development of a class of landless peasants. In practice, collective ownership and responsibility made it difficult for individual peasants to improve agricultural methods or leave their villages. This limited the effects of the reform, because it did not encourage peasants to change their old habits and attitudes.

e. Zemstvo Reform
These were organs of local self-government set up in 1864 to replace the authority of former serf-owners and to carry out duties the provincial bureaucracy could not, such as elementary education, sanitation, road and bridge maintenance, and agrarian improvement. A three-class system of towns, peasant villages, and noble landowners elected members of this local assembly. Zemstva (the plural of "zemstvo") had limited powers to levy taxes.  They could use the money to hire technical and professional personnel. Known as the "third element," this personnel consisted of teachers, physicians, engineers, agronomists and statisticians.

The political orientation of this group was liberal-radical or liberal-democratic, that is, socialist but anti-revolutionary and anti-elitist. This third element subsequently supplied the backbone of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party. The landlords elected to zemstvo posts tended to be considerably more to the right, in the main conservative-liberal. They disliked the bureaucracy and opposed all displays of arbitrariness, but they were cautious about introducing into Russia a constitutional regime and especially a parliament based on a democratic franchise.

Setting up the zemstva marked a significant step toward popular participation, and Russian liberals hoped it would lead to a national parliament. Events soon disappointed them. The local zemstvo remained subordinate to the traditional bureaucracy and the local nobility, whom the property-based voting system heavily favored.

f. Other Reforms
Most of the later reforms were also halfway measures.
1. More successful was reform of the legal system, which set up independent courts and equality before the law.
2. The tsars also somewhat liberalized education and the relaxed censorship but did not remove it.

4. LACK OF SPONTANEOUS, NON-GOVERNMENT ACTIVITY IN RUSSIA, THAT IS, CIVIL SOCIETY
Within Russia, itself half European and half Asian, the guiding slogan was "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." There was no middle ground of spontaneous, non-governmental, public activity to mediate between extreme absolutism and anarchy. The State was the only effective public force in society. The bureaucracy, while open to talent, was also not part of the people but above them. Because the Church was a governmental department, it could not create a message that included social and political action. The tragic flaw in the Russian tradition was that social and political action were separate from the wellsprings of charity (contrary to the Western experience).

Thus it was possible for expediency to corrupt revolutionary atheism. In Russia, there was nothing to match the West's Social Christianity. Russian backwardness prevented a rise in the living standards for the masses, thus they had no cause to display political responsibility.

Russian underdevelopment led to the glaring weakness: the disparity between Russian ambitions and resources, between pretension and reality.

5. THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF RUSSIA
Until the 20th century, Russia's greatest strides toward modernization were economic rather than political. Two industrial surges transformed industry and transport, both so vital to the military.

a. The first of these came after 1860. The government encouraged and subsidized private railway companies, and construction boomed. In 1860 the empire had only about 1,250 miles of railroads; by 1880 it had about 15,500 miles. The railroads enabled agricultural Russia to export grain and thus earn money for further industrialization. The railroads stimulated domestic manufacturing, and by the end of the 1870s Russia had a well-developed railway-equipment industry. Industrial suburbs grew up around Moscow and St. Petersburg, and a class of modern factory workers began to take shape.

b. Industrial development strengthened Russia's military forces and led to territorial expansion to the south and east. Imperial expansion excited many ardent Russian nationalists and super-patriots, who became some of the government's most enthusiastic supporters. Industrial development also contributed mightily to the spread of Marxian thought and transformed Russia’s revolutionary movement after 1890.

c. In 1881, a small group of terrorists assassinated Alexander II. The era of reform came to an abrupt end, for the new tsar, Alexander III (r. 1881-1894), was a determined reactionary. In the 1880s, Russia, and indeed all of Europe, experienced hard times economically. Political modernization remained frozen until 1905, but economic modernization sped forward in the massive industrial surge of the 1890s. As it had after the Crimean War, nationalism played a decisive role. The key leader was Sergei Witte, the tough, competent minister of finance from 1892 to 1903.

B. SERGEI WITTE AND THE FIRST CRISIS, 1900-05
1. BIOGRAPHY
Sergei Iulievich Witte, 1849-1915, was Minister of Finance from 1892 to 1903 and President of the Council of Ministers in 1903. He negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905 that ended the Russo-Japanese War. He was the first constitutional Russian Premier (Nov. 1905-May 1906) until he resigned, thereupon the tsar appointed him as a member of the Council of the Empire. He was the last great statesman of Imperial Russia and a forerunner of Joseph Stalin.

2. WITTE'S DOMESTIC PROGRAM AND ITS OPPONENTS
a. Friedrich List
Early in his career, Witte found in the writings of Friedrich List an analysis and a program for action.

The career of the German journalist and thinker Friedrich List, 1789-1846, reflects government's greater role in industrialization on the Continent than in England. List considered the growth of modern industry of the utmost importance, because manufacturing was a primary means of increasing people's well-being and relieving their poverty. Moreover, List was a dedicated nationalist. He wrote that the "wider the gap between the backward and advanced nations becomes, the more dangerous it is to remain behind." For an agricultural nation was not only poor but weak, increasingly unable to defend itself and preserve its political independence. To promote industry was to defend the nation.

The practical policy List focused on in articles and in his National System of Political Economy, 1841, was the tariff. He supported the formation of a customs union, or Zollverein, among the separate German states. Such a tariff union came into being in 1834. The Zollverein allowed goods to move between the German member states without tariffs, and it erected a single uniform tariff against all other nations. List wanted a high protective tariff, which would encourage infant industries, allowing them to develop and eventually to hold their own against their more advanced British counterparts. List denounced the English doctrine of free trade as little more than England's attempt "to make the rest of the world, like the Hindus, its serfs in all industrial and commercial relations." By the 1840s, List's ideas were increasingly popular in Germany and elsewhere.

Thus List had stressed the peril for Germany of remaining behind England in the 1830s and 1840s. Witte saw the same threat of industrial backwardness threatening Russia's power and greatness.

b. Railway Construction
To build up Russia's economic, and hence military power, Witte's program was to raise spin-off industries, and he moved forward on several fronts. A railroad manager by training, he believed that railroads were "a very powerful weapon. . . for the direction of the economic development of the country." Therefore, the government built railroads rapidly, doubling the network to 35,000 miles by the end of the century. The gigantic Trans-Siberian line connecting Moscow with Vladivostok and the Pacific Ocean 5,000 miles away was Witte's pride.  Russia largely completed it during his term of office. Following List's advice, Witte set up high protective tariffs to build Russian industry, and he put the country on the gold standard of the "civilized world' to strengthen Russian finances.

c. Foreign Contributions
Witte's greatest innovation, however, was to use the West to catch up with the West. He introduced the Gold Standard in 1897 to make foreign loans cheaper. By mobilizing the savings of richer nations for his policy of railway construction and industrialization, Witte could afford to resort less to forced savings of the Russian public through taxation. He aggressively encouraged foreigners to use their abundant capital and advanced technology to build great factories in backward Russia. As he told the tsar, “The inflow of foreign capital is. . . the only way by which our industry will be able to supply our country quickly with abundant and cheap products.”

This policy was brilliantly successful, especially in southern Russia. There, in the eastern Ukraine, foreign capitalists and their engineers built an enormous and modern steel and coal industry almost from scratch in little more than a decade. By 1900, only the United States, Germany, and Great Britain were producing more steel than was Russia. Russia's petroleum industry had even pulled up alongside that of the United States and was producing and refining half of the world's output of oil.

Witte knew how to keep foreigners in line. Once a leading foreign businessman came to him and angrily demanded that the Russian government fulfill a contract it had signed and pay certain debts immediately. Witte asked to see the contract. He read it and then carefully tore it to pieces and threw it in the wastepaper basket without a word of explanation. It was just such a fiercely independent Russia that was catching up with the advanced nations of the West.

d. Problems Confronting Witte's Program
Tsarist and Communist Russia became the pioneers of all modern experiments in deliberate economic development, at least throughout most of the 20th century, although Witte's policy of promoting industrial growth differed from the Soviet FYPs (Five Year Plans). (1)

1. Witte intended that the basic effort of modernization be through the initiative of the business community. The state was only to give it a start and to remove obstacles. But Witte's system, implying as it did vast governmental powers, was incompatible with an independent the business community.
2. Witte's system was also incompatible with the haphazard autocracy of Nicholas II. It needed a stricter centralization and unity of purpose and the entire weight of government behind industrialization.
3. Witte needed agricultural surpluses to pay for the interest on his foreign loans, and Russia had to export agricultural goods "even though we die," he said. This policy caused much turmoil in peasant, rural Russia.
4. The landed nobility opposed Witte because poor agricultural conditions hurt them; where Witte thought about efficiency and economic growth, they thought about popular welfare.
5. The workers objected as well, because strikes for economic improvement were also, by definition, political strikes against the autocracy.
6. The business depression of 1899 set the business community against the government.
7. With few exceptions, intellectuals opposed the costs of industrialization. And the Russian liberals also opposed industry in general.
8. The one political group that favored the concerted industrialization policy was the Marxist.
9. Witte's Two Choices
In his attempts to modernize Witte faced many problems. In general people wish to consume rather than sacrifice for future production, thus Witte felt that he could not modernize with the consent of the people. In essence Witte faced two choices:
a. He could favor a cautious, sound growth from agriculture up without foreign capital.
b. He could start at the top with heavy industry developed through foreign loans.
Military necessity ruled out the first choice. Russia had to hit a rapidly moving target when trying to gain military equality with the other Great Powers of Europe. For Witte the problem was one of how to justify an austerity program ostensibly aimed at increased prosperity. He tried to do so by promising quick results with a stream of optimistic statistics and by building Russia's sense of world mission.
10. Eventually Witte became so unpopular that he became a liability and Nicholas II dismissed him in 1903. He proved unsuccessful in solving the riddle of a backward economy through the industrialization, which remains the Western example of how to increase native wealth. Any artificial effort to hasten Russia's development to enable it to catch up with the modern world, was bound to lead to more suffering, ill-will, and renewed weakness.

3. WITTE'S FOREIGN POLICY PROGRAM
In foreign policy Witte demanded peace so his economic program would have a chance. He did, however, favor expansion in the Far East as long as it did not bring Russia into conflict with any other power.

C. THE REVOLUTION OF 1905 AND PETER STOLYPIN
1. THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR, 1904-1905
Catching up with the West partly meant vigorous territorial expansion, for this was the age of Western imperialism. By 1903, Russia had carved out a sphere of influence in Chinese Manchuria and was casting greedy eyes of northern Korea. When the Russians ignored the protests of an equally imperialistic Japan, the Japanese launched a surprise attack in February 1904. To the world's amazement, Russia suffered repeated losses and in August 1905 had to accept a humiliating defeat.

2. CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION OF 1905
As is often the case, military disaster abroad bought political upheaval at home.
a. The business and professional classes had long wanted to match economic with political modernization. Their minimal goal was to turn the last of Europe's absolutist monarchies into a liberal, representative regime.
b. Factory workers, strategically concentrated in the large cities, had all the grievances of early industrialization but now had organized into a radical labor movement.
c. Peasants had gained little from the era of reforms and were suffering from poverty, starvation, and overpopulation.
d. Finally, nationalist sentiment was emerging among the empire's minorities. The politically and culturally dominant ethnic Russians were only about 45 percent of the population, and by 1900 some intellectuals among the subject nationalities were calling for self-rule and autonomy. Separatist nationalism was strongest among the Poles and Ukrainians.
With the army pinned own in Manchuria, all these currents of discontent converged in the Revolution of 1905.

3. BLOODY SUNDAY
The beginning of the revolution pointed up the incompetence of the government. On a Sunday in January 1905, a massive crowd of workers and their families converged peacefully on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. A trade-unionist priest, Father Gapon, led the workers.  The police had been secretly supporting him as a preferable alternative to more radical unions. Carrying icons and respectfully singing "God Save the Tsar," the workers did not know Nicholas II had fled the city. Suddenly troops opened fire, killing and wounding hundreds. The "Bloody Sunday" massacre turned ordinary workers against the tsar and produced a wave of general indignation.

4. THE REVOLUTION OF 1905
Outlawed political parties came out into the open, and by the summer of 1905 strikes, peasant uprisings, revolts among minority nationalities, and troop mutinies were sweeping the country. The revolutionary surge culminated in October 1905 in a great paralyzing general strike, which forced the government to give in. The tsar issued the October Manifesto, which granted full civil rights and promised a popularly elected Duma (parliament) with real legislative power.

The Manifesto split the opposition. It satisfied most moderate and liberal demands, but the Social Democrats rejected it and led a bloody workers' uprising in Moscow in December 1905. Frightened middle-class moderates helped the government repress the uprising and survive as a constitutional monarchy.

5. THE NEW POLITICAL ORDER, 1906-07
The new political order faced severe difficulties from the start. The tsar was reluctant to concede any legal authority to the Duma. He regretted the concessions he had made in 1905, and he tried to cancel their effect.

On the other hand, even though the tsar had designed the complex election-scheme for the Duma to limit popular control, representatives of the people presented a call for political and social change.

Several parties now appeared. Most notable was the Cadet Party, which sought to create a parliament on the British model. This meant a government cabinet and prime minister responsible to a majority in the Duma. Others, especially the Octobrists, thought the concessions given in the October Manifesto were satisfactory.

Even a politically moderate party like the Cadets called for redistributing noblemen's landed estates.

a. The Fundamental Laws
The new political order was most clearly defined in the Fundamental Laws, issued by the government in May 1906, on the eve of the  First Duma’s opening in May 1906.

The tsar kept great powers. The Duma, elected indirectly by universal male suffrage, and a largely appointed upper house could debate and pass laws, but the tsar had an absolute veto. As in Bismarck's Germany, the emperor appointed his ministers, who did not need to command a majority in the Duma. The tsar could dismiss them. He conducted foreign policy.  The government, moreover, had extensive power to govern by decree.  All this confirmed the tsar's autocratic power.

In contrast, the Duma found its power highly restricted. The tsar could dismiss it whenever he chose. The tsar or the partly-appointed State Council could block its decrees. The Fundamental Laws severely restricted its authority over financial legislation.

b. The First Duma, 1906
Elections to the First Duma began in March, and the Duma met in May 1906. Dominated by the Cadet Party, the Duma clashed with the government at once over the issue of land reform. It quickly became clear that the government wanted the Duma to occupy only a minor role in Russian affairs. The Duma, on the other hand, was out to introduce major changes.

The disappointed, predominately middle-class liberals, the largest group in the newly elected Duma, saw the Fundamental Laws as a great step backward. Efforts to cooperate with the tsar's ministers soon broke down. The government then dismissed the Duma, only to face a more hostile and radical opposition elected in 1907. After three months of deadlock, the tsar dismissed the second Duma. Then the tsar and his reactionary advisers unilaterally rewrote the electoral law to increase greatly the weight of the propertied classes at the expense of workers, peasants, and national minorities. The new law had the intended effect. With landowners assured half the seats in the Duma, the government finally secured a loyal majority in 1907 and again in 1912.

c. The Vyborg Manifesto
Following their dismissal, several hundred Duma deputies gathered in Finland and issued the Vyborg Manifesto. The document reflected the bitter political divisions between the Duma and the government. The deputies called on the people to refuse to pay taxes or to obey the conscription laws until the tsar called the Duma back into session.

d. Peter Arkadevich Stolypin
Stolypin (1862-1911) was a Russian lawyer and statesman, a President of a provincial court in Kovno (Kaunas), Governor of Grodno (19-02) and Saratov (1903), and Minister of the Interior (May 1906). After the tsar had dissolved the First Duma, Stolypin in July 1906 took over the post of premier.

Following the Revolution of 1905, Stolypin quelled the Russian countryside through parallel policies of harsh repression and liberal concessions and agricultural reforms.

Tough and energetic, Stolypin brought tightened government control over the country. He directed punitive expeditions, featuring military courts and hangings—the Stolypin Necktie remains the Russian term for the hangman’s noose—against centers of peasant unrest in the Baltic region. Stolypin also tried to manipulate elections to the Second Duma to produce a more conservative assembly.

Stolypin moved at once to stabilize the countryside by freeing the peasant population from the burden of the commune. These reforms included creating, for the first time in Russian history, the notion of legally protected private property. Heretofore, Russia, and everything in it, was the tsar's patrimony, that is, his personally inherited estate. With great difficulty, Stolypin created individually held, consolidated, privately owned farmsteads tied to a market economy where there had been before communes (mirs). Under the Stolypin reforms, a peasant could consolidate the strips of land he had held under the commune into a single parcel. He could then leave the commune and set himself up as an independent farmer.

Stolypin hoped to create a class of prosperous conservative farmers who would be a barrier against rural revolution. This was his "wager on the strong."

e. Power Equals Property and Property Equals Power
Capitalism’sdevelopment in Russia, both at the turn of the century more recently, demonstrates a paradox. In Europe and America, increased personal freedom accompanied economic and technical progress, whereas in Russia, limits on personal freedom accompanied such progress.

The source of this difference lies in the establishment of serfdom in Russia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when a mentality of having plentiful resources functioned to fix the peasants to the land. The notion developed that resources, or wealth, did not move among people, but that people themselves were attached to these resources. Under serfdom, a particular understanding of property and personal became fixed the Russian national mentality: Russians exchanged personal freedom for security and, most significant, they understood property and power as indivisible.

Such conditions resulted in opportunistic behavior that resisted establishing general social rules.  Russians saw stealing only when a specific object was taken from an individual.  Taking something from a larger, more impersonal entity (such as the land or, in Soviet times, an enterprise) was acceptable. In Russia to this day, property = power and power = property, meaning to rule is to own.

f. The Second Duma, 1907
Despite the government's effort to influence the elections, the Second Duma, which opened in March 1907, was even more radical than had been the first. Disputes with the government over how to deal with terrorism led Stolypin to dissolve this Duma. Like the first, the second met for less than three months.

g. The Coup of June 1907
Following the tsar’s dissolution of the Second Duma, Stolypin altered the election law without the Duma's consent. This violated the Fundamental Laws, but Stolypin hoped the change would produce a Duma that the government could more readily control.

The new election law reduced the number of deputies representing the peasantry and non-Russian minorities. It increased the number of deputies representing more conservative groups like the gentry.

6. THE DUMAS, 1907-14
a. The Third Duma, 1907-12
The Third Duma was the only one to complete its full 5-year term. It avoided controversies such as those that had brought the first two Dumas to an early end. Instead, it produced important results in education. A law passed in 1908 vastly expanded the opportunities for Russian children to get a primary education. It set the goal of eliminating illiteracy by 1922.

b. Interpellation (the right to question ministers)
Even the conservative Third Duma took on a critical role at times. It used its power of interpellation against government ministers. This let the Duma officially and publicly interrogate figures like the minister of the interior over their official conduct.

c. Stolypin's Decline
Stolypin's position weakened as Tsar Nicholas came to feel more secure with the return of peace and quiet to the country. The tsar had no wish to keep a talented and perhaps ambitious chief minister in office.

d. Western Zemstvo Law
The 1910 crisis over the Western Zemstvo Law severely shook the relationship between the monarchy and Stolypin. The law set up zemstva in six provinces of the western part of the empire. Such local representative institutions would cut down the power of he Polish landowners in the region. The measure passed the Duma, the lower chamber of the country's two-chamber representative body, but Russian conservatives blocked the measure in the State Council, the upper chamber.

Stolypin insisted that the tsar put the law into effect by decree. He backed up his demand by threatening to resign. The tsar gave in, but he never forgave Stolypin for pressing him in this manner.

e. Stolypin and Rasputin
Stolypin suffered as well for his criticism of Grigory Rasputin (1864?-1916). Rasputin was the latest and most influential of the disreputable faith healers who had gathered around the Imperial family.

f. Assassination of Stolypin
In September 1911, shortly before the Third Duma ended, a revolutionary who was also a police agent murdered Stolypin. By then, he had already lost the tsar’s favor. Nevertheless, he was the last leader of notable talent to serve Nicholas II.

g. The Fourth Duma, 1912-14
The Fourth Duma had no record of great activity before the outbreak of war in 1914. During the conflict, however, it came to play a significant role in national life.

h. The Tsar's Opposition to the Duma System
In 1913 and 1914, the tsar, encouraged by several of his ministers, considered returning Russia to the political system that had existed before the Revolution of 1905. Another possibility that he seriously considered was to end the Duma's authority in making laws. This would leave a Duma with only the power to advise the tsar.

Thus, as Russia approached World War I, the tsar continued to see the Duma as an unnecessary and even dangerous institution.

D. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1917
1. RUSSIA'S CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
As Russia moved into World War I in 1914, had she left autocracy behind to evolve toward liberalism and political freedom?

a. The Optimists
1. The change in 1907 in the electoral law suggested that tsar could not longer abolish the Duma.
2. The reformed Duma played an important part in the country's affairs and had gained increasing prestige.
3. Russian Civil Society, universities, press, etc., were becoming increasingly progressive, liberal, and democratic.
4. Peter Stolypin's land reforms were creating a class of satisfied, peasants on consolidated, privately owned, individual farmsteads tied to a market economy.
5. The growth of capitalism, a bourgeois class, and industrialization was changing Russia's economy.

b. The Pessimists
1. Russia's constitutionalism was a sham constitutionalism, because the Fundamental Laws did not decree ministerial responsibility to the Duma.
2. The arbitrary electoral change of 1907 and Nicholas II's entire authoritarian and reactionary policy was anti-constitutional.
3. The poor quality of governmental ministers, Russia's increasing political terrorism, and the government's linguistic and cultural Russification policies showed how far Russia had to go before becoming a liberal society.
4. Fundamental inequalities in society and widespread destitution was leading to greater radicalism among the concentrated workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
5. The government, in the grip of the landowners and large capitalists, never really wanted reform.

2. WORLD WAR I
Did the war ruin Russia, or was it merely the last straw? 15,500,000 men were mobilized; 1,650,000 were killed, 3,850,000 were wounded, and 2,410,000 were taken prisoner. Huge destruction of property. The war displayed the government’s utter incapacity to mobilize effectively the country’s resources for such an exertion. The government refused the help of the patriotic Civil Society eager to help.

3. WAR COMMUNISM
To win the Russian Civil War and to defeat Allied Intervention, Lenin’s Bolsheviks instituted a policy of War Communism, that is, the intense mobilization of all resources for one purpose—military victory. This, of course, meant reversing the Stolypin Land Reforms, a precipitous decline in living standards, starvation, terror—and military victory.

E. SOVIET DEBATES ON HOW TO MODERNIZE: NIKOLAI IVANOVICH BUKHARIN—THE ALTERNATIVE TO STALIN?
1. EARLY BIOGRAPHY
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was the son of two school teachers and thus was more distinctively an intellectual by origin than any of the other leading Bolsheviks. He was born in Moscow in 1888 and early on became involved in illegal strikes and suffered the inevitable series of arrests. He left Russia in 1912 and in the ensuing years traveled about Europe, read, wrote, and met many of revolutionaries, including Lenin. During the war, Bukharin was expelled in turn from Sweden and Norway, and reached New York, where for a short time in 1916-17 he collaborated with Lev Trotsky. After the February Revolution he traveled back to Russia via Siberia and arrived in Petrograd in the summer of 1917.

2. UTOPIANISM: REVOLUTION, CIVIL WAR, AND WAR COMMUNISM
a. The Peace of Brest-Litovsk
It is unknown how much of a role Bukharin played in the October Revolution, but he did figure prominently early in 1918 in the fierce debates of the Party’s Central Committee on the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. Here he associated himself with the most extreme wing of those—at first, a large majority—who opposed Lenin's policies of compromise.

b. The Left Position of Worker's Control
Bukharin in 1918 called for a complete and immediate take-over of the economy by, and in the name of, the workers. He proposed the complete transfer of the whole people's economy from government organs to an "All-Russian Congress of Producers." The workers were to freely elect this government, one not controlled by the Party. It was to pay all wages in kind "to guarantee the raising of the productivity of labor and improvement of the life of the producers." The government was to supply all food rations and "objects of domestic use and wide consumption," plus all meals, baths, transportation, theaters, and lodgings.

c. Lenin’s Position on The Economy
Lenin, on the other hand, favored forming great industrial trusts which would bring industry under state control. Lenin would borrow many details of organization from capitalist industry, and enlist the services of former capitalist entrepreneurs. To the charge that this was "State Capitalism," (2) Lenin retorted that State Capitalism was a necessary stepping-stone to socialism. Lenin vigorously argued his position in a pamphlet entitled, "On `Left' Infantilism and the Petty-Bourgeois Spirit," and Bukharin was the principal target.  Lenin branded him as an exponent of ultra-Leftist, utopian views which reflected, not Marxism, but petty-bourgeois idealism.

d. Seventh Party Congress and Withering away of the State
Lenin and Bukharin at the 7th Party Congress in March 1918 continued to disagree on the importance of the immediate Withering Away of the State. Such doctrinal disagreements, even with Lenin, were then still permissible, and not uncommon in the Party. On all the issues of their disagreement, Lenin won the day.

3. THE END OF UTOPIANISM, 1920-21
a. Introducing the NEP
NEP’s introduction in 1921 marked the end of the utopian period in Soviet history in which Bukharin had played a significant role. During the Civil War problems of survival absorbed the energies of politicians and administrators, and the mass of the population suffered intolerable hardships and constant calls for superhuman effort. Such periods commonly inspire. Side-by-side with the harsh reality and compensating for it, people dream of a future social order they would win through their current suffering.  These visions embody the ideals for which they are waging the struggle.

A little more than a year later, the Bolsheviks won the Civil War, and, after the momentary panic of the Kronstadt Mutiny, the existence of the Soviet regime was no longer threatened. It found itself, almost suddenly, the uncontested heir to a vast, devastated, and disordered territory. The single overwhelming task confronting the Bolsheviks was to restore order in the countryside and to bring food and fuel to the towns.

Utopian visions of a future which now seemed inconceivably remote were irrelevant to this task. Bukharin symbolically abandoned the extreme of revolutionary idealism for the extreme of administrative prudence. In the next few years, he moved from the far Left to the Right of the Party, and he became the principal theoretical apologist for Stalin's "Socialism in One Country".

b. The Opposition
Many Party stalwarts were uneasy at the shelving their revolutionary ideals and aspirations under the crude impact of Stalinist realism. To the end of 1927, the semi-legal activities of the opposition groups including the "United Opposition" of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, and the survivors of the old "Democratic Centralists" and "Worker's Opposition" kept alive this unease. Even the trade unions and the Komsomol sometimes spoke with discordant voices.

After crushing all oppositions and the Party and State had assumed monolithic forms, Stalin took over the drive for intensive industrialization once so vehemently preached by Trotsky. The Soviets conducted the campaign to industrialize and modernize the Soviet economy with the same impassioned appeals for ever-increasing effort, and the same contempt for hardships and sufferings incurred, which had been familiar in the Civil War. They employed enormous pressure and savage measures of compulsion to ensure the campaign’s success. But it could not have succeeded without a widespread undercurrent of idealism, a utopian vision of future triumphs to temper the present nightmares.

c. Bukharin and the End of War Communism
By 1921, War Communism was at its last gasp and was about to give way to the cautious compromises of the NEP. In the prolonged and bitter Party controversy about the trade unions that filled in winter of 1920-21, Bukharin turned against the Workers' Opposition, which proposed that the trade unions should control industrial production.  He sided with Trotsky, who aimed to incorporate trade unions into the State machine—a policy associated with Trotsky's demand for the compulsory mobilization/militarization of labor such as practiced in the Civil War. That is, Bukharin's own stand during the Civil War.

This may have reflected Trotsky's strong personal influence on Bukharin, or, at another level, it may have exemplified the ease with which Bukharin moved from a spontaneously unified society to promoting measures to enforce unity. The 10th Party Congress in March 1921 adopted by a large majority Lenin's counterproposal which left the trade unions nominally independent of the State and relied on persuasion rather than formal compulsion to organize the workers.

d. Why Bukharin's Move to the Right?
Why did this Leftist before 1921 changed into a Rightist. Certainly, his beliefs about what was the correct policy underwent some drastic changes. Bukharin's early radicalism, though certainly real, was never as uniform or uncompromising as many often portray it. True, as a member of the "young Muscovites"(3) who came to the Bolshevik Party through the events of 1905, Bukharin's style was more revolutionary than Lenin's.

While he was at one with the Left over Brest-Litovsk, he was not so committed to opposing Lenin's ideas on industrial management, and so Bukharin soon parted company with the Left. Bukharin further had stood with Lenin on most issues against majority opinion, Bukharin's opposition to the "leviathan state"(4) did not issue from anarchist leanings but from private fears about the repressive potential of such a state. Further, Bukharin was always more interested in European social and economic theory than any other of the Bolshevik leaders, and his viewpoints were therefore always somewhat eclectic.

Thus Bukharin was never a true ultra-leftist, but a convinced Marxist who still sought the truth and who was willing to alter his views when convinced of the need. Bukharin's conversion took a while. He had harbored illusions, which the War Communist experience and the clash with the mass of peasantry over grain requisitioning had shattered.

Thus the "costs of the Revolution" deeply impressed Bukharin. The casualties and economic deprivations of the Civil War had horrified him. He could not countenance imposing an economic regime that would systematically exploit and degrade the peasants in the name of a future socialism. Believer in world revolution that he was, he admitted in 1919 that "sometimes I am afraid that the struggle will be so bitter and so long drawn out that the whole of European culture may be trampled underfoot". Out of such apprehensions and after pondering the grim implications of theories of "primitive socialist accumulation", Bukharin moved toward an ethic of social industrialization, which clearly delineated between the permissible and the impermissible.

4. NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
a. Bukharin and NEP
NEP’s introduction proved to be a turning point reversing the direction in Bukharin's life and thought. He spoke of his former "illusions", and he moved over rapidly from the extreme Left to the extreme Right of the Party spectrum. Already in 1922, he had sided with those who wished to abolish the monopoly of foreign trade, and had spoken in favor of the expediency of alliances with capitalist governments. In 1923, he appeared for the first time, in opposition to Trotsky's pressure for speedy industrialization, as a champion of the peasants, who had scarcely figured at all in his earlier writings. In December 1923, he began a long series of personal attacks on Trotsky, which continued with increasing asperity for four years; through these years Bukharin was Stalin's willing henchman. In the mid-1920s, Bukharin became the principal advocate of concessions to the kulaks.

b. Theory
Bukharin was a Marxist economist seeking a socialist path to industrializing a backward agrarian economy. Theory was important to him and often stood at the core of his policies, which in turn determined his political alliances. When the awaited international revolution did not occur, Bukharin sought a new "Marxist" explanation for a socialist revolution in peasant Russia. He discovered that the peasantry also formed a "revolutionary class" with the proletariat. Bolshevism's historical tasks, he believed, were to guide both classes along a peaceful evolutionary path to socialism and to industrialize Russia without capitalism's exploitation of the peasantry.

Building on Lenin's last writings, Bukharin viewed the smychka (5), the market exchange between industry and agriculture, and balanced growth to be the economic keystones of the NEP. NEP was to exist "seriously and for a long time". It rested on social equilibrium. By this he did not mean the absence of struggle or competition. Indeed, the State and the cooperative sector would extend itself at the expense of the "Nepman"(6) through competition. But he envisaged this to be an economic struggle, not a police operation. Above all, the Party must preserve the smychka. If this meant building socialism "at a snail's pace", so be it.

c. Bukharin Opposes the Left
Bukharin also devoted many pages and many speeches to combating the bureaucratization of the Party apparatus, and he was among the first to point to the dangers of a new ruling stratum or class emerging in Stalin's Russia. However, he supported Stalin against Trotsky, because Trotsky and his friends threatened the smychka, and this for him was the most important issue. He saw the Left's policies, based on the "law of primitive socialist accumulation" from the peasantry, on ambitious investment plans, and on greater state control, as directly threatening NEP’s foundations. This bitter programmatic disagreement with the Left eventually led Bukharin to side with the ambitious Stalin, and then to share in expelling the Left under the banner of Party unity—Bukharin's worst moment.

5. BUKHARIN'S FALL FROM GRACE
a. Political Ineptitude
The NEP perished with the defeat of the Right in 1928-30. At the end of 1927, the political power of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky appeared formidable—government, trade unions, press, popularity, and high Party positions—but it did not last. Several reasons were central to Bukharin's defeat:
1. By adhering to the Party's ban of factionalism and by not taking the dispute to the Party and people, the Right passed over the weapon Stalin most feared. Stalin dealt with the Right behind the Party’s back.
2. Bukharin was an inept politician, one who miscounted Politburo votes, fought too late and in the wrong arena, and relied too much on his persuasiveness and the Party's conscience.

b. Economic Problems
Bukharin's economic policies had their weaknesses too, and the economy had come to an obvious impasse. Stalin's presented his own administrative solutions as boldly continuing NEP, and he denounced the existing Bukharinist policies as Right deviation. While Stalin's approach to the grain problem and industrialization raised the specter of mass peasant violence—as Bukharin often warned—its revolutionary-heroic nature appealed to independent Party leaders more than did Bukharin's evolutionary policies. Issues as well as intrigue defeated Bukharin. Once Stalin no longer needed Bukharin's support after removing opposition pressure, Stalin advanced rapidly toward policies of industrialization even more drastic than those formerly demanded by the Left Opposition.

Bukharin, true to his role as defender of the peasant, resisted Stalin as he had earlier resisted Trotsky. Early in 1929, the Politburo and then the Party Central Committee heavily censured Bukharin, and he lost one by one all his party offices. Unlike the earlier opposition leaders, the Party regarded him as a "deviator" rather than as an out-and-out heretic, and the Party did not expel him.

c. Recantation and Trial
Bukharin partially recanted, and he found employment in the mid-1930s in several lesser capacities, including helping to draft the Soviet "Stalin" Constitution of 1936. But Bukharin remained  unreconciled to Stalin’s repressive dictatorship, which he regarded as akin to Fascism. He had to choose between the complete silence and an Aesopian advocacy conducted within the narrow freedoms offered by his seeming submission.

The high point of Bukharin's Aesopian opposition occurred at his Show Trial in 1938. Bukharin, by confessing to everything, admitted nothing. He pleaded guilty to "the sum total of crimes committed" by the alleged Right and Trotskyite Anti-Soviet Bloc, while obstinately denying all the more specific charges. With double-talk and code words he pleaded for unity against Hitler's fascism and denounced Stalin's policies for the last time. Condemned to death, he was shot. The Soviet regime never rehabilitated him, but by the late 1980s, however, it no longer denounced him or Trotsky as traitors.

6. BUKHARIN AS THE ALTERNATIVE FOR THE USSR; UTOPIANISM AND THE NEP MODEL
a. The Government
No society devoid of utopian aspirations will long escape stagnation. In the long and continuing struggle since the mid-1950s over de-Stalinization, the old clash between passionate idealists and cautious administrators reappeared. The theses on the Seven-Year Plan presented by Khrushchev to the Twenty-First Party Congress in 1959 revived the old utopian ingredients of the Marxist program by announcing "immediate new measures. . . to liquidate the essential differences between manual and intellectual labor, between town and country."

b. The Gamut of Critical Ideas
The emergence of samizdat (private and secret self-publishing) obscured the range of opinion and information which has appeared in Soviet censored publications after 1956, especially in the 1960s and mid-1980s.

c. Economic, Political, and Social Aspects of the Debate
The larger significance of the economic reformers under Gorbachev was that in criticizing the hyper-centralized, bureaucratized system of planning and control bequeathed by the Stalin years, they developed a critical analysis of the State and its relations with society. There developed between Soviet reformers and conservatives a fundamental clash between "socialist pluralists" and "statists", socialization and nationalization, "democratization" and central authoritarianism. While it may be easy to overemphasize the overtly democratic features of reformist thinking, there were, nonetheless, deep divisions within official Soviet society.

d. Bukharin versus Stalin
Bukharin and Stalin held totally different views of what kind of society they should be building and the methods they could used to build it. Stalin aimed at hierarchy, discipline, personal despotism, and eagerly used the ruthless methods of War Communism against the peasant and those Party members who saw things differently. Bukharin, though hardly a "humanist," opposed these policies. Party activists responded at first to Stalin's appeal to the heroic traditions of War Communism, but many were repelled by the excesses to which the policies led, as Bukharin predicted they would.  Ultimately, Stalin had them shot in the purges with Bukharin.

It remains a puzzle, on a personal level, why Bukharin took so long to recognize how dangerous Stalin was to him and all that he stood for. Under other leadership, namely Bukharin's, Russia might well have traveled toward a more open, creative, and pluralistic socialist society based on a centrally-guided but, nevertheless, a market economy. Indeed, NEP—often regarded as the golden age of Soviet arts, economic innovation, and scientific progress—was well on its way to becoming such a society.

7. NEP REVIVAL
The debates of the 1920s in themes, wording, and phraseology closely paralleled the economic debates during Gorbachev's rule. While conservatives defended the Stalinist 1930s, the seedbed of the Soviet system, many reformers under Gorbachev revived the ideas and practices of the pre-Stalinist 1920s, of NEP and the Bukharinist wing of the old Bolshevik Party.  Among them are:
1. A more limited State
2. Official tolerance of a more diverse, open, and participatory society.
3. A mixed economy employing the advantages of both plan and market, central direction and local initiative.
The political and economic disputes became also a quarrel of two generations, a confrontation between alternative historical models, between two different traditions in the history of Soviet Communism.

8. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
The reformers argued that Soviet history included a sequence of distinct, socio-political models and they called on a non-Stalinist tradition.  This belies the popular interpretation of Soviet history after 1917 as the continuous, inevitable, development of a single political tradition culminating in Stalinism. The theory of a straight line from 1917 to the Stalinist 1930s, popularized by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and others, obscured NEP as an example of non-Stalinist rule by treating it as merely a retreat or holding pattern in Soviet development.  These writers interpreted Party politics after Lenin largely in terms of a Stalin-Trotsky rivalry, while portraying Trotsky's economic proposals as proto-Stalinist.  They minimized the importance of Bukharin and his programmatic ideas. NEP was an authentic, alternative model in Soviet history. In terms of programmatic alternatives, Bukharin was the foremost political leader opposed to Stalin.

Bukharin's role as the main spokesman for NEP gives him historical importance.  At that critical turning point in 1928-29 when the Stalinist system began to emerge, he opposed the imposition of Stalinism.  He proved to be remarkably prescient in his admonitions against over-centralization, over-bureaucratization, over-planning, over-investment, and over-collectivization.  He was timely in his own proposals for economic proportionality, a combination of plan and market, scientific management, and authentically cooperative forms of economic organization.  Above all, modern socialist reformers echo Bukharin's prophetic warning against an emerging Leviathan state, which was the crux of the debate, in the 1930s and in the 1980s and 90s.

9. SUMMARY
a. Bolshevism in 1917 was not a monolithic movement but a federation of groups with rather disparate ideological tendencies.
b. Lenin's infant Soviet State was not destined for Stalinism or some similar totalitarianism. Rather than Stalinism being a logical unfolding of Leninism, it was merely one of several possibilities, the one that happened to happen because of specific post-revolutionary forces, including personal failings and historical accidents.
c. Among the various alternative to Stalin that existed in the 1920s, Bukharin and Bukharinism were more important than Trotsky and Trotskyism, despite the extensive historiography to the contrary. Bukharin's moderate policies, especially on the peasant question, were more truly alternatives to Stalinism than Trotsky's and more thoroughly in step with the Party policies of the 1920s.
d. Bukharin's views underwent evolution in the 1920s in a consistent and promising direction. Alarmed by the excesses of the early years, he became the Soviet Union's most articulate exponent of evolutionary socialism. Although Bukharin did not want to be known as a proponent of "socialist ethics" because he disagreed with the philosophical idealism that usually underlay such concerns, he gradually refined an ethical critique of coercive economic policies. Stalin proposed in forced collectivization what Bukharin defined as a massacre and a military-feudal exploitation.
e. Bukharin wanted to continue the NEP and he favored more freedom, especially for the kulaks. In essence, he wanted to resume Stolypin's policy of first creating a strong rural base and then industrializing, as opposed to the Witte system. But this would endanger the monolithic nature of the Soviet dictatorship by creating free peasants while continuing to regiment the workers.
f. Bukharinism remained relevant in the 1980s and 90s, because it represented the most valid reformist, rather than revolutionary, program for Soviet intellectuals. Even today, those who support a mixed economy which retains a socialist foundation, and who wish to revise the Soviet framework rather than reject it wholesale, are likely to find their greatest inspiration in Bukharin.

F. SOVIET DEBATES ON HOW TO MODERNIZE: LEV TROTSKY AND EVGENY PREOBRAZHENSKY—THE OTHER ALTERNATIVE TO STALIN?
Trotsky and Preobrazhensky believed, as had Witte, in the need for rapid industrial growth. Only after building a strong industrial base should Russia worry about agricultural improvement. But without foreign capital to invest, they would need to lower the standard of living through "primitive socialist accumulation". This was Preobrazhensky's phrase suggesting that Soviet Russia could amass the capital necessary to finance creating and expanding a large-scale socialist economy only by expropriating the surpluses of the small-scale producer, that is, the peasant.  Shades of Witte’s, “We must export even though we die.”

Preobrazhensky, always allergic to orthodoxy, like Bukharin had welcomed the emergency measures of War Communism as a foretaste of the future socialist order. In 1921, Preobrazhensky came out against Lenin, and for the platform of Trotsky and Bukharin, in the trade union controversy. Preobrazhensky remained mistrustful of NEP, which he plainly regarded as a derogation from the true principles of socialism. This rigid hostility to NEP, which recognized the need to sacrifice socialist principles to appease the peasant, meant a parting of the ways between himself and Bukharin. Lenin impatiently dismissed Preobrazhensky's ideas.

In 1923, with Lenin already out of action and Trotsky moving toward a clash with the ruling triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, Preobrazhensky signed the so-called Declaration of the 46.  This proclamation denounced the ineffectiveness of official economic policy in terms similar to those used by Trotsky. From this time most regarded Preobrazhensky as a member of the opposition, though he never had a place in its inner counsels.

His reputation as an outstanding economic thinker rests on his paper, "The Fundamental Law of Primitive Socialist Accumulation". Its theme was that the USSR could get the capital accumulation necessary to finance creating and expanding a large-scale socialist economy only by expropriating the surpluses of the small-scale producer—that is, the peasant. But Preobrazhensky's plain speaking proved a liability rather than an asset to the Opposition.

In December 1927, Stalin expelled Preobrazhensky from the Party with other leading members of the Opposition and exiled him to Siberia. The conversion of Stalin and the Party majority to industrialization policies more intensive than the Opposition had ever promoted impressed Preobrazhensky—unlike Trotsky. Stalin allowed him to return to Moscow in May 1929, and two months later he recanted and the Party readmitted him. But he never returned to favor, and the Soviet press did not publish the articles he wrote after his rehabilitation. An unconvincing public confession of past errors at the Party Congress of 1934 did not help. Arrested in 1935 or 1936, he died in 1937. He was not part of the great purge trials, and the Soviets never reported the manner of his death.

F. SOVIET DEBATES ON HOW TO MODERNIZE: JOSEPH STALIN WINS
By the time of Stalin's takeover in 1928, he could no longer put off the problem of which economic path to follow. Stalin, after having sat on the fence in the debate between Bukharin and Trotsky, finally opted for the nationalist program of rapid heavy industrialization—but only after having defeated Trotsky and trundling him off into exile.

G. CONCLUSIONS
In the race for modernization, the revolution from above replaced the revolution from below. But revolution from above defeats it own purpose by stifling creativity. But the Soviets feared that to relax the controls might mean that Russia could slip back to something less than a Great Power—precisely what has happened since 1991. Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and others, stand condemned because they did not grasp the persuasive political necessities and strict social discipline that cause all modern societies to operate.

It is in motivation control, the essence of Soviet totalitarianism, that Russia's Communists have made their greatest and most original contribution, although we may not like their methods of socio-political organization. The West never faced the kinds of problems with which Russia's Marxists had to cope.  Their problems were closer to those of the modern developing nations, and thus the non-Western societies for a long while looked to Soviet Russia, not to the West, for their developmental model. The Soviets lacked the West’s invisible weapons, for example, integrated societies, impartial scholarship, and political morality.  These ideas would have destroyed the heart of the Soviet system.  The Soviets, therefore, had to create, and they had to resort to other weapons such as subversion, trickery, and hostility.

ENDNOTES

1. Presumably, today, we could add Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.
2. State Capitalism: a command economy system in which the State largely controls or owns capital, and the State performs the entrepreneurial functions of gathering land, labor, and capital. In a fully capitalist economy, private individuals seeking private profit perform these functions.
3. Young Muscovites: an especially radical group of Bolsheviks from Moscow, of the generation younger than Lenin's, who had gained their revolutionary perspectives during the abortive Revolution of 1905.
4. Leviathan: a Biblical aquatic monster, interpreted variously as a crocodile, a whale, and a dragon. Something huge and formidable of its kind. Thus the "Leviathan State" would be a huge, ravenous, and uncontrollable political entity, consuming its citizens.
5. "Smychka": market exchange between industry and agriculture. The economic unity between urban worker and rural peasant each symbiotically producing for the benefit of the other, and in the process, gradually striving toward a fully socialist economy.
6. "Nepmen": petty entrepreneur whose heyday was the 1920s under NEP.

 

JOURNAL 13 QUESTIONS

Russia provides a fine example of the non-bourgeois model of modernization, of state-directed modernization. Please note that this model transcends the Communist Revolution of 1917. That is, the necessities before and after the Revolution were identical; the range of choices to deal with those necessities were identical; and the effects of choosing different developmental paths were identical.

1. Describe the general course of Russia’s modernization  from 1860 to 1930.
2. Why did Witte and Stalin choose the developmental paths they did? What were the outcomes of their choices?
3. Why did Stolypin and Bukharin choose the development paths they did? What were the results of their choices?
4. How is Civil Society important for modernization?

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