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Ten Theories in Search of Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior in the Social Sciences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Surely, more has been written about the Russian Revolution and the ensuing forty years of Soviet rule than about any comparable episode in human history. The bibliography of items on the French Revolution occupies, it is said, one wall of the Bibliothéque Nationale. A complete bibliography on the Soviet Union—which is yet to be compiledand may never be because of the geometric rate at which it multiplies—would probably make that earlier cenotaph to scholarship shrink the way in which the earlier tombs diminished before the great complex at Karnak.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , April 1958 , pp. 327 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1958

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References

1 Pace President Roosevelt, who wrote on the flyleaf of his personal copy of Joseph E. Davies' Mission to Moscow: “This book will last.” Ullman, Richard H., “The Davies Mission and United States-Soviet Relations, 1937–1941,” World Politics, IX, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Mead, Margaret, Soviet Attitudes to Authority, New York, 1951.Google Scholar

3 Gorer, Geoffrey and Rickman, John, The People of Great Russia, London, 1949.Google Scholar

4 Dicks, Henry V., “Observations on Contemporary Russian Behavior,” in Human Relations, V, No. 2 (1952), pp. 111–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 A dichotomy, like an atom once split, can seemingly be multiplied indefinitely. Thus Tomasic, Dinko, in his study of The Impact of Russian Culture on Soviet Communism (Glencoe, 111., 1953)Google Scholar, finds that Russian national character is a bisect of two contrasting influences, that of the “power-seeking and self-oriented nomadic horsemen of the Eurasian steppes” and of the “anarchic and group-oriented [Slavic] tillers of the land.” One can also point to antinomies, such as Gordon Wasson's discovery that Russians are mycophiles and Anglo-Saxons are mycophobes.

6 Dicks, , op. cit., p. 171.Google Scholar

7 Ibid.

8 Leites, Nathan, A Study of Bolshevism, Glencoe, III., 1954.Google Scholar

9 Bauer, Raymond A., Inkeles, Alex, and Kluckhohn, Clyde, How the Soviet System Works, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Moore, Barrington Jr, Terror and Progress—USSR, Cambridge, Mass., 1954CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power, Cambridge, Mass., 1950.

11 “The Permanent Revolution Is on Again,” Commentary, XXIV, No. 2 (August 1957), pp. 105–12.

12 Ibid., p. 109.

13 Deutscher, Isaac, Russia: What Next?, London, 1953.Google Scholar

14 Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921, New York, 1954.Google Scholar

15 Russia: What Next?, pp. 123, 125.

16 Deutscher, Isaac, “Russia in Transition,” Universities and Left Review, I, No. 1 (Spring 1957), pp. 4–12.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 12.

18 The first book to insist that Russia was a new class state—calling it ‘bureaucratic collectivism”—was that of R., Bruno, La Bureaucraticisation du Monde, Paris, 1939.Google Scholar The theme was debated in the Menshevik press in the early 1940's, widi the late Theodor Dan arguing in Novy Put that Russia was still a workers’ state, and Rudolf Hilferding and Solomon Schwarz arguing the contrary in the Vestnik. (Dan, following the invasion of Russia, gave qualified support to the Russian regime.) Hilferding's argument, a classic statement of the neo-Marxist position, was printed in the Modern Review I, No.4 (June 1947), pp. 266–71, under the title, “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy,” while Schwarz's data appeared later in his article, “Heads of Russian Factories,” in Social Research, IX, No. 3 (September 1942), pp. 315–33, and in his collaborative effort with Bienstock, Gregory and Yugow, Aaron, Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture, New York, 1944.Google Scholar The debate was carried over into the Trot skyite press in the 1940's, principally in the New International and the Fourth International in New York. Trotsky's last argument is contained in the collection entitled In Defense of Marxism (Against the Petty-bourgeois Opposition), New York, 1942. The revisionist position can be found in Burnham's, JamesThe Managerial Revolution, New York, 1941,Google Scholar and Schactman's, Max introduction to the revised edition of Trotsky's The New Course, New York, 1943.Google Scholar

19 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1951Google Scholar (published in England as The Burden of Our Times).

20 Jablonowski, Horst and Philipp, Werner, eds., Forschungen zur ost-europäischen Geschichte, Vol. I, Berlin, 1954.Google Scholar

21 Kohn, Hans in the Russian Review, XIV, No. 4 (October 1955), p. 373.Google Scholar

22 A Study of Bolshevism, p. 527.

23 Ibid., p. 137.

24 Ibid., pp. 135, 261.

25 Ibid., pp. 403–4.

26 This may explain the intensity of the feelings of ex-Communists toward the party. Though they are free of the ideology, the rigid personality pattern remains.

27 Hamlet … with a Psycho-analytic Study by Ernest Jones, M.D., London, 1947, p. 22. The argument is elaborated in Jones', Hamlet and Oedipus, New York, 1951, pp. 83–90.Google Scholar

28 As George Ivask has said, if all men may be divided into foxes and hedgehogs, they may also be divided, following the satire of Saltykov-Schedrin, into boys with pants and boys widiout pants. If Lenin wore pants, is Khrushchev without them?

29 The example has been adapted from Inkeles, Alex, “Understanding a Foreign Society:A Sociologist's View,” World Politics, III, No. 2 (January 1951), pp. 269–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Bauer, , Inkeles, , and Kluckhohn, , op. cit., p. 20.Google Scholar

31 The Radio Liberation Daily Information Bulletin of May 14, 1957, carried the following news item, headed “Andropov—Head of the Satellite Countries Department of the CC”:

“Pravda for May 12, 1957 twice mentions the former ambassador of the USSR in Hungary, Yu. V. Andropov, as ‘head of a department of the Central Committee of the CPSU.’ According to the Pravda, Andropov was present at Khrushchev's reception for the government delegation from me Mongolian People's Republic and also at a lunch given by Bulganin in honor of the same delegation.

“Although the Tass reports do not state precisely which department Andropov controls, it may be assumed that it is the fairly secret satellite countries department (even its official name is not known).

“In the past, B. N. Ponomarev, who was invariably called ‘a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU’ usually took part in such receptions and banquets in honor of party and government delegations from the satellite countries. The position occupied by Ponomarev has never been mentioned anywhere. In this connection it is interesting to note that at the lunch given by Bulganin and Khrushchev in honor of the Albanian party and government delegation on April 12th this year (Pravda, 13th April 1957) the order of those who attended was as follows:

“… Serov—Ponomarev—Palgunov—Nikitin. …

“At the lunch which was recently given by Bulganin for the Mongolian delegation, the order of protocol was as follows:

“… Serov—Andropov—Nikitin—Palgunov …* [FOOTNOTE: *The protocol order at the reception given by Khrushchev was as follows: Gromyko—Pisarev (ambassador in Mongolia)—Andropov; however, it should be remembered that according to protocol, at a reception for a foreign delegation, the Soviet ambassador of the country concerned is always given the place of honor, whether or not he actually merits it ‘on the protocol ladder’.]

“Despite all rnese facts, it would be premature to conclude that Ponomarev has been replaced by Andropov, because Ponomarev is also to some extent connected wim the international communist movement. (For example he was a member of the delegation of the CPSU to the Fourteenth Congress of the French Communist Party in July 1956.) A more probable explanation is that an ‘international division of labor’ has been carried out in the Central Committee; Ponomarev will henceform maintain contact only with those Communist parties outside the orbit, while Andropov deals with the satellites.

“Bearing in mind the fact that Andropov was released (‘in connection with a transfer to other work’—Pravda 7 March 1957) in the course of a reshuffle of senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which was begun by Shepilov immediately before his withdrawal from the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, there can be no doubt to whom Andropov owes his promotion (on the ‘protocol ladder’ he is now several stages above his former chief—V. V. Kuznetzov, first deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs—see Pravda, 12 May, 1957).”

32 Birnbaum, Immanuel, “Destalinization: Motives and Consequences,” Problemsof Communism, VI, No. 1 (January-February 1957), p. 41.Google Scholar

33 Imagine what the Kremlinologist and/or the psychoanalyst could do with the statement of Indian Ambassador K. P. S. Menon, the last foreigner to see Stalin alive, that at the interview Stalin occupied himself throughout the entire session with making doodles—of wolves.

Perhaps the most extraordinary attempt to trace Soviet elite maneuverings by means of “Kremlinological” mediods is the RAND study of Rush, Myron, The Rise of Khrushchev, Washington, D.C., 1958.Google Scholar In 1955, Rush observed that Khrushchev's title as first secretary of the party (pervi sekretar), which normally appeared in the Russian press in lower case, suddenly was given in Pravda, of May 25, 1955, as Pervi Sekretar. (The next day, the capital S was diminished, but die capital P retained, and the tide appeared thereafter as Pervi sekretar.) From a clue as slim as this,and from others which at first glance might seem to be equally tendentious (e.g., Khrushchev's emulation of Stalin's use of the word otriskoi, or “belching forth,” to characterize Malenkov as a right deviationist), Rush argued, in apaper prepared for RAND at that time, that Khrushchev was beginning to make his bid for power, and mat he would use Stalin's ladder, the party secretariat apparatus, in his ascent For some detailed questioning of Rush's, Mr. reasoning, see my review of his book in Problems of Communism, VII, No.2 (March-April 1958).Google Scholar

34 Insufficient attention has been paid, for example, to the techniques of evasion practiced by Soviet scientists in carrying out their work in accordance with the common fund of scientific knowledge. Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski, who was editor of the physics journal in the Soviet Union, and later a director of an institute in Kharkov, before being jailed in the 1937–1938 purges, tells the highly amusing story of how, in the journal articles, research advances in Russia were attributed, out of political necessity, to the wisdom derived from dialectical materialism and of the problems mat confronted the editors when the German Academy of Science asked for the secret of the new method. (See Science and Freedom, proceedings of the Hamburg Conference, London, 1955.)

More recently, Ivan D. London has noticed wholesale evasions of partinost in science: “For example, it is not difficult to show, on the basis of items abstracted from speeches, prefaces, introductory paragraphs, etc., that in the Soviet Union the whole development of physiology of the sense organs was prescribed by the Communist Party in order toprovide a ‘concrete basis for Lenin's theory of reflection’ and to meet the ‘demands of practice’: industrial, medical, and military, me latter two in particular. Yet a detailed scrutiny of the technical literature, the published minutes of various meetings, conferences, etc., overthe years reveals little to suggest that the seriousprograms of research in the field of sensory physiology in the Soviet Union have been really influenced, in any respect, by either practical considerations or Party dicta. Of course, superficially mere may seem to be a planned compliance wim practical programmatic aims—after all, ‘Soviet language’ fulfills, besides communicative, also prophylactic functions—but any sensory physiologist who is alert to his subject will recognize the dust-in-the-eyes purpose of certain parts of research programs…” (“Toward a Realistic Appraisal of Soviet Science,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, XIII, No. 5, May 1957, p. 170.)

35 Bauer, , Inkeles, , and Kluckhohn, , op. cit., p. 239Google Scholar; Rush, , op. cit., p. 21.Google Scholar

36 Dedijer, Vladimir, Tito, New York, 1953, p. 327.Google Scholar

37 We realize, too, the profound wisdom of de Tocqueville: “… it is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has just put up wim an oppressive rule over a long period of time without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it … Patientlyendured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds. For the mere fact mat certain abuses have been remedied drawsattention to the others and they now appear more galling…” Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Anchor, ed., New York, 1955, pp. 176–77.Google Scholar

38 Campbell, Robert W., “Some Recent Changes in Soviet Economic Policy,” World Politics, IX, No. 1 (October 1956), p. 8.Google Scholar

39 In this connection, see the interesting study, When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger, Leon, Riecken, Henry W., and Schacter, Stanley, Minneapolis, Minn., 1956.Google Scholar