REVIEW: MAROT ON FITZPATRICK AND KOTKIN
Sent: 10/6/97 3:18 AM
While we are preparing the first set of book reviews of the 1997-98 academic year here is a review essay submitted by John Eric Marot to H-Russia for purposes of discussion. Marot looks at Sheila Fitzpatrick's 1994 book, Stalin's Peasants and Stephen Kotkin's 1995 work, Magnetic Mountain.
John Eric Marot received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1987. His articles on Russian Social Democracy and the Russian revolution have generated debate in the leading journals of the field. He has taught in a variety of settings.
Mauricio Borrero
Book Review Editor, H-Russia
Questioning the Revisionist Paradigm of Stalinism: Review Essay
By John Eric Marot, PhD
JEMAROT@aol.com
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the
Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994);
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
Over a decade ago Sheila Fitzpatrick limned out a new research program for a new, social history of Stalinism. In "New Perspectives on Stalinism" (Russian Review vol. 45, July 1986: 352-73), she invited historians to shift their traditional focus from state institutions and high politics toward the hitherto largely neglected daily life of ordinary people, for a fuller understanding of that period. Challenging the totalitarian paradigm, she argued that upward social mobility was a general trend under Stalin and that the majority of peasants and workers who improved their social position could be expected to support, from below, Stalin's 'revolution from above' because they could be expected to see it in their interests to do so.
Having changed their status through upward mobility, Fitzpatrick went on, many Soviet citizens now needed to acquire a modern technical education and to learn new skills. It was the responsibility of the regime to meet these needs. The stress on indoctrination and education of workers and peasants had a practical social justification and was not merely an imposition by the State, as the totalitarians believed. Similarly, state coercion was not simply the result of the regime's desire to transform society. Stalinist ideological, cultural, and social norms were internalized by the population, Fitzpatrick argued, so that society itself challenged the state to control "excessive social mobility" by any means necessary, including the use of force. The causal connection worked both ways, according to Fitzpatrick.
In the discussion that followed (_Russian Review_ vol. 45, October 1984: 357-413) there was some legitimate ambiguity as to whether Fitzpatrick intended an empirical shift of focus within the totalitarian paradigm or an analytical shift from the totalitarian paradigm altogether. Whatever her intent then, _Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization_, is now directly subversive of the revisionist paradigm because Fitzpatrick affirms in her latest work that the overwhelming majority of peasants possessed neither the motivation nor the interest radically to change their social status, to abandon their age-old way of life, and to enter modernity of their own free-will, via Stalin's collective farms. This work, therefore, does little to nurture the idea of a mutually supportive relationship between state and society that all versions of the revisionist paradigm espouse, let alone the wild notion expressed in earlier, more extreme versions that peasants and workers somehow initiated the policies of collectivization and industrialization respectively.
On the ruins of the mir through which peasantry had ruled itself the Stalinist state established the kolkhoz, a new, initially rickety institution through which the totalitarian state now effectively, if not unlimitedly, re-imposed political/economic controls over the kolkhoznik. Kolkhoz and kolkhoz chairman broadly speaking were the functional successors to the zemstvo and the zemskii nachalnik, institution and officer respectively through which the Tsarist landed aristocracy had imposed its collective will on the peasantry but from which the peasantry had collectively freed itself during the Russian Revolution -- by scouring the countryside of the zemstva and its repressive officialdom.
The Stalinist state reversed the peasantry's victory. With the epochal destruction of the mir, the only institution of collective self-defense available to the peasant for protection against the depredations of an exploiting state, peasants were left with no alternative but to develop, within the framework of the kolkhoz, the various individualistic strategies of resistance that constitute the exclusive object of Fitzpatrick's pathbreaking study. In this way Fitzpatrick actually strengthened empirically the totalitarian paradigm by proving the larger point that the state under Stalin, despite continued and pervasive peasant opposition, had nonetheless subdued the peasantry as a class, had pulverized it as a cohesive social force. In sum, state coercion was an indispensable feature of the (putatively upward) 'social mobility' that forcibly transformed the direct producer in agriculture from peasant into kolkhoznik.
Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick seems not fully alive to the destructive analytical implications of her work for the revisionist paradigm. This is because she wrongly amalgamates the newly state-created kolkhoz to the age-old peasant institution of the mir. She refers to both institutions as if they were more or less the same thing. Fitzpatrick overlooks the fundamental difference between kolkhoz and mir.
The mir responded to the interests of the peasantry and enjoyed its support. Incontrovertible proof of this came in 1917 when the peasants were free to choose forms of life and work -- and chose the mir and the communal tenure of land. "This fact alone" acidly remarks Michael Confino, "should serve as a clear answer...as to what the Russian peasant wanted and what was good for him."1
The kolkhoz, in sharp contrast, responded to the interests of a dictatorial state, and peasants fled it whenever feasible. No continuity exists between mir and kolkhoz because each institutionalized a contrasting ensemble of social relations: peasant self-rule in one, rule over the peasantry in the other. Ignoring this key difference, or denying the analytical feasibility of this distinction, can lead to the basic misconception that the kolkhoz responded, somehow, to the interests of its members and therefore can lend credence to the dubious revisionist idea of peasant support for collectivization (and/or that the Tsarist state was supportive of peasant interests institutionalized in the mir and mediated by the zemstva).
The very title and subject matter of her last chapter, "How the Mice Buried the Cat," directly speak to this misconception. In the Great Purges of 1937-38 many a kolkhozniki-'mouse' buried many a tormentor, the unelected kolkhoz-chairman and his associates, the 'cat' and his minions. Fitzpatrick's idea, as I understand it, was that the state's victory was not total, and that the mice had the last laugh, as it were. But even if every mouse had buried (more precisely, Fitzpatrick notes, had happily watched higher ups burying) every cat, the fact remains that the 'mouse' did so as a kolkhoznik, an involuntary member of the kolkhoz who watched the forced removal by the state of one of its own. The 'mice' were not free agents, acting self-interestedly, through the mir, to remove one of their own. Kolkhoz officialdom came and went but the kolkhoz remained, the institutional sign of the peasantry's ultimate defeat, and of the Stalinist state's ultimate victory.
Had Fitzpatrick recognized in the Second Serfdom the end of the Russian Revolution in the countryside, not its consummation, she might have retitled her chapter more truthfully, if more circumlocutionally: "How the Wolf Swallowed the Mice that Buried the Cat" with the Wolf representing the totalitarian state, of course.
In Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, a case study of the construction of Magnitogorsk under Stalinist rule, Stephen Kotkin rejects the totalitarian paradigm and, therefore, dissents from Fitzpatrick's final if implicit reconciliation with it. Kotkin insists that the totalitarian thesis is terribly flawed chiefly because its exponents failed to discern the genuine enthusiasm of workers for the construction of 'socialism' -- without which no construction of any kind would have been possible.
In Kotkin's view, the massive force deployed by the state against the working class reflected no objective antagonism of material interests between the Stalinist state and the working class, it reflected only dynamic relations of power on particularized "sites of contestation." On each of these sites "raw raison d'etat" was welded to "beneficent devotion to the commonweal," (p. 11) "genuine enthusiasm" existed cheek by jowl with "widespread coercion." (p.16).
Making the characteristic revisionist effort to show that the state was not all-powerful, and society not completely defenseless, Kotkin details the "little tactics of the habitat" deployed by workers to get along, make do and get by, to blunt the intrusive effects of coercive state policies in their everyday lives. He observes closely their artful stratagems to secure marginal improvements, on the shopfloor, at the police station, in the manager's office, at home, in the labor camps. Among other things, Kotkin does for workers what Fitzpatrick does for peasants (and, to raise an uncustomary parallel, what many historians have done for black slaves in the antebellum American South): record the most varied kinds of individual acts of resistance, in word and deed, in the most diverse of settings. But Kotkin's overall interpretation of the significance of these daily acts of resistance, taken together, is the direct opposite of Fitzpatrick's.
Whereas, for Fitzpatrick, individualized resistance by peasants to the state simply expressed, in disaggregated form, the lack of collective commitment by the peasantry to support the state's policies, for Kotkin the workers' individualized resistance to Stalinist nachalstvo somehow indirectly expressed the collective interest of workers to build Stalin's 'socialism'.
In support of the foregoing thesis Kotkin argues that the "structures of authority" under Stalinism were so many forms of "legitimate political representation" for the population, not "totalitarian controls" over it, as Merle Fainsod and others have held (p. 282). Nevertheless, Kotkin, despite (because of?) Foucault and postmodernism, has written perhaps the most powerful broadside to date against revisionist theory of Stalinism, and for Stalinist totalitarian practice.
If political representation is to acquire legitimacy, even of a purely formal sort, certain minimal social conditions must be met. First, different social forces must be free to organize for the purpose of representing their particular interests. Second, the highest organizational form taken by such representation is called a political party. Third, parties only exist in the plural, competitively, in relation to others, as they seek to gain popular support for their politics through struggles of the most varied kind, electoral campaigns, striking, demonstrating etc. Fourth, all social forces must be free to chose which party or parties best represent their interests, by freely electing them to authoritative and representative assemblies, such as parliaments, soviets, factory committees etc. Only when these four conditions are met can the semblance, at least, of legitimate political representation in the structures of authority be said to exist.
Kotkin agrees that these formal conditions did not exist under Stalin and concedes the essential truth of the totalitarian position which he assails, namely, that the Communist 'party' was not even the semblance of a party in the commonly accepted sense of the term in that this 'party' had declared itself, through its monopoly on the mass media, secured by state repression and terror, the only party to represent its interests as the interests of workers and peasants, and to demand unswerving loyalty from all its subjects on pain of exile, imprisonment or execution. By calling this legitimate political representation Kotkin defies all ordinary, non-postmodernist conventions of what political representation is: it is disembodied, it has no institutional form independent of the state.
Indeed, what are we to make of Kotkin's own account that the Stalinist state destroyed all alternative centers of competing authority and representation? Not just parties, trade unions and factory committees, but even the most politically innocuous of political forms, such as artels? (The artel -- another word for mir basically -- was a communitarian form of peasant self-organization, a producers' collective designed to minister to peasant needs). Some ex-peasants gamely attempted to reproduce an aspect of the artel in Magnitogorsk's urban environment where it meant, according to one Stalinist rank-and-filer, cited by Kotkin, that "...we [Stalinists] did not have the right to interfere in their affairs. They divided the wages among themselves. Every artel had its own tradition [for dividing wages]. In the artels they had their own 'masters of the first hand,' 'masters of the second hand.' To the master of the first hand they gave more money, to those of the second a little less, and so on. It did not depend on how a person worked, but only on his position. These traditions were strongly maintained... We had to smash the artels." (p. 89)
The message broadcast to civil society by this minor representative of the Stalinist state is unequivocal: civil society, however frail and anodyne, had to be smashed. This reviewer cannot imagine a more strident Stalinist declaration of war against revisionist theory and for totalitarian, Stalinist practice.
Kotkin makes no attempt whatsoever to explain why the Stalinists didn't consider possible the peaceful coexistence of state and society. He just wonders why the Stalinists "seem not to have considered" that "artels might somehow coexist " (p. 89) with Stalinist power -- and quickly moves on, perhaps sensing that any prolonged inquiry into the actual incompatibility of an independent civil society with the Stalinist state might progressively reveal the incontrovertible truth of the totalitarian paradigm and simultaneously raise grave doubts about the conceptual validity of his alternative to it.
This is not to deny that the totalitarian paradigm is bedeviled by numerous weaknesses, some of which are duly noted by Kotkin. However, the paradigm's principal weakness, one not unique to it since the anti-totalitarian Kotkin suffers from it as well, is that it fails adequately to distinguish social/political conditions originally producing Stalinist social relations, including the specific relation of state to society, from those social/political conditions reproduced by those very relations, that is, on the basis of an already established Stalinism. Running together these two entirely different problematics invariably leads Kotkin a teleological hunt for Stalinism before Stalinism, specifically, in Marxism and the organizational principles of the Bolshevik party mainly but not exclusively.
Kotkin's opening chapter on the origins, course and outcome of Russian Revolution exemplifies this teleological approach. In this chapter Kotkin tracks the history of Stalinism prior to the Russian Revolution, in his case (and with Martin Malia as guide), all the way back to the 18th century Enlightenment, and beyond that even. Searching for 'roots', Kotkin simply followed the well-worn technique of projecting Stalinism onto pre-Stalinist history -- as Stalin himself did in his 1938 Short Course. As for the Russian Revolution itself, Kotkin grossly mistakes the Bolsheviks for carbonarist conspirators. Like Richard Pipes, Kotkin writes about the Russian Revolution without ever critically integrating into his analysis the work of the classical social historians of 1917 and their sympathetic critics.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc: a genuinely causal account of Stalinism is missing in Kotkin's book. It is in any event beyond the scope of this review essay to provide an alternative explanation for the genesis of Stalinism. The point to be made here is simple: the totalitarian paradigm becomes valid once Stalinism has established itself, not before. How valid is Kotkin's critique of it in the end?
With respect to the pivotal question of popular support for Stalin's policies it should be stressed that the strongest versions of the totalitarian thesis (e.g. Fainsod's) do not deny that the industrialization of the country involved the enthusiasm and self-interest of many workers, but all versions, even the weak¤ö¬ ones (e.g. Brzezinski's) do deny that the industrialization was dependent upon such enthusiasm and self-interest.
If Kotkin is to identify a crippling weakness in the totalitarian paradigm he must show that mass enthusiasm alone, without coercion, would have been enough to build Magnitogorsk, as the Stalinists themselves claimed. In sum, following Foucault, if truth is what the ruling powers say it is, then Kotkin must show how the power of Stalinist 'truth' to convince workers to build Magnitogorsk could have independently prevailed over the undoubted truth of Stalinist power to coerce them into building it. And this Kotkin did not show because he could not show it.
In a fundamental respect Kotkin is right: collectivization and industrialization could not have happened unless it galvanized a social interest. Without that social interest and motivation, no collective farms, no Magnitogorsk. The issue is: whose social interest? the worker's? Or somebody else's? Kotkin's account is illuminating and conclusive on this critical point.
Kotkin describes the appalling, zoological conditions of work under which the overwhelming majority of Magnitogorsk's workers produced unending quantities of brak, of defective, even useless producer and consumer goods. It was not just a matter of workers lacking special skills, technical expertise and advanced education to do a good job, as Kotkin thinks, for the Stalinist management could not even elicit the most elementary care, the most common concern, the most rudimentary conscientiousness from skilled, educated and technically literate workers either.
Kotkin and many others have standardly blamed the absence of capitalism and the presence of planning per se for this lamentable state of affairs. But they overlook the inescapably political dimension to planning, its political 'construction' to use the favored postmodernist term: Only when the working class has democratic control over production can it expect that production will be carried out in its interests, only then will workers be fully motivated to develop and apply their creative powers in the process of production.
Stalinist planning was undemocratic and non-participatory through and through. It is this kind of planning that produced mountains of brak, the material expression of the quasi-universal alienation and repulsion of the producers from the world of labor, affecting in roughly equal measure skilled and unskilled, married and unmarried, young and old, men and women, educated and uneducated, well-paid and poorly paid, raw recruits from the countryside and hereditary proletarians. Since direct party-political opposition to Stalinism was frontally suppressed by means of firing squads, exile and imprisonment, the working class could only express opposition under Stalinism indirectly, through sabotage, shoddy work, drunkenness and absenteeism, in sum, through the production of brak.
Conditions of life for workers away from the workplace were no less feral. The poignant facts related by Kotkin are devastating. Suffice to say that with respect to 'housing' in brak-city the Stalinists crammed workers into barracks built without toilets, kitchens, running water, washrooms and showers. Scanning the photographs that accompany the book one could easily mistake the exterior of workers' quarters for a nicely-appointed Nazi concentration camp. Airbrush Arbeit Macht Frei in and the mistake is made. Filth was "staggering," Kotkin tells us, and disease endemic, with infant mortality reaching an astounding 222 per 1,000. For the regimented ex-peasants, Magnitogorsk was not the living, civilized expression of the democratic and egalitarian legacy of the Russian Revolution, it was the concrete and steel sarcophagus of that legacy.
Who had an interest in so degrading, bullying and humiliating the working class under Stalinism? Only the Stalinist nomenklatura had that interest. Only the nomenklatura possessed the necessary power and motivation to coerce workers to build Magnitogorsk because only the nomenklatura had an interest in building "Berezka."
What was Berezka? Though built next to Magnitogorsk geographically, Berezka was far, far away socially because it was a world of ease and privilege, the world of the ruling class. Situated in the only wooded area in an otherwise barren wasteland, and therefore chosen for that very reason, the ruling elite ordered workers to build there, Kotkin tells us, "individual homes and a few larger multi-occupancy, two-story stucco bungalows with separate sleeping quarters, a common living room, a kitchen with a woodburning stove, indoor toilets, and bathrooms with water heaters. One structure functioned as a communal dining room, which provided waitress service... " (pp. 126-27). Volleyball and tennis courts nicely complemented the spacious housing.
The construction of 'socialism' really began in mid-1933 when new Magnitorgorsk Director Zaveniagin ordered a dozen large individual homes for himself and his closest associates that according to John Scott were 'copied almost exactly from American architectural catalogues' with the result 'very much approaching Mount Vernon' (p. 126).
Director Zaveniagin's pleasure dome was the costliest -- a quarter of a million rubles, taken out of the factory budget. Kotkin describes the secluded compound as a three story, fourteen-room stuccoed brick structure that contained individual bedrooms and a playroom for his two children, a music room, a large study, and a billiard room. This mini-estate, enclosed by a highbrick wall complete with steel gates and an armed guard, boasted a luxurious garden. "My garden at Magnitka," Zaveniagin proudly recalled many years later, was, if not the first and only, surely one of the very, very few gardens in the Urals....(p. 127)
The inhabitants of Magnitogorsk's elite enclave, Kotkin continues, also "enjoyed the services of well-stocked, restricted access stores, chauffeur driven Ford automobiles, expense accounts and the steel plant's [sic] lakeside resort, built about forty kilometers away in the Ural mountains at bannoe ozero. Here they and their families could swim, fish, and hunt in the mountainous outdoors, staying over, if they wished, in a cabin." (Ibid.)
How could Berezka, that heavenly oasis, remain suspended above the hellish desert of Magnitogorsk? What supported it? Kotkin does not inquire into how the seemingly miraculous relationship between Berezka and Magnitogorsk was reproduced day in and day out. It is easy to see why.
Berezka developed because its inhabitants prevented others from ruling themselves, because through their possession of the state as their private property they commanded the labor of workers that built both Magnitogorsk and Berezka. Kotkin does not support this totalitarian conclusion but the coming into being of Magnitogorsk and Berezka does -- a far weightier support. It is there, in Berezka, that one will find the ruling class along with the relevance of class and class analysis which have always come in for a massive drubbing in this and many other social-scientific fields.2
The sole pre-requisite to live in Berezka was membership in the nomenklatura, not performance of a necessary social function, passage of a special exam, acquisition of a particular skill or some other objective index of meritorious achievement or social usefulness. "Members of the nomenklatura," Kotkin memorably tells us, "could be and were appointed in any official capacity, regardless of their particular skills, because they were thought to have the general capacity to rule (pravit)" (p. 298) Kotkin should have added "the general capacity to rule" ...others.
In centrally claiming that most ordinary Russians were willing executioners of the Stalinist state-building project, Kotkin reiterates the central claim of the Stalinist state-builders.3 Fortunately, Kotkin's book belies empirically the Stalinists' claim: Kotkin the highly talented storyteller easily bests Kotkin the short-sighted historical analyst.
Let's call a spade a spade: political dictatorship is in itself incompatible with the self-interested rule of the majority (and therefore with socialism in the classical Marxist and only truthful sense of the term). Any overarching, state sponsored project -- building 'socialism,' defending private property, purifying ethnicity, combating atheistic Bolshevism -- that does away with political democracy on the grounds that it is redundant, because the 'people' or 'society' already massively support the state's initiative anyway, is the final argument of all dictatorships, whether avuncular or murderous, whether bourgeois -- Bonapartism, Pinochetism, Hitlerism -- or non-bourgeois -- Maoism, Castroism, Bukharinism, Trotskyism (to 1937) and Stalinism. The totalitarians understood this, at least, and its speaks volumes that this elementary truth must be restated in this disordered, post-Cold War world. It makes this reviewer almost nostalgic for that by-gone era.
Copyright John Eric Marot
1 Michael Confino, "Russian Customary Law and the Study of Peasant Mentalities," _Russian Review_, vol. 44 January, 1985, p. 43. On the commune see also Moshe Lewin, "Customary Law and Russian Rural Society in the Post Reform Era," Ibid., pp. 1-19, and Boris Mironov, "The Russian Peasant Commune After the Reforms of the 1860.'s" _Slavic Review_ (Fall 1985, pp. 438-67). Parenthetically, in accounts of alternative paths of modern economic development in post-1917 Russia most historians and economists, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, are deaf to the unequivocal answer the peasant gave in 1917. Instead, they prefer to foist their own, quite different answer on him namely, the kulak-led peasant wanted to realize his putatively (Adam) Smithian propensity to systematic productive investment, thorough specialization of technique and regular technical innovation characteristic of modern, capitalist economic development. Because the commune stood in the way of capitalism, so this argument continues, therefore the kulak-led peasant wanted to get rid of the commune to get capitalist development going. In the Russian Marxist camp Lenin originally developed this erroneous line of reasoning in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899); Trotsky expounded it throughout the twenties; and the Stalinists opportunistically adopted it as a rational lie to justify, post-festum, the atrocity of collectivization.
( I use the term "classical'" to refer to their search for causality. This distinguishes them from the social historians of today, many of whom have largely given up looking for causality after taking the 'linguistic' U-turn toward postmodernism. Sadly, some of them are drawn from the ranks of former classical social historians.
2 A case in point is a recent festschrift, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), honoring the work of Moshe Lewin. Though one would hardly know it by reading the Introduction alone, penned by the editors Ronald Suny and Lewis Siegelbaum, this book makes for the strangest reading: the honoree spends much of his time defending the probative value of class and class analysis against the criticisms of those who would honor his work.
3 Mutatis mutandis, the same may be said of David Jonah Goldhagen Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust(New York: Alfred B. Knopf, 1996). Goldhagen condemns 'ordinary Germans' for willingly going along with the Holocaust. He fails to integrate in his analysis the preceding larger and, from the standpoint of what he wants to prove, inexpedient fact that the Nazis had first to subvert the will of the majority to get their way because the German people never freely accepted the Third Reich, because the Nazis never obtained a democratic majority authorizing the destruction of the Weimar Republic. Which only goes to show, if it shows nothing else, that electoral results alone, even in a formally democratic republic, cannot be decisive in deciding the outcome of deeply-laid, class-bound social conflicts -- possession of state power is, as V. I. Lenin first powerfully argued. In other words, just because the democratic majority wants something doesn't mean it will get it -- unless it wields state power. Worse, if the democratic majority does not wield state power it may well get something it does not want, in Kotkin's case -- Stalinism, in Goldhagen's -- WWII and the war-time destruction of millions of Jews and millions of 'ordinary Germans' as well.