A Caricature of Soviet Studies

...the free market has delivered a capitalism of the nomenklatura and the Mafia...

...He finds the corpus of Western Sovietology, indeed the whole of Western social science in the 1960s and '70s, to have been tainted by socialist sympathies, or else "value-neutral," which to him is just as bad...

...In The Soviet Tragedy Martin Malia, former professor of Russian history at the University of California, Berkeley, joins the ranks of the free-market purists...

...His argument goes roughly as follows...

...non-Marxist Socialists, non-Bolshevik Marxists like the Mensheviks, non-Stalinist Leninists like the Trotskyists and Bukharinists...

...Malia looks upon socialism as an insidious evil??but also as vague to the point of meaninglessness...

...This tracks the familiar phases: revolutionary movement, World War I and the Revolution, War Communism, the New Economic Policy, the Revolution from Above, purges and consolidation, wartime and postwar Stalinism, Khrushchev's reform Communism, the Brezhnev era, Gorbachev's reprise of reform, and the demise of the Soviet system...

...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Author, "The End of the Communist Revolution...

...Ultimately, Malia's approach is a throwback to the one-factor theory so often heard 40 years ago: All the Communist agony stemmed from the Marxist-Leninist idea??or "virus," as some Communist-hunters thought of it...

...The Sovietologists and social scientists, he charges, were inexcusably tolerant of Soviet sins and shortcomings as well as wrongheadedly optimistic about the future of Communism, because they thought it was "essentially similar to...

...Socialism suddenly seems convicted of inexpungible criminality...

...Instead, the Soviet debacle has been widely read as a refutation of every notion of deliberate social change...

...Logically, the disappearance of the Soviet threat to democratic societies should have freed the Left from being associated in many minds with Soviet militarism and despotism, and encouraged a hundred new schools of social criticism to blossom...

...Entering the 21 st century, we surely can do better...

...When he dons his historian's hat, however, Malia allows for a range of views from totalitarian socialism to social democracy??although he mentions no such range between the latter and Milton Friedman, where Western reality actually lies...

...Attributing any of the features of the Soviet regime to peculiar personalities or Russian habits and circumstances, let alone to the social conflicts of industrialism, simply reflects softness on Communism...

...that Communism failed to modernize Russia...

...His history says the opposite...

...In his view, to try to salvage some of the social and economic "rubble" of the Soviet regime, and fashion a compromise among market, plan, and welfare state of the sort the West enjoys, would amount to a "centrist" bargain with the old Communist devil...

...Malia's ideology says, for instance, that the workers contributed nothing to the Communist Revolution...

...We are overdue for thinkers with a vision for their own societies that is informed by a true understanding of how the Soviet experience does and does not apply...

...In fact, the reading of the Soviet record exemplified by Malia not only rules out any course for Russia more humane than its present mess...

...Incidentally, his impressive listing of source works is itself testimony to the remarkable quality and quantity of Western and especially American Soviet studies...

...Touted as the spearhead of a grand reconsideration of the 20th century, Malia's book needs to be seriously examined, despite its internal inconsistency, for it articulates the conclusions that doctrinaire free-marketeers have been attempting to draw from the Soviet regime's collapse...

...Reasoning such as Malia's encourages the myopic approach that the West has taken toward reform in Russia...

...Malia has really produced two books, as he announces himself...

...If this is so, Russia would have to go back to square one of primitive capitalism and retrace all the struggles the West has gone through during the last 200 years in pursuit of a society that is both prosperous and just...

...The Soviet Tragedy ends with Boris N. Yeltsin's liquidation of the Soviet Union in December 1991, so it may not be fair to put Malia's antisocialism to the test of subsequent events...

...Vladimir Lenin was the most consistent Marxist because he recognized the need for a party dictatorship to put Marx' Utopia into effect...

...Nonetheless, Malia the historian does not hesitate to cite some of the same academic villains the ideologist has denounced where they serve his purposes...

...Other contradictions abound...

...Well-known for his study of the 19th-century Russian liberal Aleksandr Herzen, Malia came relatively late to Sovietology, with his attention-grabbing pseudonymous article in the Winter 1990 Daedalus, "To the Stalin Mausoleum," by "Z...

...Joseph Stalin was the most consistent Leninist because he did not shrink from colossal crimes in building the Marx-Lenin Utopia...

...Sovietology has certainly not been infallible, and there is plenty of room for legitimate disagreement, but Malia draws a caricature of Soviet studies verging on academic McCarthyism...

...One is a conventional, literate, sometimes presumptuous history of Russia from the late 19th century to the USSR's 1991 breakup...

...Socialist ideology, he says, drove the Communists toward their totalitarian goal ??but it landed them somewhere else, like the "mistake of Columbus...

...The weakness of civil society in Russia was one reason why the Communists could take over and hold on...

...The author thus accepts the Stalinist version of Soviet history in toto, except that he condemns the outcome instead of glorifying it...

...After Lenin's original sin of revolution, orperhaps ever since Marx' original sin of the socialist idea, he sees everything that happened to Soviet Communism as determined...

...Maybe not in economics...

...Scholars will be annoyed by the author's habit of footnoting them as targets or authorities, without page numbers or quotation, and then proceeding with his own views...

...Communist totalitarianism differed from Right-wing versions in being implanted longer, and in propagandizing itself in rationalist and universalist terms, rather than by irrational and divisive nationalism...

...othermodern societies...

...In Malia's scheme a third way is no more possible than in Lenin's...

...Karl Marx was the most consistent Socialist because he formulated the "fantasy" of totally statist "integral socialism...

...This is not explanation, it is a play on words...

...While trying to prove this, the author mistakenly characterizes the third way as "integral socialism" plus democracy??admittedly a difficult proposition that no country has yet voted for...

...Any deviation from the trinity of "private property, profit, and market" Malia considers an invitation to the Gulag...

...Political democracy leads inevitably to the demand for economic democracy, i.e...

...No other 'model,'" says Malia, "is required to understand our story...

...Eduard Bernstein, the theorist of evolutionary socialism, is not even in the Index...

...Malia says he is not a determinist...

...Malia's strait-jacketed stance automatically dismisses everyone in between...

...Nevertheless, you have to call 1991 a "revolution," since Soviet socialism could not really "change" but only "collapse...

...Stalin's purges left more of a sense of terror in their aftermath than while they were taking place, and they were aimed in particular at the older generation of believing Communists...

...it rules out any aspiration to social improvement for the rest of the world...

...In other words, as Richard Armour put it with tongue in cheek, "It all started with Marx...

...Still, we can now see how the "perverse logic of Utopia" that foiled the Communists' ideals has similarly confounded the good intentions of the post-Communist reformers...

...There is no "third way" between socialist slavery and capitalist freedom...

...The "Myth" turned into the "Lie"??exactly the shift that many historians see from Lenin to Stalin...

...and the voters have reacted in a nationalist-Communist backlash...

...If a given political system can be placed in the box called totalitarianism, it cannot be reformed into anything else...

...The parallel work is a diatribe against socialism...

...he certainly is in politics...

...A series of subsequent articles and now his book constitute a long polemic against his colleagues??blinded from seeing the true root of Soviet evil, he believes, by their own softness on socialism...

...Socialist ideology was the key to the Soviet tragedy...

...socialist egalitarianism...

...Yeltsin, the personal symbol of democracy, has ended up behaving like Napoleon III...

...editor, "Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse," forthcoming from Heath ONE OF THE strangest things about the collapse of Soviet Communism is its impact on ideas for an alternative to the status quo in the rest of the world...

...Communism is today seen as a lengthy, cruel "experiment" that finally "failed," though soon after the Revolution it had ceased to be anything but a struggle for internal and external power??as The New Leader recognized from its inception...

...that Stalin was driven by the egalitarian ideal...

...Malia's confrontational entry into the field of Soviet studies may divert attention from some of the worthy insights that he underscores...

...Hence Gorbachev's attempt at "restructuring" was bound to fail...

...Free-market theorists have rushed in to fill the vacuum by promoting the utopianism of Adam Smith in place of the utopianism of Karl Marx...

...There are several fundamental problems with Malia's position, beginning with his either-or manner of making judgments...

...Western liberals and Social Democrats appear impotent to offer any other choice...