Randall Collins derived his prediction from extending into future the dynamics of great geopolitical turmoil in Europe between 1914 and 1945 that had removed the majority of Russia’s erstwhile adversaries. The sweeping simplification of world geopolitics after 1945 from complex multipolarity to a Cold War binary opposition of just two ideological blocs turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. But such a position also brought costs and liabilities at an unprecedented scale. In the continuing confrontation with America, reasoned Randall Collins back in 1980, the U.S.S.R. had already reached the tipping point at which the costs of controlling allies and confronting external rivals must become insuperable.
In an important corollary, the same model predicted China’s potential for economic prosperity. At the time almost nobody took seriously this huge reservoir of Asiatic poverty presided by idiosyncratic Chairman Mao. The side effects of superpower rivalry, however, left China in a lucky kind of geopolitical limbo. The eccentric communist state in East Asia by the late 1970s found itself in a constraining but also stable interstate environment where its geopolitical costs seemed very minor in comparison to Soviet costs. Chinese leaders, like the leaders of Japan after 1945, were left to pursue the state goals of power and prestige through the path most obvious in their region at the time—the export-oriented industrialization dependent on the American consumer markets.
Immanuel Wallerstein had been long (and very controversially) comparing communist states to factories seized by a labor union during a strike.[2] If the workers try to operate the factory themselves, they inevitably have to follow the rules of capitalist markets. The workers might get a better distribution of material rewards, but not equality or democracy. The more “realist” among labor organizers would reimpose production discipline, compellingly citing external market pressures. The “Iron Law of Oligarchy” in complex organizations predicted that the narrow circle of those making managerial decisions would cut themselves off from the larger group and evolve into a new ruling elite. It might take time before ideological vapor entirely escaped from the cauldrons. Nevertheless the moment would come when the erstwhile organizers turned managers would no longer feel compelled to disguise the reality. The factory would then revert to being a normal capitalist enterprise, and the managers would cash in on their positions. If you wish, it is a sociological version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but Wallerstein’s analysis specified in a clear and logical fashion the structural conditions and causal sequences. He also added an important political caveat: socialism in one country or one factory may not last unless the whole capitalist world-system is replaced by a different historical system where capital accumulation is no longer the paramount priority.
Wallerstein based his metaphor of the union-controlled factory rejoining capitalism on the actually observed facts. Soviet leaders tried to trade their ideological and military positions for economic integration with the West as early as 1953. Days after Stalin’s death, the dreadful head of secret police Lavrenty Beria ordered the first massive release of inmates from the Gulag and signaled to the West Moscow’s willingness to withdraw from East Germany. This short-lived episode points to a curious possibility. Beria was known to be an utterly cynical opportunist but also a ruthlessly pragmatic economic manager. Had he succeeded, communism would have likely ended much sooner. Beria would probably have ruled as a personalistic dictator selectively allowing his cronies to share in the capitalist profits at the time when Soviet industries and newly educated labor were just entering their prime. This could have outdone the market recovery of China after the death of Mao. Imagine Western consumers driving today the stylish Soviet-made Volgas and wearing Vostok watches. But in 1953 the unification of Germany was a broadly unwanted proposition in the Western alliance, and Europe had plenty of its own skilled eager workers emerging from the decades of war and depression.
In historical reality Beria was arrested and executed by his Politburo rivals. It was the revenge of party nomenklatura and military commanders for the fear and humiliations at the hands of secret police. In 1956 the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin—and merrily survived this indiscretion. He would be toppled in 1964 only after attempting to undo the bastions of bureaucratic intransigence in the gigantic vertically integrated industrial ministries, the Soviet equivalent of economic corporations. The nomenklatura cadres certainly desired a limited de-Stalinization. But they wanted to stop the changes once officialdom had achieved their bureaucratic paradise of life tenure, generous perks, and a more relaxed work pace. The sprawling command apparatus of economic ministries, dating back to the industrial spurt of 1930s, thus perpetuated itself essentially unchanged. Its parts would survive even the Soviet collapse of 1991, ensuring that postcommunist capitalism acquired a distinctly oligarchic character of tremendous wealth concentration and corrupt insider politics.
The costs of bureaucratic self-incorporation were transpiring already after the death of Stalin. Command economy must have its Supreme Commander who makes decisions regarding the allocation of resources. In his absence central government is reduced to bureaucratic inertia amidst the corporate lobbying of influential ministries and territorial governments. The old economic debate about the virtues of plan versus market is based on the timeless and therefore false assumption that these are mutually exclusive ideological choices. Planned or rather command economies could be more effective in the short run when time demanded delivering the miracles of large-scale standardized production, such as required during wars, postdisaster recoveries, or industrialization leaps. The command model, however, is unsuited for the longer and more normal periods that require more diversified and flexible adaptations. But how could anyone dare suggest scrapping the giant obsolescent enterprise that was the pride of the first Five-Year Plans and whose top managers, incidentally, were voting members in the Central Committee? This is precisely what toppled Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. The Soviet executives and ideologues grew as intolerant of market ideas as their capitalist counterparts in the age of neoliberalism would grow intolerant of public property and regulation. The intransigence of industrial and political bosses, however, had deeper reasons than orthodoxy alone. In the main, it was the fear that their better-educated and energetic younger subalterns were bound to unseat the seniors if open discussion and competition were allowed.
The main tension of Soviet communism in its late period pitted the now stolidly bureaucratized nomenklatura against the rising middle strata of educated specialists and creative intellectuals. The new youthful groups of the romantic “sixtiers” emerged from the lower and middle ranks of the state institutions of economic planning, higher education, and culture. In a quite literal sense, these were the children of Soviet modernization. The original ideology of young specialists was a version of the New Left movements emerging all over the world between 1956 and 1968. Only much later, during the crisis of Gorbachev’s perestroika, would the antibureaucratic frustrations of junior echelons find a radically different expression in the individualistic philosophy of neoliberalism or in the affirmation of their ethnic nationalisms. The official antisystemic ideology of the Soviet bloc thus suggested to youthful rebels the adoption of Western systemic ideologies, and then, by logic of polarization, in their most extreme versions.
2
There are many essays and books where Immanuel Wallerstein discusses the U.S.S.R. in world-systemic perspective. See his 1973 programmatic essay “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System” reprinted in the