European feudalism had some features in common with the East, but these were overcome: ‘in this case we should not speak of an Eastern variant of feudalism but of a rebirth of the Asiatic system in the West.’118 I.F. Kosesnitsky wrote that in the West, too, in the early Middle Ages, the state emerged as exploiter of the direct producers, which corresponded to a ‘still undeveloped form of economic relations’.119 In Europe, however, the small size of the territory, along with a relatively rapid growth of population — especially after the tenth century — evoked a need for commodity exchange. And here those immense spaces in which a mighty bureaucratic apparatus found its justification were lacking. Here there was no objective necessity for it.
Everywhere, in circumstances of undeveloped commodity-money relations, the apparatus of government began to be transformed into a ruling class. But in the West this happened differently. Here the barons were quickly transformed from officials into feudal lords. The same tendency existed in the East but did not reach fruition, for the immense spaces made it inevitable that government of the social organism should be connected with the growth of a special apparatus, constantly undergoing organizational consolidation. The centripetal forces prevailed over the centrifugal ones.
Vasil'ev traced the formation of the official class [shi] in ancient China, the distant predecessors of our nomenklatura and the hanbu of present-day China. He showed how, in the Chinese Empire,
the role of highest and most important estate, guiding the country and fulfilling the functions of a ruling class, fell to the lot of the stratum of administrative officials — widespread, numerous and organized on strictly hierarchical lines — who were headed by the Emperor and his ministers. Real power was in the hands of this estate of officials who served the bureaucratic Empire, and they used it in the name of the Emperor and of ‘the well-being of the state and the people’.120
It is important that we come here upon a ruling class which is not formed on the hereditary principle. The right to appropriate surplus product was ensured in this case not by ‘wealth’ or by ‘descent’ but by office held, by ‘rank’. There were only two real forces in society — ‘the people’ and ‘the ruling bureaucracy’.
So, at the end of our inquiry, we come back to the same questions with which we began. These questions were not invented by the intelligentsia but were inherent in reality itself, arrived at through suffering: history and logic led to them through knowledge of our society and of ourselves. The discussion of the Asiatic mode of production is important from the standpoint of principle.121 It is important that since Stalin’s time the concept of socialism has been bound up with state ownership, which itself has become the basis for the activity of a huge, centralized apparatus of officials and an authoritarian — if not totalitarian — system. But it has now become clear that all this already existed in ancient China, long before the 1917 Revolution, and naturally has nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. Compare this with M. Cheshkov’s conclusions, which I have already mentioned, about the statocracy. Reading reports of the discussion of the Asiatic mode of production one cannot help thinking: Isn’t all this a case of ‘modernizing’? Isn’t it just an example of Aesopian language? No, this research is objective, and precisely because of its objectivity it can lead us to some fundamental conclusions of present-day importance. Understanding and knowledge of the past is here helping us to understand the present, and not vice versa.122
Vasil'ev finds in the history of China various ‘models’, historical archetypes: the patriarchal state (Yin), the transitional xenocratic state (Chou), totalitarianism (Tsing), conservative authoritarianism (Han).
The last-named system proved the most stable and well developed. Sinologists show how traditions of authoritarianism and obedience led ‘to exaggeration of the personal authority of a deified personage and depreciation of the individual’.123 Conclusions suggest themselves. Our notorious ‘cult of personality’ was not a disease of socialism, not a deviation ‘from’ socialism, but a phenomenon logically connected with a particular form of totalitarian and authoritarian state which had nothing in common with socialism.
Finally, the models of bureaucratic behaviour turn out to be similar. In statocratic society we find a high degree of social mobility. A person of peasant origin may become a minister. But there is one circumstance which
sharply alters this whole idyllic picture. It is that every possibility is open to an individual only on this absolute condition, that he will humbly remain within the channel of conformism and never think of displaying his individuality.124
As a result society experienced on the one hand, many centuries of stagnation and, on the other, the suppression of all freedom of thought. The historical good fortune of the European peoples, a long-lasting condition of ‘dual power’ (in the period when the modern nations were being formed), the rivalry of church and state (poorly developed, alas, in Russia), was unknown in the East. This situation created in the West the possibility for the development of political and social alternatives, ideological conflict, innovation. Where that was not the case, hyperconservatism triumphed.
Fully comprehensible, therefore, are the conclusions of V. Lukin: that in the twentieth century the state has become an object of deification most often in countries which have
very rich historical traditions of mutual relations between the state and its subjects, traditions connected with the retention of numerous survivals of what Marx called ‘the Asiatic mode of production’.125
Again we move from ancient times to the problems of the present day. This actuality of historical investigations is especially evident in the books of Cheshkov, who, writing as both sociologist and historian, comes in the course of his research upon the coincidence between the basic features of the Asiatic mode of production and the contemporary statocracy. Studying medieval Vietnam, he arrived at the conclusion that its economic system could be called ‘state feudalism’:
Its economic basis was the state’s monopoly of land, a monopoly which made the state a real, and not merely a juridical, landowner. This monopoly was realized in the existence of a substantial state revenue, in the organization of basic irrigation works by the state, in the predominance of a conditional form of feudal landownership, and the direct merging of the economically dominant class with the state as a whole — a ‘state-class’. In consequence of this, the state appears not merely as a superstructural phenomenon but also as a participant, a subject in the relations of production.126
Such a ‘state of feudalism’ was, in essentials, closer not to Western feudalism (really it was something quite different) but to contemporary statocracy, whether in Algeria, China, Vietnam or the Soviet Union. One and the same phenomenon, the ‘state class’ or ‘class-apparatus’, appears in different forms in different epochs. In Cheshkov’s works the discussions of present-day statocracy and of the Asiatic mode of production resemble each other closely. In fifteenth-century Vietnam Cheshkov reveals the existence of ‘a stratum of nomenklatura officials’ who possessed immense political and economic power.127 In medieval Vietnam there was not only separation of the executive from the supervisory organs, something new for the Russian bureaucracy (it developed here only in the Soviet period) but there also appeared important political institutions that were absolutely similar to Soviet ones: