Beating Soviet Swords into Sovietological Ploughshares

This chapter describes the influences that inclined scholars in the field to recast their subject in civilian terms. Sovietologists belonged to a small, low-prestige field of economics. They were hired and promoted by their departmental colleagues working in the other fields of economics, and stood a higher chance of being treated favorably if their research could be seen as dealing with the issues of interest for the larger discipline, such as growth and economic development.

The Secrecy Hypothesis

Secrecy is commonly cited in the literature to explain gaps in the understanding of the Soviet economy during its lifetime. Yet secrecy surrounding the military sector was a mixed affair. Western governments used their intelligence means to pry some of the secrets, and make public parts of what they found out. The Soviets themselves revealed significant information about the part of their economy that they generally tried to hide. Emigres, defectors, underground writers, and returning foreigners supplemented these two streams of information. Sovietologists did not point to secrecy as a barrier to studying the military sector, and expressed no surprise at or appreciation for colleagues who managed to do such work. There was enough information to support such work, but it was done mostly by the political scientists, think tank employees, and British scholars. Sovietology neglected the military sector by choice, not out of necessity.

Civilianizing the Objectives of the Planners

Simple omission is not the only anomaly in Sovietology’s treatment of military-economic matters. Another is civilianization, the peaceful reinterpretation of the features of the economy that the Soviets themselves revealed to be of military significance. This chapter focuses on the objectives of the planners, the most important actors in the Soviet economy. The objectives of planning, as described by Soviet sources, are the same as those of rulers elsewhere: building up military might and popular wellbeing, with growth as the means for achieving those. The standard Sovietological view holds growth for its own sake to be the supreme objective of the Soviet rulers. Yet such an objective is incompatible with the evidence of actual economic policies pursued throughout the plan era.

The Missing Sector

This chapter surveys books and articles on the Soviet economy published in 1948-1991 and finds that Sovietologists afforded the military sector little attention, both relative to its importance and relative to the attention lavished on the other, lower-priority sectors. Literature on Soviet economy contains few chapters, articles, and books on the military sector, compared to other sectors. Thus, textbooks on the Soviet economy have 136 chapters on civilian sectors, and only eight on the military sector. Disproportionately many of those appeared in the final years of the USSR, and few of the military economy publications have been produced by American Sovietologists. Post mortem writings on Sovietology have not detected this gap in the scholarship. A survey of comparative systems and introductory economics textbooks shows that Sovietologists failed to persuade other economists that the military sector was merited a mention in popular treatments of the Soviet economy.

Civilianizing Industrialization

Forced industrialization, which was launched under the First Five-Year Plan, was a formative event that set the course of the Soviet economy. Stalin and other Soviet rulers have repeatedly stated, with uncharacteristic candor, that the objective of industrialization was the creation of defense capability, as well as building socialism. The main feature of industrialization, primacy of heavy industry, was said to serve the same twin goals. The standard Sovietological account civilianizes industrialization by downgrading or omitting the objectives proclaimed by Stalin, and substituting growth for its own sake as the sole motive. It derives the priority of heavy industry from the writings of Marx and the obscure Soviet economists. This account disregards or glosses over contradictory Soviet sources, violates the basics of the economic approach, and fails to draw connections to similar policies in other countries and periods.

Conclusion

The conflict identified in this book between academic incentives and the needs of national security has broad relevance. The fields of social science that are important for national security are those that study other societies. They are likely to be peripheral in their academic disciplines, where the mainstream deals with American, or at any rate Western, problematics, and sets the research agenda accordingly. Practitioners in peripheral fields may be expected to seek professional respectability by adopting topics and approaches from the mainstream of their discipline, even if ill-fitting to the task at hand. The case of Sovietology shows the professional and political incentives operating in academia to be stronger than the government’s power of the purse in determining the direction of research. This casts a doubt on the strain of “Cold War science” writing that argues that government funding of university research deformed, and perhaps corrupted, academic disciplines.

The Politburo’s Holy of Holies

The military sector was the most successful part of the Soviet economy, and the most important one from the point of view of its rulers. It owed this success to its unique place in the Soviet economic and political system and its non-standard internal organization. Defense industry was not only separate from the rest of industry; it also had different management practices and was home to institutions unseen elsewhere in the economy. It was guided by the highest levels of political authority, and the rulers’ interest in the sector translated into generous allocations of inputs. USSR maintained a wartime level of military expenditures during the four decades of peace. Such a large and privileged claimant on the nation’s resources strongly influenced the performance of the civilian sectors. With all these characteristics, the military sector should have interested Sovietologists for its own sake, quite apart from Western security concerns.

The Origin and Structure of Sovietology

American academic study of the Soviet economy was created to help parry the strategic challenge of the USSR and received lifetime government support for reasons of national security. The military sector of the economy was one of the most important topics that the sponsors of Sovietology expected it to address. To understand how the field dealt with this task, I describe its organization. The minuscule size of Sovietology meant that there were not enough specialists to cover the range of problems arising in the analysis of a modern economy. Some sub-fields were the sole preserve of a single researcher, resulting in lack of debate. Most of the debates that did occur were between American Sovietologists and outsiders of various kinds. These characteristics of the field reduced the reliability of findings and resulted in fragmentation, when mutually exclusive propositions were held at the same time.

Civilianization Elsewhere

Aversion of the discipline of economics to things military, which Sovietology, its peripheral field, emulated, is shown to be a part of a more general pattern in the social sciences. A survey of articles about the German economy in 1934–1939 finds that the authors largely ignored another great peacetime military buildup of the twentieth century. It was seen as a peculiar and successful variant of employment policy, with potential lessons for other Depression-stricken economies. Archeologists and anthropologists bypassed the evidence of warfare in pre-literate societies, or gave it strained pacific interpretations. Academic historians marginalized their colleagues specializing in military history. Civilianizing tendencies in the study of other countries and in other disciplines support some of my arguments about Sovietology, and at the same time make its case all the more instructive.