Going Modern
The Transformation of Russian Society.
by Cyril E. Black.
Harvard University Press. 695 pp. $9.75.
It would do Karl Marx’s heart good to discover how much American scholarship and journalism is being devoted to the change from what used to be called “feudalism” to whatever it is that follows. Terms for the before and the after have multiplied. Once upon a time there existed, and in some places there still exists, the old regime, the ancien régime, rural society, traditional society, the pre-modern world, the agricultural economy, underdeveloped countries, the non-Western world. These were fated to be replaced by developed countries, modern society, modern civilization, the market economy, industrial society, urban life, Western ways. Popular magazines, on the other hand, feature the change itself rather than either of the two stages: we are in a revolutionary era, an age of transition, a world in upheaval. The scholars, meanwhile, speak of economic growth or development, and cultural or social change.
Much of the older scholarship on the whole process of “going modern” was European, and was largely concerned with Europe. But Americans gradually entered the discussion via American portals. A few of them questioned why America was so exceptional among Western societies, and decided that it was because the ancien régime had never existed here. More recently, Americans have wondered why Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians, and Latin Ameriicans behave the way they do; and now there are books and articles, new courses in a variety of academic departments, study centers, and the quarterly Economic Development and Cultural Change (in its ninth year). Clearly the subject has arrived.
What can be said in general terms about the social and cultural changes that accompany (follow, are related to, caused by, or themselves enhance) economic development? One would say now that economic development can take place in almost any sort of society and in almost any fashion—in a revolutionary upsurge, without revolution; via private enterprise, via state socialism; with planning, without extensive planning. One would also say that the social and cultural results of economic development will not be identical: more freedom, less freedom; more equality, less equality; destruction of traditional religion, preservation of traditions; more democracy, less democracy. Within these possibilities sociologists look for probable uniformities, such as the shrinking family and the need for greater literacy in an industrial civilization. But one no longer feels pushed toward doctrinaire pronouncements on inevitable relationships between economic system and social system. Anything can happen, and almost everything seems to be happening.
The older writers tended toward polemics on socialism. Marx, who was undeniably a Marxist, set the pattern, and the German sociologists who followed him seem always to have had an eye mainly on correcting his “socialistic” analyses of social change. A generation ago, Karl Mannheim, using his “sociology of knowledge,” hoisted Marxism with its own petard by treating it as just another cultural product of industrialization. (Adam Ulam’s recent treatment of Marxism, The Unfinished Revolution, saw this body of thought similarly, as the product of a changing society—a “disease of the transition,” according to W. W. Rostow.) The nice thing about disposing of Marx so neatly or of ignoring him in the first place is that one can abandon the polemical trappings and get on with the underlying work.
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The transformation of Russian society cannot be praised too highly, for it gets on with the work. The bulk of the book consists of a variety of short working papers, some thirty of them, written by specialists in no way bound by any one approach. Some of the essays, such as the one on population changes, are factual, while others—like the one titled “Some Principal Characteristics of Industrial Societies”—are theoretical; many deal with the familiar political subjects (“The Political Police”), a few with more off-beat topics (“The Strong-Woman Motiv”). In general, there are half a dozen essays each on aspects of law and politics; social stratification; education, scholarship, and religion; family, youth, and human welfare; and personal and social values—designed “to raise questions rather than settle them.” The book, in short, is for those who want to know what’s been happening in Russia, not for those who want a neat classification.
The editor, Professor Cyril E. Black, consequently permits himself to draw only a few tentative conclusions on Russian modernization. It has followed more or less universal patterns, he believes. Deviations are due either to unique historical traditions—the predominant role of the state, or the country’s backwardness, defensiveness, and patriotism; or to contingent circumstances—the specific terms under which the serfs were emancipated, the interruption by World War I of pre-war economic growth and social developments, Lenin’s skill, and the provisional government’s lack of it. Among modernizing societies, Black sees the Russian pattern resembling somewhat that of Turkey, Iran, Japan, and China. They are “societies with a tradition of vigorous, independent, and relatively centralized governments; modernizing at first defensively but in due course aggressively, and to a marked degree at the initiative of the state; borrowing wholesale from the West, but with a characteristic ambivalent attitude toward Western values and influences.”
This pattern of modernization is by no means applicable to all countries. It is distinct not only from that of the West but also from that of the newer states of Asia and Africa.
Quite naturally, a recurrent theme in the book concerns the activities of the state in promoting social change. More specifically, the question is whether Russia’s totalitarianism might gradually come to mellow. Thus, Merle Fainsod, the rapporteur of the section on law and politics, is critical of those contributions which do not sufficiently emphasize the distinction between Soviet totalitarianism and the “merely” authoritarian rule of the Czars. Fainsod grants that Stalin’s decision in 1928 to overcome Russian backwardness through rapid industrialization and collectivization powerfully “strengthened” the existing totalitarian “component.” But he asks: “What happens when economic backwardness is at last overcome. . .?” Two other Harvard rapporteurs, Alex Inkeles (stratification) and Raymond Bauer (family, youth, and human welfare), raise the question of whether industrial society’s tendency toward equality of opportunity (I translate from Inkeles’s “homogenization of life chances”) and toward the welfare state will erode totalitarian controls.
The answer is anybody’s guess. We just do not know enough yet about the life cycle of totalitarianism. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy died violent deaths and provide no basis for comparison. There is, in any case, every prudent reason to assume the worst—that totalitarianism creates a “permanent revolution” which will not mellow significantly. Whatever the answer, the thaw in Soviet life since Stalin’s death in 1953 in no wise wipes out the Soviet totalitarianism identified with the Stalinist formula of forced industrialization. “The somewhat easier way of life and the relatively relaxed methods of government that have marked Khrushchev’s administration,” Professor Black reminds us, are not the result “of any fundamental change in the philosophy of modernization.”
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