Официальная тема дискуссий об СССР и лучшем в мире политическом строе

Problems and Prospects: An Agenda for Research

    Political scientists and historians have long debated the achievements of Soviet communism and how these should be weighed against the costs. Since the fall of communism, the views of the avowed anticommunists have tended to predominate. They argue that the revolution was an unmitigated disaster, a complete tragedy, a failure that achieved nothing, and that never stood any chance of achieving anything. Richard Pipes, in the final volume of his history of the revolution, argues that "failure was inevitable and imbedded in the very premises of the Communist regime. The political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his famous analysis of communism in the twentieth century entitled The Grand Failure, asserts, "Clearly, it is no exaggeration to say that never before had so much human sacrifice been exacted for relatively so little social benefit." His chapter "The Historical Record" claims that the social costs for all the communist countries "include at a minimum about 50 million fatalities." These views rely heavily on Robert Conquest's estimates of 20 to 30 million deaths "as the debit balance of the Stalin regime for twenty three years" which he records in his famous "Casualty Figures" appendix.

    None of these accounts are based on any serious attempt to assess Soviet welfare levels, to place them in any form of historical perspective, or to consider whether there might have been any welfare or mortality improvements over this period.

    In this paper I argue that welfare and mortality crises were not the totality of Soviet welfare and demographic experience under Stalin. Apart from the crises, there were remarkable changes and improvements in welfare, mortality, and height. There was an extraordinarily rapid secular decline in mortality. There was an extremely swift transition from relatively short terminal stature to relatively tall terminal stature, and from late maturation to early maturation.
    It is unfortunate that our academic debates are not used to confronting a complex situation in which secular improvements in welfare and mortality are accompanied by massive shortterm crises in welfare and mortality. Instead of concentrating on the question Who is to blame, we need to know more clearly What really happened? How large was the crisis? What factors were causing or moderating the secular trend?
    The problem of reassessing precisely what the Soviet experience meant to the mass of the Soviet population is perhaps one of the most important questions for our discipline. At the other extreme to Pipes and Brzezinski, we have Eric Hobsbawm, who recently wrote:
The Bolshevik model ... was essentially a model for modernizing backward agrarian economies .. . I have to remind you of the incredible sufferings it imposed on the peoples ... And yet ... up to a point it worked better than anything else since . . . 1918. For most of the common citizens of the more backward countries of the region ... it was probably the best period in their history.

    I agree that it "probably" was the best time for most of its citizens. Mortality was generally falling at a greater rate than ever before. More people than ever before were able to leave the countryside. More people than ever before received an education. But it is less clear than Hobsbawm suggests that it was the Bolshevik model that was causing this secular improvement. Hobsbawm is correct in stating that we cannot forget the sufferings and the excess mortality. We cannot forget them, but we do need to try and place them into some form of perspective. Using mortality data as an indicator of mass welfare is rather unsatisfactory and tends to raise the emotional charge. It is to be hoped that future work with anthropometric data might lead us away from relying on such emotionally charged indicators and enable us to gain a more balanced view of this complex experience. Mironov's work is commendable for moving us in that direction. I also hope that the rich and well-documented Soviet experience will be incorporated into the body of data studied by social scientists in other disciplines interested in the question of incorporating shortterm crises into changes in secular levels of welfare.