(Stefano Bianchini) Eastern Europe and The Challen
(Stefano Bianchini) Eastern Europe and The Challen
(Stefano Bianchini) Eastern Europe and The Challen
Modernity, 1800–2000
Editorial Committee:
Roy Allison, St Antony’s College, Oxford
Birgit Beumers, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies,
University of Aberystwyth
Richard Connolly, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University
of Birmingham
Terry Cox, Department of Central and East European Studies, University of
Glasgow
Peter Duncan, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College
London
Zoe Knox, School of History, University of Leicester
Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages,
University of Bath
David Moon, Department of History, University of York
Hilary Pilkington, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester
Graham Timmins, Department of Politics, University of Birmingham
Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow
2. Political Parties in the Russian 5. Political Elites and the New Russia
Regions Anton Steen
Derek S. Hutcheson
6. Dostoevsky and the Idea of
3. Local Communities and Post- Russianness
Communist Transformation Sarah Hudspith
Edited by Simon Smith
7. Performing Russia – Folk Revival 16. Literature in Post-Communist
and Russian Identity Russia and Eastern Europe
Laura J. Olson The Russian, Czech and Slovak
fiction of the changes, 1988–98
8. Russian Transformations Rajendra A. Chitnis
Edited by Leo McCann
17. The Legacy of Soviet Dissent
9. Soviet Music and Society under Dissidents, democratisation and
Lenin and Stalin radical nationalism in Russia
The baton and sickle Robert Horvath
Edited by Neil Edmunds
18. Russian and Soviet Film
10. State Building in Ukraine Adaptations of Literature,
The Ukrainian parliament, 1900–2001
1990–2003 Screening the word
Sarah Whitmore Edited by Stephen Hutchings and
Anat Vernitski
11. Defending Human Rights in Russia
Sergei Kovalyov, dissident and 19. Russia as a Great Power
Human Rights Commissioner, Dimensions of security under
1969–2003 Putin
Emma Gilligan Edited by Jakob Hedenskog,
Vilhelm Konnander, Bertil Nygren,
12. Small-Town Russia Ingmar Oldberg and Christer
Postcommunist livelihoods and Pursiainen
identities: a portrait of the
Intelligentsia in Achit, 20. Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of
Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1940
1999–2000 Truth, justice and memory
Anne White George Sanford
13. Russian Society and the Orthodox 21. Conscience, Dissent and Reform in
Church Soviet Russia
Religion in Russia after Philip Boobbyer
Communism
Zoe Knox 22. The Limits of Russian
Democratisation
14. Russian Literary Culture in the Emergency powers and states of
Camera Age emergency
The word as image Alexander N. Domrin
Stephen Hutchings
23. The Dilemmas of Destalinisation
15. Between Stalin and Hitler A social and cultural history of
Class war and race war on the reform in the Khrushchev era
Dvina, 1940–46 Edited by Polly Jones
Geoffrey Swain
24. News Media and Power in Russia 35. The New Right in the New Europe
Olessia Koltsova Czech transformation and right-
wing politics, 1989–2006
25. Post-Soviet Civil Society Seán Hanley
Democratization in Russia and the
Baltic States 36. Democracy and Myth in Russia
Anders Uhlin and Eastern Europe
Edited by Alexander Wöll and
26. The Collapse of Communist Power Harald Wydra
in Poland
Jacqueline Hayden 37. Energy Dependency, Politics and
Corruption in the Former Soviet
27. Television, Democracy and Union
Elections in Russia Russia’s power, Oligarchs’ profits
Sarah Oates and Ukraine’s missing energy
policy, 1995–2006
28. Russian Constitutionalism Margarita M. Balmaceda
Historical and contemporary
development 38. Peopling the Russian Periphery
Andrey N. Medushevsky Borderland colonization in
Eurasian history
29. Late Stalinist Russia Edited by Nicholas B. Breyfogle,
Society between reconstruction Abby Schrader and
and reinvention Willard Sunderland
Edited by Juliane Fürst
39. Russian Legal Culture Before and
30. The Transformation of Urban After Communism
Space in Post-Soviet Russia Criminal justice, politics and the
Konstantin Axenov, Isolde Brade public sphere
and Evgenij Bondarchuk Frances Nethercott
31. Western Intellectuals and the Soviet 40. Political and Social Thought in
Union, 1920–40 Post-Communist Russia
From Red Square to the Left Bank Axel Kaehne
Ludmila Stern
41. The Demise of the Soviet
32. The Germans of the Soviet Union Communist Party
Irina Mukhina Atsushi Ogushi
33. Re-constructing the Post-Soviet 42. Russian Policy towards China and
Industrial Region Japan
The Donbas in transition The El’tsin and Putin periods
Edited by Adam Swain Natasha Kuhrt
67. Celebrity and Glamour in 76. The Communist Youth League and
Contemporary Russia the Transformation of the Soviet
Shocking chic Union, 1917–32
Edited by Helena Goscilo and Matthias Neumann
Vlad Strukov
77. Putin’s United Russia Party
68. The Socialist Alternative to S.P. Roberts
Bolshevik Russia
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 78. The European Union and its
1917–39 Eastern Neighbours
Elizabeth White Towards a more ambitious
partnership?
69. Learning to Labour in Post-Soviet Elena Korosteleva
Russia
79. Russia’s Identity in International
Vocational youth in transition
Relations
Charles Walker
Images, perceptions,
misperceptions
70. Television and Presidential Power
Edited by Ray Taras
in Putin’s Russia
Tina Burrett 80. Putin as Celebrity and Cultural
Icon
71. Political Theory and Community Edited by Helena Goscilo
Building in Post-Soviet Russia
Edited by Oleg Kharkhordin and 81. Russia – Democracy Versus
Risto Alapuro Modernization
A dilemma for Russia and for the
world
Edited by Vladislav Inozemtsev and
Piotr Dutkiewicz
82. Putin’s Preventative Counter- 91. The Transition to Democracy in
Revolution Hungary
Post-Soviet authoritarianism and Árpád Göncz and the post-
the spectre of Velvet Revolution communist Hungarian presidency
Robert Horvath Dae Soon Kim
83. The Baltic States from the Soviet 92. The Politics of HIV/AIDS in
Union to the European Union Russia
Identity, discourse and power in Ulla Pape
the post-communist transition of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 93. The Capitalist Transformation of
Richard Mole State Socialism
The making and breaking of State
84. The EU–Russia Borderland Socialist society, and what
New contexts for regional followed
cooperation David Lane
Edited by Heikki Eskelinen,
Ilkka Liikanen and James W. Scott 94. Disability in Eastern Europe and
the Former Soviet Union
85. The Economic Sources of Social History, policy and everyday life
Order Development in Post- Edited by Michael Rasell and
Socialist Eastern Europe Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova
Richard Connolly
95. The Making and Breaking of
86. East European Diasporas, Soviet Lithuania
Migration and Cosmopolitanism Memory and modernity in the
Edited by Ulrike Ziemer and wake of war
Sean P. Roberts Violeta Davoliu-té
Stefano Bianchini
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First edition published in Italian in 2009 by Rubbettino Press.
Stefano Bianchini
Le sfide della modernità
Idee, politiche e percorsi dell’Europa orientale nel XIX e XX secolo
© 2009 Rubbettino
www.rubbettinoeditore.it
This English translation published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Stefano Bianchini
The right of Stefano Bianchini to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bianchini, S. (Stefano)
[Sfide della modernit?. English]
Eastern Europe and the challenges of modernity, 1800-2000 / Stefano
Bianchini ; English translation by Carolyn Kadas.
pages cm. – (BASEES/Routledge series on Russian and East European
studies ; 99)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Europe, Eastern–Politics and government–19th century. 2. Europe,
Eastern–Politics and government–20th century. 3. Economic development–
Europe, Eastern–History. I. Title.
DJK48.B5313 2014
947.0009'04–dc23
2014029460
Acknowledgments xiii
Bibliography 213
Index 232
Acknowledgements
Notes
1 In this book I have treated “modernisation” and “paths to modernity” as syno-
nyms, so that the latter is not to be interpreted in the way American “modernisa-
tion theorists” from Seymour Martin Lipset on treat it. Actually, I am aware that
there is a distinct strand in political science development theory known as “mod-
ernisation theory” which overlaps with, but is not quite the same as, “paths to
modernity”. Nevertheless, as the title of the book says, my main focus is on the five
debates on modernisation which include not only the economic and social dimen-
sions, but also political and cultural factors: understanding this comprehensive
complexity, in my view, reveals the fundamental commonalities of modernity, and
shows how each society interprets it somewhat differently and finds its own path to it.
2 Métissage: this term, of French origin, is increasingly used in sociology and
anthropology. It does not refer merely to the mixing of cultures, but specifically to
the complexity of mutual cultural influences that promote changes and lead to new
original cultural forms, without necessarily replacing the original ones. It has
sometimes been translated into English as “hybridity”, although some scholars,
Acknowledgements xvii
like Burke, contend that “hybridity” has a different meaning, as it refers to a
combination of cultures without history and memory, and can operate as a trans-
mitting vehicle of dominance (as in the case of the British colonisation of India, or
evangelisation). In contrast, métissage is about the mixing of cultures, with their
own traditions and roots in the past, that materialises regardless of the adoption of
legal and political measures. Compare John Francis Burke, “Reconciling Cultural
Diversity with a Democratic Community: “Mestizaje” as Opposer to the Usual
Suspects”, in Citizenship Studies, vol. III, n. 1, 1999, pp. 119–40; Homi K. Bhabha,
The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994; and, on nomadic métissages,
Matilde Callari Galli (ed.), Nomadismi contemporanei, Guaraldi, Rimini, 2003,
pp. 17–50.
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Introduction
Industrialisation, modernity and development in
Eastern Europe
“Since the age of discovery”, writes the famous French sociologist Michel
Wieviorka, “métissage has been inseparable from modernity”, and citing
Serge Gruzinski, he points out how the appearance of the “first world econ-
omy” between the 16th and 17th centuries in Asia and America caused the
phenomenon of “mixing and rejection”.1
The geopolitical macro-region we usually define as “Eastern Europe” is
from this point of view no exception. Indeed, métissage, a product of different
processes of cultural syncretism occurring over centuries, is the main feature
that has accompanied its process of modernisation from the moment the
Industrial Revolution triggered its rapid economic development.
In truth, métissage was present in Eastern Europe well before modernity
appeared on the horizon. Nevertheless, with its arrival the phenomenon of
métissage consolidated, propagated and changed inasmuch as modernity was
largely the result of a dense network of tightly woven relationships, a) between
its component parts (i.e. Central-Eastern Europe, the Danube and the Bal-
kans, and the immense, rolling spaces of the Plain of Sarmatia, beyond the
Volga and up to the Urals), b) within each one of these regions, and c) in
interaction with the rest of the Continent.
In other words, modernity did not simply develop because some East European
elites “suddenly” perceived their countries’ state of backwardness and thus set to
work, in myriad difficulties and resistance, to introduce models considered success-
ful and tested in a vaguely defined industrial West (which for decades essentially
consisted of England and Belgium and some regions of France and Germany).
According to this interpretation, the question of East European modernity
should be viewed merely in terms of the hard-won but inevitable absorption
of an indistinct “Western model of industrial development”. Access to mod-
ernity would thus have occurred thanks to the pre-eminence of Western cul-
ture to which the East had “finally” submitted after “numerous and vain”
attempts to reject this modernity, or Western pre-eminence, or both.
In our opinion this explanation, reinforced over time by plenty of stereotypes,
sounds simplistic and unconvincing.
It seems to us that, on the contrary, a discussion of modernity and devel-
opment in Eastern Europe must take into consideration the area’s dynamic
2 Introduction
métissage. As a matter of fact, the traditional multiplicity of trans-European
ties and the predisposition for mixing contributed decisively to anchoring the
development process to original trends of thought, continuously reacting to
the international context. In this process political ideals and movements were
forged, with their own views of modernity. The dense networks of relations
that formed the substratum of East European societies likewise established
their actual degree of mutual dependency, as well as their autonomous sub-
jectivity. This was done through lengthy processes which turned out to be
original but also marked by other European and international contexts.
These networks of relations, the result of regional specificity and multilateral
inputs, engendered the awareness both of local possibilities and aspirations and
of various obstacles (social, economic and cultural) which, compared to other
situations, delayed economic development, and industrialisation in particular.
Naturally, over the course of time East European métissage relations
changed, multiplied and established unprecedented forms of communication.
New networks arose and still others, as we will see, disappeared or lost
importance. In their tumultuous succession and intersection they defined the
multiplicity of East European societies, contending with economic changes,
the development-backwardness issue and Political transformation. The capital
“P” indicates the broader ideals and strategic policies that set the scene for
shaping political stances, reactions of public opinion, concrete acts of gov-
ernance, the functioning of institutions, and also the choice of reference
models.
At the outset of modernity several important networks of relations were
already established due to certain crucial factors such as: a) the economic and
social functions carried out mainly by Jewish, German, Armenian and Greek
diasporas; b) competition, first religious (both within Christianity as well as
between Christian religions and Islam), and then national, with the spread of
the press, universities and academies; c) the intensification of communication
and transport, first via canals and then railways; and d) participation in the
main cultural currents that crossed the Continent.2
These “basic networks” promoted new forms of métissage and aspirations/
constructions of modernity, against the background of a prior process of
change in the exercise of political power. In effect, this process of change took
a similar course across the entire European continent (the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth being the most significant exception), and was characterised
by institutional centralisation, the progressive bureaucratisation of state
administration, and by the creation of a tax system and a regular army.
While these transformations were underway, the networks mentioned above
played a decisive role in transmitting ideas and political practices. Just think
of the influential role of the diasporas.
It is well known that Jews, Germans, Armenians and Greeks had spread
around the various East European regions from the beginning of the Middle
Ages (the Greeks had been there since the Classical Age, like the Jews, at least
in the Balkans). They had been invited by local princes and sovereigns for the
Introduction 3
specific purpose of compensating for the absence of certain activities in the
fields of commerce, public administration, handicrafts and at times even the
military. This process took place in political contexts dominated by the Great
Empires, where borders were few and distant: it fostered an extended and
more general perception of “community”, which was particularly successful
among the diasporas.
Thus after centuries of being settled, the maps of the early 1900s showed
that Ashkenazi Jews were an influential element in Poland, Lithuania and
Belarus as far as Vitebsk and in Volhynia; then in Galicia, Moldova, Hungary
between Debrecen and the Carpathians, as well as in Bessarabia, with a
strong presence in the cities of Cluj, Bucharest, Szeged, Budapest, Bratislava,
Novi Sad, Odessa and Poltava. In turn, Sephardi Jews were . particularly active
in the Balkans, especially in Sarajevo, Thessaloniki and Istanbul and, in part,
in Bulgaria.3
Germans, on the other hand, besides living in Poland, Lithuania and
Volhynia, had settled in Bessarabia, along the Bug, or on the Black Sea
between Odessa and the Crimean peninsula, along the Volga, and in the
Banat, Transylvania and Dobruja.
Greeks. had spread out along the entire Black Sea Coast as well in Wala-
chia and Istanbul, where the majority of European Armenians also lived. The
latter were also present in Bulgaria, especially in the triangle between Plovdiv,
Shumen and Varna, and in Romania, Moldova and Podolia, Galicia and,
though less widespread, in Transylvania, Odessa, Macedonia and Thrace
(especially in Edirne).
For centuries Jews played an important intermediary role between the city
and the countryside in their roles as merchants, innkeepers, grocers, tenant
farmers and property managers; Greeks were often employed as imperial
administrative functionaries (not only at the time of Byzantium, but also of
the Sublime Porte), while – like Armenians – they conducted trade between
the banks of the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Adriatic (in competition
with Venice, Genoa and Dubrovnik/Ragusa), leaving to Germans mainly
craftsmanship or, in the capital cities, the formation of administrative and
military cadres.
On the whole, for centuries the main diasporas linked nobility, rural popu-
lations, artisans, merchants and entrepreneurs, promoting the growth of mar-
kets, craftsmanship, credit and the number of consumers of non-agricultural
products. They likewise influenced local cultures to the point that still today it
is unthinkable to understand the literature of the various East European
countries without considering the contribution provided by the main dia-
sporas. Certainly, a part of them (as in the case of the Jews), became poorer
as a result of industrialisation, suffering from the financial and market crises
of the early 1800s, as well as from reductions in sales rights and urban
migration permits (especially to the detriment of small and medium-sized
towns and to the benefit of the modern megalopolises). Yet another part
became wealthy, turning into the undesired competitor of the nobility,
4 Introduction
especially of those who aspired to entrepreneurial or bourgeois functions or
simply wanted to control all the economic activities of the village.4
Thus keen competition arose between the new aspirations of the landed
aristocracy, including the nascent national bourgeoisie (especially those of
rural origin) and the roles traditionally carried out by diasporas (particularly
the Jewish diaspora). This negatively affected not only their penetration into the
countryside, where they were used to exchanging handmade goods and tools
with surpluses of wheat, linen, wool and livestock, but also – more generally –
the progressive secularisation of society. This secularisation by stimulating
emancipation and respect for civil rights was encouraging a more favourable
climate for greater acceptance of Jews in the Christian world and facilitating
their integration.5
Therefore industrialisation and modernity had an ambivalent function: on
the one hand, they intensified relations between Jews and non-Jews (and more
broadly between the diasporas and the various ethno-national groups in the
territory) in a context of progressive and rapid social differentiation which
could be felt everywhere, including among the diasporas; on the other hand,
they deepened the fracture lines, mainly by asserting individual ethnic groups’
national, religious and linguistic-cultural homogeneity, thus discouraging the
secularisation of society.
For that matter, we cannot comprehend the extent and diffusion of East
European anti-Semitism if we do not keep in mind the ambivalence of this
process.
It is common knowledge that capital knows no borders because it tends to
be invested where it finds a profit. Bankers, entrepreneurs and merchants
moved according to an international and cosmopolitan logic, dictated by
business needs. This aspect often (but not exclusively) interwove with the
network of relations established within each diaspora. As far as Jews were
concerned, at the end of the 1800s, 40% were engaged in commercial activities
or in the credit business, and 30% in industry and handicrafts. Therefore, with
the internationalisation of business, capitalism became a cosmopolitan trend
in cultural terms. However, the closeness of the rising neo-bourgeoisie to the
Jewish presence in the crucial and significant sectors of capitalism was chal-
lenged at the end of the 19th century by a negative reaction to cosmopoli-
tanism (mainly perceived as a threat to national or group identities), which
translated into anti-Semitism and influenced some major anti-capitalist social
currents.
At the same time, as Jews were socially differentiated among themselves,
the cultural cosmopolitanism that characterised them facilitated the con-
currence of interests with worker and socialist internationalism, to the point
that this element – which contained conspicuous personalities from Marx to
Trotsky – decisively contributed to spreading potent political ideas all over
Europe.
In reality the conflict between diasporas’ trans-national ties and the new
fracture lines triggered by 19th-century insurgent nationalism formed part of
Introduction 5
the ambivalence intrinsic to the process of constructing modernity. This con-
tained the impulses for the development of capitalism and the creation of
nation-states, aspirations to free trade and economic protectionism, the affir-
mation of scientific rationalism and the enhancement of religious and identity
precepts …
It was thus in a contradictory picture of constantly evolving trans-national
frames of reference, that modernisation in Eastern Europe began to deal with
the relation between agriculture and industry, mechanisation and handicrafts,
and city and countryside, taking into account a complex system of reforms
and changes in values, on which development-backwardness dynamics exerted a
decisive influence.
These changes affected both the link between freedom and property (dear
to the diasporas and the rising bourgeoisie), and equal rights, establishing
unexpected commonalities between traditional peasant egalitarianism and the
spread of Marxism. Similarly, these changes laid the foundations of civil
society (starting with the emancipation of serfs and the formation of a liberal
element in the nobility) and began to reduce the aristocracy’s privileges
(especially in the fiscal area). They took shape in the fight against the Great
Empires’ administrative centralism in favour of decentralisation, in the form
of emerging claims, as we will see in Russia, Austria-Hungary or Turkey, and
in the liberalism that supported the zemstvo, as well as in Bakunin’s anar-
chism. They likewise contended with the need to define the forms and the
main actors in the national and identity issue, just as they addressed the pro-
blem of reconstructing legitimising myths and reminders of the past, both to
affirm the existence of “historic nations” (according to a 19th-century theory
shared by Karl Marx and Otto Bauer), and to claim the existence of original
constitutional and parliamentary structures in some countries (as in the case
of the Hungarian Golden Bull of 1222, compared to the English Magna
Charta, or of the aristocratic republics in Poland and Transylvania).6
Ultimately, this was a complex and indigenous process which could not
help but take into consideration other changes underway – albeit along the
same lines – in other Northern and West European countries, and later in the
newly formed Kingdom of Italy, which, however – as already pointed out –
had its roots in the plurality of networks of trans-European relations, due to
their particularly receptive nature, prone to mixing.
Religious competition, on the other hand, also contributed to defining the
cultural substratum that triggered the modernisation process.
To the pre-existing conflict between Western and Eastern Christianity, exa-
cerbated by the presence in Eastern Europe of both Roman and Greek (or
Uniate) Catholicism in contrast to Orthodoxy (and in particular the Greek
and Russian Patriarchates), was added, in the 16th century, the spread of
Protestantism, and therefore the Tridentinum Counter-Reformation.
This competition exerted a fundamental, long-lasting influence over the
entire region, beyond theological diatribes, because it involved the issue of the
language used in liturgy, promoting the use of the vernacular, then
6 Introduction
transformed into national languages, while the use of printing and subse-
quently higher education spread through the founding of universities and
academies, thus confirming the processes extensively studied by Anderson and
Gellner.7
As early as 1470, printing appeared in the German and Protestant areas of
Saxony, Silesia and Bohemia. In a few years’ time it spread to Krakow,
Budapest and Bratislava, in Catholic as well as Protestant circles. At the end
of the 15th century it was present in Moravia, Croatia (in Senj) and in
Orthodox Montenegro, as well as in the Republic of Venice, where printing
was done in the Latin, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets.
. Meanwhile, in 1493
the first Hebrew printing house was opened in Istanbul: this was followed in
the 1500s by a Hebrew printing works in Edirne and in the 1600s in Thessa-
loníki and Smyrna. In the meantime, between the 16th and 17th centuries,
Hebrew printing was also established in Prague, Krakow, Lublin, Augsburg,
Leipzig and Venice as well as in other cities.
In the wake of the Catholic–Protestant conflict, the different denomina-
tions’ need to spread their own truths induced even the Orthodox Church to
promote printed publications. The first books in Cyrillic appeared in Krakow
in 1483, followed by those from Cetinje in Montenegro, Tîrgovişte in Wala-
chia, and also in Prague, Vilnius and Sibiu. The first Orthodox printing works
was opened in Moscow in 1564 and shortly afterwards in L’viv in Ukraine,
then spreading to Kyïv. Previously printing had also appeared in Belgrade,
Iaşi, Bucharest and Košice, as well as in the monasteries of Shkodër and
Goražde, albeit only briefly.
From a climate of religious adaptation to new inventions such as the
printing press, the Turkish-Islamic culture remained excluded for reasons that
can be traced back mainly to the resistance of the scribes’ associations, and
subsequently reasons of doctrine, originating as we will see later from pres-
sures on the part. of the Hanafi school. Thus the first Turkish printing house
was opened in Istanbul only in 1727, whereas in Central Europe printing in
Danubian-Balkan languages in the Christian regions bordering the Empire of
the Sublime Porte developed in reaction to the Ottoman advance. Thus Milan
became a centre for Greek publications, Venice specialised in Croatian and
Glagolitic, Rome in Bulgarian and Hebrew, Krakow in Hungarian, Braşov in
Romanian and Bologna in Hebrew. Similar processes arose in other areas in
which the political context represented an obstacle to the spread of printing in the
local vernacular. This contributed to making Plzeń a specialised centre of
publishing in Czech, Tubingen in Slovenian and Königsberg in Lithuanian.
In the meantime Catholic–Protestant competition had extended to higher
scientific education. During the 16th century Protestant churches spread
quickly throughout Poland, the Baltic coasts and to the south-east as far as
Transylvania and Slavonia. Lutherans established their own universities in
Bratislava and Prešov in Slovakia, in Legnica in Silesia, in Sopron and Sár-
ospatak in Hungary and in Königsberg on the Baltic. Calvinists promoted
.
their own universities in Vilnius, Kedainiai, Slutsk and Šilura in Lithuania, as
Introduction 7
well as academies in Cluj, Alba Iulia and Aiud in Transylvania, in Debrecen
in Hungary and in Panivci in Podolia. On the other hand Antitrinitarian
schools were established in Ukraine in the cities of Chernihiv, Hoshcha and
Khmil’nyk, as well as in Raków and Levartów in Poland, Kysylyn in Volhy-
nia and Cluj in Transylvania. Finally, the Unity of the Brethren (or Jednota),
after breaking with the Hussite movement, created its own gymnasiums in
Moravia, Bohemia and in Leszno in Poland.
The Counter-Reformation reacted to Protestant penetration, especially in
Habsburg Austria and in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by creating
religious colleges, seminaries and Jesuit schools which had great importance
in educating the faithful: among these we recall particularly the work of the
Jesuits in Danzig and Płock in Poland, in Zamość in Volhynia, in Ivano-
Frankivs’k in Galicia, in Košice, Trenčín and Banská Bystrica in Slovakia, in
Cluj and Alba Iulia in Transylvania, in Brno in Moravia and in Telč in
Bohemia, as well as in Zagreb and Rijeka in Croatia. Catholic universities
were established in Prague, Vilnius, Vienna, Krakow, Olomouc and Trnava,
inducing the Orthodox Church in turn to create its own cultural and religious
education centres, so that in Ukraine and Lithuania one could soon find side
by side Catholic and Orthodox academies, colleges and schools: this was the
case in Kyïv, Vilnius, Minsk, Slutsk, L’viv, Przemyśl, Zamość and Chełm,
among other cities.
From this rapid mapping it is obvious that the way religious relations in
Central-Eastern Europe had been shaping up entailed spheres of pre-eminence,
conflict and overlapping which were to have linguistic-cultural repercussions.
Meanwhile Judaism and Christianity had confronted each other in the
Balkans as well, where the Ottoman system of Millet ensured Orthodoxy’s
firm predominance (even though over time it became increasingly divided
within) as well as Jewish autonomy. The Sephardi Jews fleeing from the
Spanish Inquisition were offered protection, not only due to cultural tolerance
but mainly out of economic self-interest. It is well known that the Sephardi
Jews – in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews – had developed highly advanced
and prized handicrafts, especially in the production of luxury goods. Fur-
thermore, during their forced migration eastwards, they were able to transfer
most of their capital from the Iberian Peninsula. This allowed them to con-
tribute to the development of cities in Anatolia and the Balkans, in particular
turning Smyrna and Thessaloníki into influential centres for the spread of
modern political culture (from the Jewish Enlightenment to the Young
Turks).8
The Sublime Porte thus undoubtedly drew advantages from this welcoming
policy, but this conduct was not always constant: in 1526, for example, fol-
lowing its advancement in Danubian Europe it imposed the closure of the
universities in Pécs and Buda, so that the Hungarian nobility was forced to
look elsewhere to educate their children, thus founding the Collegium Hun-
garicum (and subsequently Hungaricum Illiricum) at the University of
Bologna, in anticipation of better times.
8 Introduction
The fact remains that the spread of the press and the complexity of reli-
gious and educational networks set up between the 16th and 18th centuries
formed a powerful foundation for the enormous cultural developments that
occurred in the 19th century. The processes of secularisation and national
construction engendered at the time the elaboration of a lively system of
museums, publishing houses, academies, cultural societies (in which the var-
ious national diasporas found a mode of expression), reading rooms, theatres,
universities, but especially gymnasiums and lyceums in the languages of the
various existing linguistic groups. Thus a new competitive process opened up
which added even more controversy to the religious conflict in the form of the
spread of laicism and atheism, as well as divergent political perspectives.
These new perspectives were just as linked to a new form of ethno-national
autonomy and independence, as they were oriented to constructing neo-
regional cultural or federal spaces such as Mitteleuropa, Danubian integration,
Yugoslavism and Panslavism (in all the accepted meanings).
To the network of lay and religious, ethnic and socio-cultural relations
mentioned above we must add the role of the complex system of commu-
nication and transport that was gradually developing in Eastern Europe, first
with the construction of canals connecting rivers and subsequently, after
1840, with the spread of the railways.
Just to mention an example, the canal between the Elbe and Havel rivers
(later extended to the Oder), or the canal that joined the city of Bydgoszcz to
the Oder or the one between Timişoara and the Danube in the Banat were
already operating in the 18th century. In the 1800s canals were then built
between the Dnepr and the Bug, between the Neman and the Vistula. Simi-
larly, the network of canals in the Hungarian plains (especially in Bačka and
the Banat) were connected to the Danube and projects to reinforce the
navigability of the Danube were implemented, as well as the intensive use of
the Maritsa and the construction of the Corinth Canal between Peloponnese
and Attica.
It was, however, mainly the fear of the decline of cities that were large
commercial centres but distant from access to the most important waterways
(especially seaports) which encouraged the expansion of trans-national rail-
ways after 1840. Soon Berlin, Vienna and Budapest became hubs of primary
importance for regions like Saxony, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, Lower Aus-
tria, and for connections to the Baltic and the Adriatic. Soon afterwards Saint
Petersburg joined these ranks, closely connected to central European capitals
via Vilnius and Warsaw, and the Warsaw–Minsk–Moscow and Warsaw–Kyïv
railway lines were built. Warsaw, via Krakow (at the time part of Austria) was
connected to the Russian port of Odessa and it in turn was connected to Iaşi
in Romania. In particular the so-called “corner of the three empires” where
Austria, Russia and Germany shared a common border became strategically
crucial for communication.
In the Ottoman Empire on the other hand, interest in developing the rail-
ways, albeit late and brought about more by military than commercial
Introduction 9
motivations, had begun to increase: thus after the construction of the
Thessaloníki–Kosovska
. Mitrovica railway line (conceived mainly to control
Macedonia), the Istanbul–Alexandroupolis and the Edirne–Plovdiv lines
(aimed at controlling Greeks and Bulgarians, respectively), the basic network
was extended to connect Thessaloníki to the capital and the latter, via
Yambol, to Burgas and, via Sofia (already independent), to Varna.
To the north, in the Habsburg Empire, Zagreb – already connected to Cluj
in Transylvania – was connected to Belgrade by 1891, when the Serbian
capital had .a few years before already completed its connections to Sofia,
Edirne and Istanbul. In fact, Vienna, via Celje in Slovenia and Zagreb, could
already communicate by rail with the Sea of Marmara, so that the German
dream of constructing a Berlin–Baghdad–Persian Gulf railway began to be a
concrete possibility (or a real nightmare for the powers of the Entente).
This increasingly dense intertwining of networks created by the diasporas,
religious and national competition, and the new and potent communication
routes (which were also rapidly shrinking perceptions of space), were joined
by the major currents of thought which flowed with increasing speed of
exchange and reciprocal knowledge across the entire continent.
On the other hand, in Poland German cameralism and physiocratic culture
were already widespread at the end of the 18th century. Concepts such as
“free trade”, “natural law” and “contracts” were well known. In Bohemia, as
we will see, industrialisation was progressing in the villages in the form of
small and medium-sized enterprises, thus avoiding rapid and dramatic
urbanisation.9
In turn, the Enlightened absolutism of Vienna and Saint Petersburg was
essential for the spread of the ideas of freedom, constitution and the fight
against privilege in the two empires. For these impulses the contribution of
Jewish Enlightenment (or Haskalah) in Vilnius, Odessa and Warsaw, with its
attempt to bring Jewish culture closer to Polish, Lithuanian and Russian
national cultures, was not extraneous. In the meantime, in spite of having
shown themselves incapable of managing landed estates in a substantially
different way from the rest of the landed aristocracy, some sectors of the
nobility had sought to gain credit as the indigenous entrepreneurial bour-
geoisie. They assigned themselves a national role, referring to their own
independence from international finance due to historical reasons as well as
the special role of their economic activity.
This does not mean that there were no forces or individuals who would
have proposed or desired to imitate existing foreign models, in particular the
English one, such as in the case of István Széchenyi in Hungary or in Russia,
especially after the assassination of Czar Paul I and until 1810. A century
later, even Lenin posed the problem for post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, of
whether or not to follow the “Prussian model” of development or the
“American” one. Still later, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Sakharov (between
the 1970s and 1980s) joined these ranks, as well as Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister
Kozyrev.10
10 Introduction
In sum, the problem of Westernisation in terms of transferring models (and
sometimes, in its most radical expression, even as a form of “self-effacement”
in the West) repeatedly surfaced on the political scene. However, this was just
one school of thought among many in a vast and dynamic framework,
marked by the syncretism triggered by the pressing force of numerous net-
works of trans-European relationships, which proved to be both protagonists
of conflict and inspiration for original re-formulations.
In conclusion, modernity and métissage interwove; both interacted with the
West, fuelled by a wide range of ideas which, in addition to the aforemen-
tioned Enlightenment, liberalism and capitalist cosmopolitanism, developed
in various ways. Just think of Romanticism, which up until the end of the
18th century spread rapidly in all its political interpretations from France to
Russia, from Germany to the Balkans, and also of the imperial visions con-
jured up from racist presuppositions to be found in the theses of Mackinder’s
Heartland and in Danilevsky’s Panslavism.
Analogously, the debate between Darwinism and creationism, science and
religion, selection of the species and power politics permeated the spirit of the
entire European continent, from the moment it intensified during the course
of the 19th century, certainly not leaving Eastern Europe on the margins of a
more general reflection about man, machines, the evolution of civilisation and
the art representing it.
With the turn of the 20th century, the idea of self-determination and the
principles on which it is founded formed part of Lenin’s thought, and over-
seas, in the House Inquiry, Woodrow Wilson’s commission to prepare the
American plan to reorganise Europe geopolitically at the end of the Great
War. In both cases the solutions put forward had many commonalities, in
their dominant ethno-national approach, whereas in Great Britain the pub-
lication of the weekly New Europe constituted a political-cultural operation of
great incisiveness which emerged from the sharing of British intellectuals’ and
journalists’ ideas, as well as of other exponents of Czechoslovakism and
Yugoslavism (such as Masaryk or Supilo).
The idea of Europe and the prospect of its integration was part of Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi’s philosophy, a convinced multi-culturalist and cosmopo-
litan of Bohemian origin but raised in Austria, who formed the pan-European
movement and was close to Aristide Briand, who above all understood the
importance of the new systems of railway, road and air communication in
drawing closer, not just symbolically but in daily life, to what he defined as
“pan-regional systems” (including Europe).
Finally, even Marxism was a powerful carrier of inter-European commu-
nication not only because the idea of Europe and overcoming backwardness
were strategic references for both Lenin and Trotsky, but also because that
political philosophy came from Europe, where the Bolsheviks and other cur-
rents of Russian thought felt they legitimately belonged. On the other hand,
as we will see, there were many moments in which Soviet literature and phi-
losophy interacted with the international and West European, Central-Eastern
Introduction 11
European and Balkan orientations, during the 1920s as well as in the 1950s
and 1960s, and as surprising as this may seem, even during Brezhnev’s era of
stagnation.11
On the other hand, when we think of art, Russian modernism appeared
before the advent of Bolshevism: Suprematists, Constructivists and Cubists
were already at work when the Revolution of 1917 exploded and the Futurists
could still freely express themselves for another decade before “Socialist
Realism” was imposed, precisely because their favourite subjects were
machines, cities and electricity, all symbols of the idea of modernity of the
time.12
In sum, a multiplicity of trans-European relations (and in the 20th century
transatlantic ones, as has already been touched on and will be dealt with in
more detail later on) contributed to creating the conditions for East European
métissage and modernity to develop in a “leopard-skin” pattern, with areas of
intense growth next to profoundly backward areas.
In these conditions, it was inevitable that over time and in space various
debates on development and on the forms it would have to assume got
underway, generating just as many currents of thought. Their penetration into
these societies’ political cultures makes it unthinkable – even after the fall of
communism – that the consolidation of an enlarged European Union (EU)
and the subsequent steps toward European integration could occur by indul-
ging in a mere transfer of Western models, without the formation of a shared
process or, as recent bureaucratese usage would have it, co-ownership. Simi-
larly, relations with Russia may not overlook the complex ties that formed
over time between this immense country and the various geopolitical areas of
Europe, in which the West – once again – ends up being but a component and
not the main point of reference.
Together all these reflections, summed up to refresh the reader’s memory,
explain why – in the attempt to reconstruct the line of debate on modernity
and development in Eastern Europe – a comparative methodology has been
chosen for this book, innovative in many respects in relation to the stimulating
and vast bibliography available on the topics to be addressed herein.
Indeed, international literature on the transition written by comparativist
politology in the 1990s attempted to accredit the existence of “Centre”-
”Periphery” dynamics to the celebrated “Western victory over communism”,
according to what was mentioned above. “Progress” and “failure” in the
individual countries as they emerged from the previous Socialist system were
thus evaluated according to a methodology intended to establish a taxonomy
with which to measure the degree of assimilation with the West achieved by
the individual post-socialist societies, to place them within a predisposed
hierarchical grid.
Here we need only think of the theses according to which several post-
communist models would have emerged, according to the “Europeanist”
legacy of the Habsburgs or the “Asian” one of the Ottoman Empire: these are
theses that do not explain why Bulgaria managed to enter the EU “only”
12 Introduction
three years later than, for example, “Habsburgian” Bohemia and Moravia
(currently the Czech Republic). Other interpretations placed an accent on the
democratic or national claims that emerged during the crises of communism
between the 1950s and 1980s in Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Poland in order
to explain the greater solidity of the post-communist transition in these
countries, forgetting, however, that a similar process (and rather more con-
stant over time) characterised Tito’s Yugoslavia, although this could not save
it from a destructive crisis with much bloodshed.13
Besides, it is not by chance that many authors carefully avoided broaching
the subject of the profound crisis of the state that exploded in the Balkans, as
if this were an event extraneous to transition. At times, in focusing their
attention on the ongoing transformation in Central Europe and trying to
grasp the differences in approaches (for example, between Poland and Hungary),
some scholars attempted to establish a hierarchical order between Poland’s
conflictual-pluralist-type model of democratic consolidation (believed to be
more persuasive), and Hungary’s corporate one, founded on compromise
(judged as less convincing). Similarly, Slovakia’s reliance on hierarchies led to
assigning that country scarce probability of democratic success, and went as
far as putting it on the list of “problematic” countries, while predicting the
Czech Republic’s rapid inclusion in democratically consolidated societies with
a successful market economy.14
In this way transitology often used a unidirectional interpretative logic,
from West to East, without critically asking what the historical-cultural,
sociological and political-institutional as well as economic relationship still in
existence was between the process of assimilation (considered already under-
way) and the perceptions of what came to be considered the “Periphery”, at
the moment the latter re-established its encounter with the supposed
“Centre”, after the contrapositions of the Cold War.15
To escape these limits, however, it would make no sense to renounce the
comparative method, as it offers stimulating perspectives for understanding
trans-national dynamics, especially when the changes take on an epochal
character, with broad geopolitical implications.
Thus we have chosen a methodologically different path, which in comparing
takes more into account the qualitative repercussions triggered by the net-
works of relations mentioned above, which, by following their own ways, gave
rise to specific situations leading to forms of modernity as original as they
were trans-national and interdependent.
On the other hand, to dwell for just a moment on the methodological
aspects, nor can we be satisfied with the traditional approach taken up to now
in the literature of area experts, i.e. those scholars of East European political
history empirically oriented towards assessing the changes in their specific
area of research (in which they know at least one language) in reference to
historical contexts and experiences, mentalities, cultures matured locally, to
all of which they end up attributing a determining importance, leaving com-
parison in the background. Even though many of them have produced
Introduction 13
famous and very detailed studies, they have often been affected by “geo-
graphical” limits enforced on their research, in that it is focused on Russia or
other countries (sometimes just one) of the Central-Eastern Europe and the
Balkans. Thus they underestimated or lost sight of the dense network of
contacts and reciprocal influences that made modernity in Europe a trans-
national aspect of the configuration of “politics” in the area that from
Szczecin and Trieste extends to the Urals and beyond, stretching as far as the
Pacific to interact – simultaneously – with the even larger framework of
European and world dynamics.16
In contrast, this book intends to use a comparative approach to define
modernity taking into account: a) the principal transversal political and cultural
trends or, more precisely, the trans-national trends that were involved in the
development/backwardness relationship; b) the impact these had on historical-
cultural heritages and value systems; and c) experiences acquired in East
European societies, in order to shed new light on the métissage forms of
constructing “Politics”, governance and social organisation forged during the
last two centuries.
On the other hand, the perception of modernity rooted in East European
elites and public opinions has not really moved away from the principal traits
attributed to the process of modernisation from the time of Karl Marx and
then Max Weber, up until the most recent syntheses of Jürgen Habermas and
Anthony Giddens.17 In other words, whether accepted or rejected, all over
Europe modernity was identified with the dynamics of different, intimately
interdependent processes, such as the development of manufacturing and the
exaltation of the machine, the accumulation of capital and the mobilisation of
resources; the increase in productivity and literacy; urbanisation and ration-
alist architecture; the centralisation of state power and the construction of
national identity; the affirmation of reason, the primacy of science, the right
to participate in politics, as well as lay definitions of values and reference
standards.
An original aspect of the East European space as a whole, on the other
hand, consists of the ways and forms in which the elites and public opinions
gradually constructed their own attitudes toward “Politics” and modernity,
taking into account (or being pressured by) the many-shaped intensity of
communication flows that formed between East and West and never dis-
appeared – as already mentioned – even during the communist era, until there
was a sudden acceleration during the process of EU enlargement and the
advent of globalisation.
Furthermore, it is precisely out of a reflection aimed at simultaneously
keeping in mind how East European modernity was conceived, discussed and
realised, as well as the dense and multilateral networks of trans-European
relations (which were the cause of this syncretism, fusion and métissage), that
some unexpected interpretations emerge, offering a dynamic framework for
the relationship between “Politics” and modernisation on the European continent,
far beyond the West-East or “Centre-Periphery” approaches.
14 Introduction
Indeed, within the framework of the networks of relations we have already
mentioned, a powerful vector for the diffusion of modernity was the increas-
ingly influential role of money. The state, which needed vaster and vaster
resources to exercise its power politics and maintain the courts and public
administration, relied with increasing frequency on the fiscal lever. This was
first done by changing feudal obligations into cash payment, and then by
introducing new forms of taxation. Soon even new instruments, innovations
and more advanced cultivation methods (like, for example, using chemicals in
agriculture), and the acquisition of new knowledge contributed to the
increasing use of money. The relationship that emerged on the one hand
between money and some of the activities carried out mainly by exponents of
the diasporas, and on the other hand between the influence of traditional
nobility and the emerging liberal nobility, and the formation of bourgeoisie
and imperial centralism set off repercussions which soon came to have
unforeseen consequences.
In Eastern Europe modernity also provoked a rapid and profound change
in social stratification. Industrial development had been carried out at the
cost of agriculture and handicrafts, while trade and credit, transport and
communications, public services, rents and the private professions spread
(with usury often carrying out the function of promoter of accumulation).
Some categories were protected, such as pensioners, especially after the rise of
communism; others enjoyed special privileges, such as the military. Com-
munism in turn introduced new forms of inequality, in contrast to its pro-
grammes and its own ideology. The bureaucracy had advantages. Unequal
distribution of income was allowed by territory (thus encouraging the growth
of nationalist claims) and by category (for example, to the benefit of Party
and state functionaries). In some cases salaries were markedly differentiated
for different categories of workers, or, in the case of Yugoslavia, the emer-
gence of a class of small private entrepreneurs was supported within certain
limits … Moreover, disparities were introduced in terms of access to rights
when, under the system of ethnic quotas, the majority national group was
preferred in a given territory, the borders of which were often subjectively
and/or arbitrarily determined.
Finally, the explosion of modernity shaped politics, determining its forms
and instruments. For the whole of Eastern Europe this implied a radical
revision of representation (which often occurred much more rapidly than in
the West). Immediately after the First World War many countries adopted
universal suffrage, which was often accompanied by voting by proxy and
collective representation, mostly of the ethno-national type. Likewise the
sources of legitimisation of power changed, and the primacy of nations and/or
ideologies emerged. Gender relations and the idea of the family underwent
profound changes, in an atmosphere in which the growth of secularisation
was the result of a drastic reduction in the number of those holding the faith,
the spread of criticism of religion, as well as laws governing divorce and
abortion.
Introduction 15
In the meantime civil society – upon which initially, as we have seen, great
hopes had been set – was hardly able to emerge as an autonomous subject.
Originally, urban centres had recognised the limits to their development both
because this was opposed by the landed aristocracy, and because they were
geographically very distant from each other. Subsequently – in the nation-
building phase – a significant part of public opinion considered city inhabi-
tants, mainly Jews and ethnic minorities, an obstacle or an encumbrance
which was best gotten rid of. Furthermore, the independence of the courts
had been restricted well before the communist ascent, as shown by the Zagreb
and Friedjung trials in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900s.18 For
its part, rural illiteracy caused peasants’ support for cooperation to be late
and often contradictory, while the Orthodox Church’s dependency on poli-
tical power, censorship of the press (already widely practised in the interwar
period) and finally the tendency in a significant part of the intellectual and
political elites to encourage emotional support for nationalism, often identified
with ethnicity, all contributed to constricting space for the autonomy of civil
societies.
In any case, as modernity reached the populations’ daily lives, the educated
elites’ plans and debates about problems of development soon became the
expression of a political practice as differentiated in its tactical options as it
was in its strategic solutions. Thus, from the initial naive and fideistic impetus
of certain youth movements (like the Russian “Going to the people”), it went
from extremist exasperation to terrorism, to then fall back at the end of the
century on more articulate prospects, becoming the fulcrum of the pro-
grammes of populist, peasant, socialist and liberal movements and parties
which gradually formed not only in imperial Russia, but all over the Habsburg,
Balkan and Ottoman territories.
Overall, the East European construction of modernity, in terms of the
search for a new equilibrium between agriculture and industry, city and
countryside, peasants and workers, tradition and innovation, oligarchic power
and the assertion of rights, urban reconstruction and public administration,
rationality and beliefs, secularism and religions, inevitably ended up inter-
twining with the great theme of East European contemporaneity or that of
identifying the most efficient institutional models for representing and repro-
ducing modernity, which then resulted in the construction of the state and
nation.
State and nation building, like aspirations to economic, social and cultural
modernity, were therefore the two great currents that, intertwining and influ-
encing each other, marked the evolution of East European events from the
Napoleonic era onwards.
In this regard, we will examine in detail just one (albeit important) dimen-
sion of its political history, and that is the dynamic relationship established
between the main debates on modernisation and the configuration of politics.
In other words, the focus of our attention will be on the most significant
controversies that grew up around the historic issue of development, intended
16 Introduction
as one of the two fundamental themes that led to, limited and determined the
construction, original in many ways, of modernity in the East European
regions. However, we do not aim to reconstruct all the phases or networks of
relations that manifested themselves during the course of the two centuries on
the themes we will be addressing.
On the other hand, it will be impossible to ignore, as the reader will have
already ascertained, the question of the state and the nation: in effect, like a
karstic river, it has run through the political literature and debates which over
time have accompanied the political desire to participate in the construction
of modernity both for those who hoped to become an integral part of a
European project (by means of constitutions or revolutions), and those who
hoped to assert their own vision of modernity, completely or in part different
from the Western model.
On the whole, this was a polyphonic and trans-national debate, which
ended up constituting a challenge to the behaviours and practices with which
the “Centre” tended, and still does tend to relate to East European spaces,
often reproducing unilateral and pre-established formulas, relying on mental
laziness and recurrent attitudes, capable of triggering mutual resentment and
incomprehension, and making it difficult to construct a shared political
practice.
Thus to reconstruct the salient phases of the complex historical evolution
that grew up around East European politics, development and modernity, we
have concentrated our attention on five moments, which likewise constitute
milestones in the process of both intellectual and political construction of a
society conceived as modern, efficient, equal, and rooted in the consciousness
of its inhabitants.
These moments have been briefly analysed in each chapter, the first of
which lingers, in the guise of an introduction, on the main causes of back-
wardness in Eastern Europe, making ample reference to the international
debate on the topic.
Chapter 2, in contrast, analyses the main aspects of the so-called Russian
movement Narodnichestvo (improperly translated with the term “Popu-
lism”).19 This chapter reconstructs the most important topics of the con-
troversy, by now “classical” and thoroughly examined by the literature on
capitalism in Russia, which at a certain point even involved Karl Marx, also
dedicating space to the less researched influence of Narodnichestvo on the
spread of revolutionary ideas in South-East Europe.
In Chapter 3 the reader is introduced to the hopes (and illusions) cultivated
by the agrarian movements, and in particular their project of founding “pea-
sant states” in Central-Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In this case,
the political projects and efforts aimed at constructing an agrarian social
theory revealed an unprecedented trans-national appeal and a variety of ideas
which were actually translated into rather brief and uneven experiences of
governing. These projects shared commonalities with models of Western
origin, as well as the emerging Bolshevik model.
Introduction 17
In Chapter 4 the attention focuses on the contents of the contemporary
Soviet controversy about primitive socialist accumulation. This is a con-
troversy that came about during the sort of competition that arose between
the “Green International” and the Krestintern, and concluded with the liqui-
dation of the peasant question, as well as the Bolshevik revolutionary elite,
and with the triumph of Stalin’s political vision.
The turning point brought on by the rise of Stalinism in the USSR and the
way the Second World War ended in Europe led to a drastic change in how
people thought about “politics”, development and modernity in all of Central,
Eastern and Balkan Europe, marginalising agriculture and rural life every-
where. It also defined a future that was previously unthinkable for the entire
region as far as the spread of industrialisation, urban rationalism, education
and social and cultural homogenisation was concerned.
Chapter 5 thus deals with the lively and tumultuous phase following the
expansion of socialism in Central-Eastern Europe, the assertion of an indus-
trialist political culture and the consequent necessity to adjust production
qualitatively during the years of de-Stalinisation. In particular, the chapter
analyses the proposals advanced by politicians and experts from the various
East European countries concerning the construction of a market socialism
and national roads to socialism.
It was at this time that a reformist wave swept over the entire Soviet Camp,
including Yugoslavia (a sort of “ghost presence” in the Camp) which lasted
nearly 15 years. During that period, as we shall see, a vision of modernity
and development was discussed that originally began in a closed and well-
defined space, that is the Soviet Camp, though it had already been challenged
by Yugoslavia with its opening to the West and its policy of non-alignment.
Subsequently this closure underwent another attenuation when in the entire
European socialist space the conviction prevailed that it was possible to
compete on a global level by proposing efficient and functional models for
transforming rural societies into industrial ones (the limits of which, however, had
been underestimated at the time) to the countries emerging from the dissolution
of the colonial empires.
Finally, Chapter 6 lingers on the consequences of the external world’s
penetration of the Socialist Camp (continuing, in spite of powerful ideological
resistance, throughout the 1970s) and subsequently on Gorbachev’s project,
aimed at reorganising socialist modernity without renouncing its great inter-
national ambitions. Its realisation, as is well known, unleashed repercussions
on the very solidity of the Camp and the socialist experience, and has nur-
tured an intense – and curiously, not yet concluded – discussion about the
possibility of reforming “real socialism”.
Certainly in all these phases, as we shall see, the perceived relationship with
the West was alive and well, even when it was experienced in terms of con-
traposition: a sort of alter ego with whom to compare oneself, see the reflection
of oneself, or conflict with, but who could still not ignore the relational
dynamics that gradually arose between Central-Eastern Europe and Russia.
18 Introduction
On the other hand, it would have been impossible for these societies – in
spite of attempts to the contrary, basically ideological in nature – not to take
into account themselves and each other, not only because of the powerful role
Russia had, but also due to the complex and multilateral web of contacts and
interdependencies that historically developed between them, and which produced
the métissage forms of politics we have repeatedly touched upon.
Just think of the complex role played by Marxists and Narodniks in the
peasant issue and the rural socialism project put forward at the time, not only
in Russia, by appealing to the municipalities: how much was this an expression
of resistance to development, or was it just a manifestation of the rejection of
cultural homologation which was feared could come with industrialisation? In
other words, were Narodniks sort of no-globals long before the term was
invented in the strictly cultural sense, or more radically, a movement that
sought to define an alternative form of governance (thus anticipating the
Bolsheviks) in order to shun the Western model of capitalist development and
to found instead non-capitalist modernity? How much of this approach sur-
vived in the following decades in the context of a constant search for paths
towards and the contents of modernity, in various European currents of
thought and spaces characterised by features different from the most significant
ones in the West?
This question, which we would like to leave open, actually raises another
issue regarding the role of intellectuals: the Narodniks in fact were all intel-
lectuals, not peasants. For rural leaders to emerge, gathering consensus from
their main electoral base, the ascent of the agrarian parties had to be awaited
and in any case this was an event linked more to Central-Eastern Europe than
to Russia (with the exception of the Socialist Revolutionaries in the villages
and their leftist component).20 Nevertheless, in both cases intellectuals then
and throughout the 20th century continued to play an essential role in for-
mulating programmes and identifying political goals, to say nothing of their
ability to mobilise.
However, if it is true, and it is, that the function carried out by the intel-
lectuals was absolutely crucial, can this same intellectualism be considered an
indistinct whole, not so much for the ideas it promoted (inasmuch as this would
be impossible from the beginning), as for its basic formation and its scientific
system of reference? In other words, can it be considered – from this point of
view – a class that maintained its role unchanged over time, or, on the con-
trary, is it worthwhile to examine – with the comparative analysis of the five
controversies mentioned above – its evolution as a pressure group, identifying
the successive components that determined its leadership capacity or driving
force?
The first wave of intellectuals active in politics (with the Narodnichestvo
being the main reference point) had a classical education mainly obtained in
religious colleges and schools. When and how was this wave then joined and
perhaps overtaken by the rise of a new strata of technical/scientific and/or
bureaucratic intelligentsia, forged in the public schools, as industrialisation
Introduction 19
and the diversification of services offered to society became dominant in the
state’s economic and administrative governance? The relationship between
intellectualism and communism – especially in mature socialist societies,
when the topic of the market had taken over the political-cultural debate in
the entire Soviet Camp and Yugoslavia – acquired particular significance in
this respect, as the polyphony of the intellectual class with its articulations
and divisions, allows us to understand better the evolution of the dynamics
between reform and conservativism, between internationalism and nationalism,
until the eve of the collapse of communism itself.
Another aspect we touched upon earlier, and which we should think about,
is that of the relationships between Russia and Central-Eastern Europe, from
the moment when both – in their complex interactions – addressed the problem
of how to relate to the West, i.e. from the end of the 18th century on. This
topic has often been neglected or eliminated, especially in recent years, with
simplistic references to Russia’s imperialist and oppressive leanings (Czarist
and communist) towards Central Europe. Nevertheless, the dense web of
interdependencies established over time is much more complex and cannot be
reduced to a mere binary oppressor-oppressed relationship or an institutional
relationship of intergovernmental contacts, inasmuch as it influenced the flow
of ideas, the circulation of projects, and the transfer of cultures. A flow, this one,
that was clearly perceived, lively and intense, at the time of the Narodnichestvo
and Marxism, and then confirmed during Bolshevism and the peasant move-
ment, to resurface with unexpected incisiveness during de-Stalinisation and
Gorbachevism.
While the issue of relations between Russia and Central-Eastern Europe
and the Balkans has understandably remained largely untouched for obvious
political reasons, it cannot be exorcised by references – so dear to one part of
humanistic culture – to a difference “in terms of civilisation” between the two,
whereby Russia ends up being systematically identified with what is non-
European, and even Asian.21 What if, instead, Russia were an integral part of
the West, not only culturally (no one denies, in fact, the European cultural
roots of Chekhov or Gorky, Glinka or Tchaikovsky, Pasternak or Vysotsky),
but also in its basic political orientations, just like its conscious choice of
belonging to the project of modernity?
One need only think, just to instil some doubt in the reader’s mind, about
the origins of communism itself, Central-West European culture, embraced by
Bolshevism (but also by other Russian political movements in the Menshevik
social-democratic or revolutionary socialist forms), oriented towards devel-
oping industry and the working class in the Messianic expectation of a revo-
lution that it imagined should return to its “natural centre” or, once again,
the West – from Germany to Great Britain. Or think, along with Nikolai
Petro, about the importance of the convergence of Soviet underground society,
dissent and international emigration in affirming democracy in Russia.22
And then if communism in Central-Eastern Europe were a little less hastily
reduced to “Soviet satellites” or “lesser children” of the West and the East
20 Introduction
(Russian), but rather considered a part of European politics with its own
features, a very different significance would be assigned to the options (or
illusions, depending on the point of view) advanced in European socialist
countries outside the USSR and aimed at defining specific models, identified
in turn with the Yugoslav alternative of self-management, the programmes of
Imre Nagy or Alexander Dubček, and with the original ideas of people’s
democracy according to simultaneous mechanisms of interaction and diver-
gence. Those can be similarly observed in the relations between continental
Western Europe and the Anglo-American world, without forgetting the
broader framework of relational flows which, with just as much intensity, affec-
ted and continue to affect the Atlantic space and the European geographical
space as a whole.23
Certainly, to return to the initial concern regarding the relationship
between Marxists, Narodniks and peasants, and the paths to modernity that
arose in the West, the comparison with otherness has always raised a problem
of group, national or state identity.24 The complex interdependency between
Russia and Central-Eastern Europe and the Balkans undoubtedly was affec-
ted over time by the controversial issue of the identity of peoples who are
demographically smaller and militarily less powerful than the Russians.
However, Russia, just like Central-Eastern Europe and the Balkans, has had
to deal with the issue of its identity compared to a West erroneously perceived
as a unique whole, and to ask itself each time where or how local character-
istics or past traditions could find their place amid the upheaval that the
complex process of modernity entailed.
This has been the torment of the political systems that have alternated in
East European spaces since the decadence of the supranational dynastic set-
tings began. Apprehension about identity (an aspect peculiar to modernity!)
was a powerful factor both in terms of hindering the assumption of Western
models, but also a stimulus to seek their own paths to modernity, all the more
so in that the same communism ideologically aspired to design an alternative
framework to Euro-Atlantic capitalism, although referring to a dynamic
context of development closely connected to the Industrial Revolution and
the formation of the working class.
Therefore many apparently distant elements ended up dialoguing and
interweaving with each other in unexpected ways, at least according to Wes-
tern criteria: just think of the convergence of orthodox communist currents
and nationalist idealism; the interweaving of interests between Party appara-
tuses and populist xenophobic nationalism, with which – by abandoning
claims to their own universalist or ecumenical principles – the traditionalist
Catholic Church as well as the Orthodox Church established close ties, even
more so because they were challenged by the new Eastward expansion of the
Protestant Church.25
On the contrary, many exponents of more advanced, industrialist and
democratic Occidentalism (even among communist ranks) ended up finding
themselves in a type of liberalism that had been more or less weakened by
Introduction 21
orientations aimed at safeguarding part of the pre-existing social state. Even
the definition of “right” and “left” appeared to be a mirror or reversed image
compared to Western tradition: it was common in Eastern Europe, especially
in the early phases of post-communist transition, to define a liberal exponent
as “leftist” and an orthodox communist as “from the right”.
For that matter, identity and modernity were the crux or, more accurately, a
dichotomy that saturated the East European political and cultural debate up
until the fall of communism. It remains to be seen whether – in spite of the
West’s acclaimed victory in the Cold War – it ceased to exist after 1989/91 or
may occur again, under a new guise, not only in view of advancing globali-
sation, but even as part of shared institution building in the process of Eur-
opean integration, also due to the different way each people or country
perceives it belongs to Europe. From this point of view, the reconstruction of
the great debates on development and the trans-national reflection that flows
from it can provide useful indications on medium- and long-term trends
which could accompany Eastern and Central European developments in the
coming decades.
Notes
1 Michel Wieviorka, La differenza culturale. Una prospettiva sociologica, Laterza,
Bari, 2002, p. 68 (original title: La différence, Éditions Balland, Paris, 2001). For
an anthropological perspective on the métissage, transversality and plurality of
cultures, on the other hand, please see Matilde Callari Galli’s stimulating reflec-
tions in Antropologia senza confini, Percorsi nella contemporaneità, Sellerio,
Palermo, 2005, especially pp. 104–14 and 193–96 and the extensive accompanying
bibliography. With “transversality” I mean the fluctuation of real existing and vir-
tual contacts (across borders, bodies and mindsets) between people, goods and
values. The process contributes to liquefying the homogeneity, cultural autarky and
uniformity of a village or a nation-state, stimulating new forms of communication
in a context of de-territorialisation and nomadism.
2 For a visual map of these networks see Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of
East Central Europe, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1995, especially
pp. 48–56, 90–92 and 104–10.
3 For example at the beginning of the 20th century Jews in Vilnius made up 41% of
the population; in Odessa 34%, in Minsk 52%, in Iaşi 57%, in Chişinau 46% and in
Białystok 63%. Other Jewish centres were Brest (65%), Lublin (47%), Ivano-Frankivs’k
(46%), and Thessaloníki (57%).
4 See e.g. Miklós Szabó, “The Liberalism of the Hungarian Nobility 1825–1910”, in
Iván Zoltán Dénes (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity. Liberal Nationalisms
and the Legacy of the Empires, CEU Press, Budapest, 2006, pp. 139–53.
5 Cf. Nachum Gross (ed.), Economic History of the Jews, Schoken Books, New
York, 1975; and Markus Arkin, Aspects of Jewish Economic History, The Jewish
Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1975.
6 More broadly on these topics see the various essays contained in Iván Zoltán
Dénes (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity … , op. cit.; and Heiko Haumann,
A History of East European Jews, CEU Press, Budapest, 2002.
7 Significant, in particular, the by now classic studies by Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities, Verso, London, 1991; and Ernst Gellner, Nations and
Nationalisms, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984.
22 Introduction
8 On the Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire see Nachum Gross (ed.), Economic
History, op. cit., pp. 56–59.
9 Maciej Janowski, Marginal or Central? The Place of the Liberal Tradition in
Nineteenth-Century Polish History, in Iván Zoltán Dénes (ed.), Liberty and the
Search for Identity, op. cit., pp. 254.
10 See Iván Zoltán Dénes, “Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and
Conservatives before 1848”, and Miklós Kun, “The Inherent Burden of Russian
Liberalism”, in Iván Zoltán Dénes (ed.), Liberty and the Search for Identity, op.
cit., pp. 179, 321; and Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Rus-
sia’s Reforms. Market Bolshevism against Democracy, US Institute of Peace Press,
Washington, DC, 2001, pp. 23ff.
11 On these topics see Michael Heffernan, The Meaning of Europe: Geography and
Geopolitics, Arnold, London, 1998, pp. 125–27, 152–53; also Robert D. English,
Russia and the Idea of the West. Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold
War, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, pp. 83–89, 131–32.
12 Alan M. Ball, Imagining America. Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century
Russia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2003, pp. 33ff.
13 A tenacious advocate of this thesis was Jacques Rupnik in his various writings,
including “On Two Models of Exit from Communism: Central Europe and the
Balkans”, in Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, Between Past and Future.
The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, CEU Press, Budapest, 2000, pp. 14–24,
even though subsequently Rupnik attenuated his assessment, as is apparent in his
article “The Post-Communist Divide”, in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner,
Democracy after Communism, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
2002, pp. 103–8. A different interpretation from Rupnik’s, especially concerning the
Habsburg legacy of autonomy of the magistracy, is in John B. Allcock, Explaining
Yugoslavia, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, p. 280.
14 Cf. Anna Seleny, “Old Political Rationalities and New Democracies: Compromise
and Confrontation in Hungary and Poland”, World Politics vol. 51, n. 4, 1999,
484–518; with the volume, stimulating for other reasons, by Milada Anna Vachu-
dova, Europe Undivided, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, which by sug-
gesting a distinction of models between liberal democracies and illiberal
democracies in post-communist transition, underestimates the weight of the crisis
of the state and the weakness of institutions in the countries bordering the Yugoslav
federation.
15 Not least from this point of view, the contribution of Andrew C. Janos, Central
Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre-to Post-
communism, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000, in which the author refers
explicitly to the relationship between “Centre” and “Periphery” in explaining –
throughout the entire book – the origins of East European backwardness and
attributing the responsibilities for it largely to international factors.
16 Please see the bibliography at the end of the next chapters, from which it is also
evident, as in the great works by, for example, Franco Venturi, Joseph Rothschild,
Moshe Lewin and François Fejtö (to cite just a few) that the geopolitical space
analysed almost never includes the whole of Eastern, Central and Balkan Europe,
but just a part of it.
17 See Robert J. Antonio (ed.), Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary,
Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2003; Karl Marx, Capital, Dover Publications, Mineola
NY, 2011; and Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1982; with Max Weber, Economy and Society, Routledge, London,
2008 [1922]; and also by Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2011 [1905]; Jürgen Habermas, The Philoso-
phical Discourse of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987; Anthony Giddens,
The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990. Also useful is
Introduction 23
Gianfranco Pasquino’s synthesis in Norberto Bobbio, Nicola Matteucci and
Gianfranco Pasquino, Dizionario di Politica, UTET, Torino, 1983, pp. 637–45.
18 Regarding these court cases, read Wickham Steed’s incisive account/testimony,
Through Thirty Years 1892–1922, Heinemann, London, 1924. See also Beniamino
Salvi, Il movimento nazionale e politico degli Sloveni e dei Croati, ISDEE, Trieste,
1971, p. 171.
19 Actually the term populism reflects such a variety of meanings that it is quite
ambiguous. The Russian movement called narodnichestvo, on the other hand, has
nothing in common, for example, with Latin American populism or the xeno-
phobic and racist manifestations of the European populist right, nor can Herzen be
compared to Perón. So, in order to avoid confusion, we prefer to maintain here the
original Russian terminology and avoid translating it. On this topic, on the other
hand, see the critical analysis of the terminology associated with the word “popu-
lism” by Andrzej Walicki in his famous volume The Controversy over Capitalism:
Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists, Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1969, pp. 1–28. A confirmation of the confusion that can occur with the use of the
term populism when indifferently referred to narodnichestvo and the demagogic,
racist, anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist tendencies of the populist parties of the
1900s can be found in the very structure and introduction of the volume edited by
Joseph Held, Populism in Eastern Europe, East European Monographs, Boulder,
NY, 1996.
20 Indeed, the electoral base of the Socialist Revolutionaries of the left was among the
peasants and a significant following revealed itself at the Pan-Russian Congress of
Peasant Deputies of June, 1917. See Edward H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia.
The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, Penguin Books, 3 vols, Harmondsworth, 1976,
vol. 1, pp. 120ff; and William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921,
Macmillan, London, 1952 [1935].
21 Compare, for example, on European cultural dualism: Domenico Caccamo, Intro-
duzione alla Storia dell’Europa Orientale, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Roma, 1991,
pp. 23–81; with Jenö Szücs, The Three Historical Regions of Europe, Kiado,
Budapest, 1983; Mikhail Agurski, The Third Rome, National-Bolshevism in the
USSR, Westview Press, Boulder, 1987; Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central
Europe”, The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33–38; or György
Konrad, Antipolitics. An Essay, Harcourt Brace & Co., London, 1984.
22 Nikolai Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy. An Interpretation of Political
Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995.
23 One must keep in mind that the leaders considered in the West mere “executors” of
the Kremlin’s will, such as Rákosi in Hungary or Zhivkov in Bulgaria or Honecker
in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (to mention a few), were intimately
convinced of their ideas and the justice of communist orthodoxy which they
claimed to interpret, to the point at which they did not hesitate to oppose those
orientations expressed by the Soviet leadership they considered wrong. The extreme
cases of Hoxha and Ceauşescu were a further confirmation of how misleading it is
to demote Central-Eastern Europe to a secondary role compared to Western
Europe and Russia. This thesis even sounds “justificationist” for the responsibility
in many respects resting with the leaders of those countries. On the other hand, the
topic of relations between Russia and Central-Eastern Europe has been the subject
of intense debate between East European intellectuals, as already pointed out in
endnote 21. A more complex vision of European and Euro-Atlantic relations is
that of Oskar Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History, Sheed and
Ward, London and New York, 1960. Another acute analysis of intra-European cul-
tural flows can be found in Angelo Tamborra, L’Europa centro-orientale nei secoli
XIX e XX (1800–1920), Vallardi editoriale, Milano, 1971, even though – also in this
case – the reconstruction of Russian events is contained within rigorous limits.
24 Introduction
24 On the intertwining of development paths and perceptions of tradition and iden-
tity, see for example, Diana Mishkova, “The Uses of Tradition and National
Identity in the Balkans”, in Maria Todorova (ed.), Balkan Identities. Nation and
Memory, Hurst, London, 2004, especially pp. 273–93; or Arthur Mendel, Dilem-
mas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1961. However, at least as far as we know, there
are no available all-encompassing studies on the region from an historical perspective
from the 19th century to the present.
25 Sabrina Ramet, L’Europa centro-orientale tra religione e politica. Cattolici, Ortodossi
e nuovi missionari dopo il 1989, Longo, Ravenna, 2008.
1 Development and backwardness
The social origins of East European politics
At the beginning of the 19th century when the effects of the Industrial Revolution
in England began to be felt in continental Europe, the most dynamic centres
in the fields of culture, finance, manufacturing and technical innovation had
already moved from the Renaissance cities of northern and central Italy to
North-Western Europe, between Paris, London and Amsterdam.
According to a wide range of literature on the topic,1 within this triangle
Belgium was the first, even before France and Holland, quickly to follow
England’s example. The Industrial Revolution was already producing a rapid
increase in the rate of development of the production of goods and services,
and was thus exerting a strong influence above all on the continent, to acquire
the new manufacturing techniques and main inventions.
The networks of relationships matured over the previous centuries in Eastern
Europe were not excluded, as already mentioned, from this influence. This
region was already sensitive to the topics of modernity promoted mainly by
the Enlightenment and the new economic theories of the 17th and 18th centuries
(from cameralism to physiocracy) due to the diffusion of the press, uni-
versities, academies and high schools, as well as economic and trade ties
which over time had linked East European agricultural production to markets
in North-Western Europe. The diasporas, intellectuals and a part of the
nobility showed the most vivid interest in becoming part of the dynamic fra-
mework of changes, to receive the stimuli and re-elaborate them in relation to
their own interests and the surrounding political climate.
However, institutional and legislative conditions, social relationships, and
religious, cultural and mental predispositions varied according to region, for-
cing local political and economic players to measure for the first time so
overtly the existing distance between the potential for development and the
obstacles which, depending on the situation, impeded growth at the feverish
rhythms perceived elsewhere. The topic of backwardness and how to over-
come it became part of the political agenda, generating controversial aspira-
tions to bring about a huge structural adjustment which essentially imposed
on each society the alternative of either accepting, mixing with or rejecting
the development model generated by Great Britain.
26 Development and backwardness
In reality, this dilemma was perceived as difficult to resolve – in addition to
being obviously political in nature – as it imposed a choice between pro-
gressive economic, social and cultural autarky and an inevitable adjustment,
between opening to new international métissage or rejecting it in the name of
safeguarding local identity.
This situation contributed to the spread of a new (for those times) repre-
sentation of intra-European relations, characterised by the consolidation of
the Eurocentric-Western mythology according to which the sources of devel-
opment (more broadly referring to the idea of “civilisation”) and back-
wardness (corresponding, on the other hand, to “barbarism”) were made to
coincide respectively with the notions of “West” and “East”, in which the
“degree of distance from the idea of civilisation” became more pronounced as
one gradually proceeded eastward.2
From the cultural point of view this was indeed a radical approach, over-
turning the previous identification of the “civilisation-barbarism” binomial
given to the “South-North” dichotomy based on a rather more traditional
and, let us say, “classical” approach in view of its Latin origin, which up to
that point had been dominant in European culture.
In reality, as Larry Wolff relates, the map of civilisations was already in the pro-
cess of being reconstructed, in the wake of perceptions pondered by 18th-century
European intellectuals and travellers.3 These perceptions had become inter-
woven with the rooted conviction of Voltaire and many followers of the
Enlightenment, when they posed themselves the problem of Europe’s future
and how to reform its political systems. Though theirs was a mainly philoso-
phical and geographic point of view, again according to Wolff’s definition,
they too referred, as did the physiocrats in their salons, to categories of
backwardness and development. In so doing they arrived at a dichotomous
East-West interpretation of Europe which, in their case, was mainly used to
offer their services to the East, as that region was (mistakenly) perceived as a
tabula rasa, or clean slate, a space without history’s negative limitations and,
therefore, receptive and ripe for building a society free of the vices of the
Western Ancien Régime (where most intellectuals of the Enlightenment
expressed a positive assessment of “orientalism”).4
It was, therefore, within the context of a re-orientation of the mental maps
of Europe that the Industrial Revolution ended up supplanting Afro-Asiatic
primacy, held since the 18th century in science, technology, manufacturing
and trade and even military, by Indians, Arabs, Turks and Chinese.5
In other words, the Industrial Revolution which started in Great Britain
began, with all its transformative force, to impose decisive changes on eco-
nomic and social organisation, rapidly demonstrating the technical power,
innovative efficiency and the capacity to trigger social repercussions that had
not been seen in Europe – with such breadth and rapidity – since the fall of
the Roman Empire.
Soon the impact and the attractive force it was able to exert – in connection
with the political ideas of the French Revolution – proved to be of universal
Development and backwardness 27
importance, incomparably greater than any other model of reference. It shook
deeply rooted habits and ways of thinking, and undermined the roots of a
centuries-old stability of relations between production, commerce, city and
village. It also radically altered concepts of space and time, which for cen-
turies had been determined by the speed of communication permitted by the
horse and the sailing ship.6
From that moment, not only did everything radically change, but the pace
of change also rapidly increased. Hence, it was inevitable from the start of the
19th century that the priority of politicians and intellectuals would be to
overcome any obstacles or constraints on development. It was especially
Eastern Europe, geopolitically on the edge of the area generating new forms
of production, that felt its impact, dynamics and implications.
This, of course, does not mean that differences in development did not exist
before the Industrial Revolution. When Immanuel Wallerstein in 1974 used
the concepts of “Centre” and “Periphery”,7 the former had been identified
with Western Europe since the 16th century and the latter assigned to Eastern
Europe (as well as Latin America). Wallerstein was in fact drawing on a
debate that had been around for some time in European and East European
studies, at least since 1887 when Georg Friedrich Knapp8 had associated the
origin of differentiated development in Europe with the development, on
the right bank of the Elbe, of a manor system of land use, whereas on the left
side large landed estates prevailed.9
It was this difference, with its juridical and social implications and geo-
graphical location, which accounted for the unevenness of East European
economic development, especially according to Polish (and later also Hun-
garian) historiographic views that emerged during the Sixth World Congress
of Historical Sciences in 1928.
As a result, however, not only was an interpretation of modernisation as a
process of “catch-up and imitation” along the West–East axis endorsed, but
an explanation was preferred that arbitrarily extended the situation on one
side of the Elbe to the entire half of a continent. This subsequently triggered
heated debates which dragged on for decades and led other scholars10 to
propose different classifications, by segments or areas. However, the extent of
backwardness in one region inevitably ended up being compared to the
“radiating centre”, i.e. Western Europe.
Of course it is difficult to deny that the “Centre-Periphery” dichotomy
proposed by Wallerstein did not have a significant effect on Europe, and that
it did not provide a motivation – far beyond the interpretations offered by
historians, politicians, and an increasingly well-informed and lively public
opinion – for cultural and political frustration, crushed expectations, hopes
and “alternative” plans vis-à-vis the West which surfaced on various occa-
sions from the beginning of the 19th century in the less developed areas of
Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
In interpretative terms, however, Wallerstein’s arguments encouraged some
prominent experts in East European economics to ask themselves once again
28 Development and backwardness
about the origins of East European backwardness. A 1985 meeting of the
Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio provided the opportunity to do this.
The result was a successful publication edited by Daniel Chirot, in which the
authors basically highlight how different levels of development had existed in
Europe long before the Industrial Revolution.11 In other words the authors
agreed that a combination of factors dating far back in time contributed in
different forms and ways, depending on the region, to determining East
European backwardness and its dependency on the West.
In particular, they argued that the reasons behind the unfavourable condi-
tions for modern development in South-Eastern Europe lay in the persistence
of a predominantly pastoral economy and low demographic density. What
also emerges from their study, however, is how the Balkans experienced
phases of prosperity and population growth, and how these very factors led to
intense exploitation of agricultural land, followed, as in other parts of Europe,
and particularly in the Mediterranean, by “political crises, environmental
degradation, migration, and demographic decline”.12
As we can see, this scenario does not attribute the origins of backwardness
in South-Eastern Europe to long Ottoman rule, as does Balkan nationalist
historiography. On the contrary, it tends to highlight a variety of economic,
environmental and cultural phenomena which appear to have been common
to other European Mediterranean regions such as Spain in the 17th century,
contravening the theory founded on mere East-West contrast.
On the other hand, the mechanisms that affected South-East Europe differ
profoundly from those that characterised the evolution of the Baltic area.13
Here it was the factor of barter trade with the West – based on grain in
exchange for manufactured goods – that led to a growing dependence on
technology, thus contributing to a decline in the importance of towns and
cities, while the great landed estates became more firmly established. In the
process, the aristocracy basically abandoned the sword for the plough and
soon demonstrated they were able to control agricultural production directly
through the large landed estates. This led in turn to the establishment and
spread of serfdom.
The line of argument developed during the meeting in Bellagio, on the
other hand, was that Bohemia constituted a special case. Because of its geo-
graphical position between the Baltic area and the Danube-Balkan region, it
was able to keep step socially and economically with the surrounding regions
of Austria and Bavaria, despite the re-introduction of the feudal system,
urban reorganisation, the levying of taxes and excises on trade following the
surrender of Prague in 1547, and despite its loss of independence as a result of
the disastrous defeat of White Mountain in 1620 to the Catholic House of
Habsburg.
Hungary in turn followed a different path. After its return to Catholic rule
as a result of the Habsburg victories, the retreat of the Turks between 1683
and 1699 (ratified by the Treaty of Karlowitz) and the defeat of the insurrec-
tion mounted by Ferenc Rákóczi II, the Habsburg monarchy and the landed
Development and backwardness 29
aristocracy formed a solid anti-bourgeois alliance which extended across
the geopolitical area of the Danube. As in the case of the Baltics, this enabled
the large landed estates to prevail over the urban classes, and permitted the
consolidation of serfdom to the detriment of the peasantry.14
In Poland, on the other hand, the success of the “Republic of Nobles”15
was not only an indication of the strength acquired by the magnates, but also
of the deep-rooted conviction that a “weak state” would make the country
less “dangerous” and therefore less attractive to potential enemies.
The outcome, as we know, was very different: Poland’s partitioning at the
end of the 18th century. This ended up being an advantage, however, also for
Russia, the backwardness of which compared to Poland’s at the time had
been progressively mitigated by the construction of an industrial base, albeit
oriented mainly towards military imperatives. Paradoxically in some areas of
Poland the subsequent growth phase came about as a result of the occupation
and the need to develop pilot areas to take the lead and produce benefits
which could then potentially have more general effects.16
Overall, the conclusions of the Bellagio debate drew a complex picture of
the economic and social dynamics in Eastern Europe with regard to devel-
opment, pointing out the various levels of backwardness, traditions, cultures,
and social and political histories of the regions involved.
Nonetheless, despite the diversity of the East European area’s initial con-
ditions – from the Baltic to the Danube, from Sarmatia to the Balkans, there
is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and its impact on
Eastern Europe marked a watershed, indelibly marking the politics of those
regions.
Once contact had been established between industrial forms of Western
development and the agrarian societies of Central and Eastern Europe and
the Balkans (as different as they were originally), this contact produced a
political and social situation that was profoundly influenced by the dilemmas
which arose in the search for the most effective reference model. The adoption
of any particular model was, in fact, conditioned by the range of options
available. At one end of the spectrum was the “autarkic” model, and at the
other “integration/assimilation” of Western political and economic institu-
tions and cultural stimulus. Between these two poles there were various
intermediate solutions.
In short, the geopolitical reconstruction of the relationship between devel-
opment and backwardness preferred at the Bellagio conference confirms the
existence of a differentiated process of development in Eastern Europe. This
development can be characterised as a “leopard skin” with some leading
regions surrounded by much vaster areas marked by the prevalence of rural,
technically less evolved economies and/or insufficient political-economic
conditions for dealing with the challenges of industrial modernisation.
Apart from this, the discouragement of transversal or trans-national the-
matic currents that characterised the relationship between politics and pro-
blems of development brings to light the limits placed on the previously
30 Development and backwardness
mentioned networks of relationships and social sectors. These networks were
actually ready to accept change, to demand structural adjustments that could
facilitate access to modernity and to represent newly forming interests.
These limits included, for example, the geopolitical changes imposed by
power politics, in particular when this provoked such social upheaval as to
impoverish certain territories, thus bringing about a widespread state of
backwardness.
The end of independence did, in fact, act as a brake on development at
least insofar as it involved territorial divisions which eradicated previous local
economic and commercial ties, or established new relationships between city
and countryside and between peasants and large landowners, mostly to the
detriment of the former and the advantage of the latter.
Similarly, a permanent state of war, as was the case along the border
between the Habsburg Empire and the Sublime Porte, was a factor con-
tributing to depopulation and military devastation in some regions. Thus
military and/or political occupation and radical changes in the balance
between the major powers affected conditions of territorial development,
limiting its capacity to respond to the challenges of manufacturing and free
trade at a time when this was of crucial importance.
Yet, as we have already noted, political dependency did not always have
these results.
This was the case in Bohemia, where despite the devastation wreaked by
the Thirty Years War and movement “ahead of its time” from the city to the
countryside, modern farming techniques, fish farming, beer brewing, and the
textile and mining industries had already developed in the 18th century. In
some Polish regions, especially those of the Kingdom of Poland that were
subjects of the Russian czars, a state steel industry flourished as did privately
run woollen mills, later replaced by cotton mills. A similar benevolent destiny
awaited the Polish regions under Prussian control such as Upper Silesia (with
the intensive development of mining) and the Poznań region, where agricultural
production increased.17
Important as they were, these were exceptions. Despite the differences from
one region to another, which were often substantial, islands of development
remained territorially and socially circumscribed and were de facto “scat-
tered” throughout the immense “rural and technically backward sea” of
Central-Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
There were, however, numerous religious, political, social and cultural fac-
tors that played a part in limiting these exceptions. Some religious precepts,
for example, created an atmosphere contrary to modernisation. An eloquent
example of this was the role played in the Ottoman Empire by the Hanafi
School, which spread a negative attitude of ideological and legal resistance to
the development of innovation and modern techniques which in the past had
ensured the Sublime Porte’s power and invincibility as it advanced in the
Mediterranean and towards the centre of Europe. Prior to the 18th century,
pluralism had been guaranteed by the four schools of Sunnite Islamic law;18
Development and backwardness 31
in the 1700s this was gradually supplanted by the Hanafi rite, which was
officially adopted by the state in the 18th century. The Hanafi School imposed
formalistic legalism throughout the empire which restricted freedom of
research starting with theology and later permeating other fields, in particular
the press.
The rise of the Hanafi School is historically situated within the context of
the Sublime Porte’s rapid decline. Once the vast and rich territories north of the
Danube and the Sava rivers were lost between the 17th and 18th centuries, the
Ottoman Empire was unable to offer its subjects the opportunities for social
growth and well-being it had been able to ensure in previous centuries. Faced
with such difficulties, the Hanafi School opposed events by reacting out of
self-preservation, psychologically understandable but politically disastrous,
promoting cultural isolation at the very moment when new manufacturing
techniques were being experimented on and spreading throughout North-Western
Europe.
As a result, this attitude reversed the previous one, which was much more
open to innovation and had been systematically pursued up until the 16th
century. At the time, in fact, the Turks’ skill at fusing metal and their ability
to administer and organise were a century ahead of the Western world. These
were aspects of a more general trend, as mentioned before, which attributed a
leadership role to the Afro-Asiatic space in the process of human civilisation.
This positive propensity for modernisation had allowed the Ottoman Empire
to take on a dominant position, providing the fundamental basis for its
expansion and success. Later, however, the combination of military defeats
and religious prescriptions opposing the introduction of new techniques and
innovation coming from the West contributed just as decisively to accelerating
its decline, to the point of making it inevitable.19
More or less at the same time, other religious convictions – in this case
Christian – had a similar effect, for example in Imperial Russia.
Gerschenkron’s excellent study of Russian industrialisation20 duly explains
how much Russia was affected by the prohibition, theological in origin, bar-
ring Old Believers from changing their social status. Since this was considered
an expression of divine will, it could not be changed. Thus huge amounts of
wealth remained inaccessible: in fact, confronted with persecution imposed
first by Peter the Great and then several times at the behest of the Orthodox
Church, this money was used for the secret religious education of believers (in
Russia or abroad) and to pay the enormous taxes imposed by the czars.
Consequently sums accumulated by Old Believer peasants who had become
entrepreneurs – particularly in the textile sector and in the grain trade – were
not invested to expand commercial and industrial activities. On the contrary,
these sums were diverted mainly to ethical-religious ends, and therefore did
not help to create an entrepreneurial bourgeois class willing to risk accumulated
capital to increase resources and productive growth.
So in the wake of what Max Weber observed about the link between the Pro-
testant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, or the Catholic Church’s anti-modernist
32 Development and backwardness
positions at the time of the Syllabus and the encyclical Quanta cura, religious
convictions in Russia and the Ottoman Empire also had an unquestionable
effect, contributing (as in the Catholic Mediterranean area) to braking or
dispersing the effect of changes which could have created favourable condi-
tions for development and limiting the effect of social groups’ efforts to
achieve modernity.
On the other hand, along with religious prescriptions that constrained
modernity, anti-Semitism should also be mentioned, at least in regard to the
prejudices of Christian origin which fuelled and spread it. Clearly this was
also encouraged by cultural and social biases promoted to varying degrees by
governments (especially in Russia, Poland and Romania, but also in Austria-
Hungary). The fact is that in any case, as will become more evident in the
next chapter, anti-Semitism decisively contributed to circumscribing the
spread of liberalism. Rich Jews (especially merchants and bankers) concretely
subscribed to these liberal principles, becoming promoters of accumulation
and investment in compliance with legislative limits imposed on them from
time to time by restrictive and discriminatory government policies. These
policies were often violently intimidating, and when spirits became aroused,
they turned into pogroms.21
In similar ways and forms, other behaviour ascribable to the political-social
sphere in turn led to similar results. For example, the impact of factors men-
tioned earlier, that is the prevalence of the landed aristocracy in defining the
property structure in the countryside and discouraging growth in the cities as
centres of trade, finance and cultural exchange. This process, whether trig-
gered by crushing military defeat (like that of White Mountain) or alliances
between the local aristocracy and a foreign imperial court (as in the case of
Hungary), also resulted in limiting the formation of the bourgeoisie, dimin-
ishing mercantilist tendencies, the delayed imposition of serfdom and limiting
the liberal nobility’s room for manoeuvre.
These events had long-term repercussions. The defeat of the bourgeoisie in
its emergent phase and de-urbanisation in the modern age profoundly affected
both the establishment of an entrepreneurial class (by weakening it politically)
and its primary accumulation process (by impoverishing it materially). Forms
of serfdom de facto bound workers inextricably to the land, tying up the labour
supply just when industrialisation was in the process of getting established.
Alexander Gerschenkron, in his seminal study on backwardness,22 identi-
fied the essential prerequisites for setting off the “big spurt” (as he defined it)
to include the availability of labour, the primary accumulation of capital,
entrepreneurs’ propensity to risk and the collective’s attitude towards entre-
preneurial activity. It was the absence of these prerequisites, due to events
during the 16th and 17th centuries, as mentioned above, which contributed to
creating an unbridgeable gap between East European economic-social status
and the needs dictated by 19th-century industrialisation.
It is curious to see how this change in the balance between cities and the
countryside, to the sole benefit of the landed aristocracy, was widespread
Development and backwardness 33
throughout Eastern Europe. Moreover, and despite differences from region to
region, its origins can be seen in how the relationship changed between the
aristocracy and war during the transition from the Middle Ages to the
modern era in these regions of Europe.
In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy’s main social function was to wage war.
The subsequent relinquishing of this function by a large number of its mem-
bers and its replacement by agricultural production as the safest means for
creating wealth led to a profound transformation in Central-Eastern Europe’s
economic and social processes, which affected both the city-countryside
relationship and the relationship between peasants and the land.
That this transformation was caused by the increasing use of mercenaries
or soldiers of fortune, or by the support offered by foreign armies (the Aus-
trians) who proved in some cases to be strategic allies of local nobles when
fighting those of different religious convictions (Protestants or Muslims, for
example) or new social groups (like the nascent bourgeoisie) is nothing more
than a local differentiating factor. It does not change the overall situation, in
which the landed aristocracy prevailed.
In short, the events in Bohemia that took place between the surrender of
Prague and the battle of White Mountain, as well as the attitudes that pre-
vailed among Hungarian magnates after the defeat at Mohács and Hungary’s
re-conversion to Catholicism in the early 1700s, led to a situation not that
different from Poland’s, in which the nobles even refused to pay taxes to
maintain the army. They did this so as not to jeopardise their personal and
political freedom and the secure income guaranteed by their lands and their
control over the peasants.
Demographic decline and growing possibilities to purchase luxury goods
with the income from grain sales on domestic and Western markets also
contributed to reinforcing the above-mentioned trend.
However, even in places where these factors were not so influential because
there were fewer opportunities to trade with the West, as in the case of
Russia, the landed aristocracy still became stronger, leaving access to the
military to cadets and others. It was Peter the Great who encouraged Dutch,
English, German and foreign immigration in general to provide the army and
administration with specialised personnel with the technical, administrative
and organisational expertise necessary to reform and modernise (and also to
develop crafts). At the same time the czar also regulated farm inheritances by
introducing the concept of primogeniture. This prevented estates from being
divided up by heirs and bound a section of the dvorjane (landowners) to the
land and its profits.23
In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, the feudal system underwent rapid change
starting at the end of the 16th century when the price revolution put an end to the
spahija or sipahi’s (the sultan’s cavalry) interest in carrying out military cam-
paigns.24 The cavalry was rewarded by the sultan with a non-inheritable plot of
land called timar, with a fixed value in terms of income. As the empire expanded,
opportunities grew for distributing land in exchange for military loyalty.
34 Development and backwardness
However, the price revolution caused a massive depreciation in the cur-
rency’s value, and the timar also lost value. Consequently the sipahi’s interest
in waging war rapidly vanished as the land they received in compensation for
military service was no longer a form of wealth accumulation, nor did it lead
to an increase in income. On the contrary,
. it reinforced the sipahi’s tendency,
encouraged by imperial officials in Istanbul, to exploit the lands already
under their control, transforming them into inheritable property.
Thus while the sipahi tended to focus increasingly on the personal and
family advantages to be had by exploiting their lands, the sultan in his
obsessive search for fresh troops to send to conquer faraway lands25 was
forced to resort to mercenary infantry troops, by forcefully conscripting sol-
diers in the countryside. Given the need for funds to pay the peasant infantry
that was gradually replacing the cavalry, the Sublime Porte levied increasingly
heavy taxes on rural areas, not necessarily only Christian ones. It was not
until 1843 that the reform of military service – as part of the renewal of the
Tanzimat – founded the basis for creating a modern army.
In the meantime, with the defeat of Vienna at the hands of Jan Sobieski’s
troops and the ensuing disastrous and rapid retreat, the Ottomans abandoned
Hungary, Transylvania and most of Croatia-Slavonia. Withdrawal from these
fertile lands forced many sipahi, janissaries and officers to retreat south of
the Danube and the Sava. Many settled in Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia,
where they attempted to reconstruct their sources of income. Taking advan-
tage of weak central power, increasingly incapable of maintaining control
over the empire’s lands, they usurped part of the existing lands, imposing their
own taxes on the peasantry (who were thus doubly oppressed).
As a result the timar were broken up to form a new, still illegal type of
inheritable property known as çiftlik (or čitluk).26 Increasing numbers of these
were also the result over the long term of the fact that they were split between
heirs, creating small allotments that yielded limited income. In addition, the
systematic exploitation of Christian peasants sparked revolts, given that most
of the Ottoman military tended to safeguard their own incomes by exploiting
the countryside.
The degenerative increase in the number of farms undoubtedly played a
role in the inevitable process of decline. Here too, however, social change
originating with the reorganisation of the military and marked by the caval-
ry’s preference for farming which consequently bound them to the land, pro-
duced a generalised phenomenon in the Ottoman Empire. Here, like in
Central Europe, albeit in different forms and with other mechanisms, the
aristocracy preferred farming in order to make more profit, and established
control over the peasants either through the institution of serfdom or the
tyranny of taxation.
The impoverishment and/or rigidity of social relations in Eastern Europe
then combined with the conservative aristocracy’s (large landowners as well as
those who had authority over smaller portions of land) growing attachment to
specific values such as isolation and self-sufficiency in food and production.
Development and backwardness 35
These values were considered to be guarantees of independence, and indivi-
dual and political liberty by the landed classes who no longer intended to
serve or be subordinate to a central imperial power.
In the process of constructing political culture, the identification of virtues
always acquires crucial importance, and in our case the spread of values orien-
ted towards the convergence of isolation, self-sufficiency and independence
represented a fundamental passage in the formation of ideas that accompanied
the birth and evolution of the modern nation-state in Eastern Europe.
In this situation the positive values attributed to the above concepts were
further bolstered by the manifest support of the peasants,27 especially those
bound to a village economy, as in the southern Slav zadruga and bratstvo,
the Romanian sat, the Russian mir and obshchina, the Slovak rod and the
Albanian fis. In the countryside an autarkic culture originated from the need
to protect the extended family from outside dangers, be it war or looting, or
natural calamities such as floods or famine, as well as in daily life. We should
not forget that production (from ploughing to harvesting and raising live-
stock, from “proto-industrial” activities geared to manufacturing textiles and
cookware to the hunting and gathering, to maintaining dwellings) required a
quantitative use of labour, at that time ensured solely by extended families
and mechanisms of interfamily and village solidarity.28
Finally, and we will see this later on, behaviours stemming from experiences
accumulated in the past, like the acute (and natural) sensitivity regarding self-
protection of the group, and the prospect of independence promoted by the
landowning classes combined with economic protectionism of the 19th-century
modern state, further reinforced this basic culture.
We must keep in mind that on the whole this was a process in many ways
comprehensible and similar to other Western countries (just think of Eng-
land’s severe tariff protectionism which lasted from the 1600s to the middle of
the 19th century).29 In Eastern Europe, however, this process lasted much
longer, to the point that it prevented access of the growing and pressing mass
of the population to industrialised Europe’s productive innovation.
In fact, instead of ensuring protection and decision-making autonomy,
isolation excluded East European agriculture from the technical innovations
spreading throughout the West. Thus the level of knowledge about farming
methods and machinery became progressively inadequate and obsolete, nulli-
fying East European agriculture’s competitive potential and leaving these
countries culturally unprepared to deal with the challenges of industrialisation.
It is still true, though, that East European isolation, albeit growing, was
neither all-encompassing nor systematic. In this sense the Russia of Peter the
Great and Catherine II differed markedly: an example of pragmatic technical
and cultural openness which among other things placed Russia among the
great powers of Europe. Due to the complexity of this widespread reforming
spirit, not only did economic development accelerate (here the state often
took on a monopolistic role, albeit promoting private enterprise), but the
primacy of science was also asserted, encouraging secondary and technical
36 Development and backwardness
education as well as the Academy of Science’s activities. In sum, the seeds of
modernity, transformed by the Enlightenment, had been sown in Czarist
Russia: from Voltaire to Herder, numerous intellectuals and experts worked to
“Europeanise” Russia. These efforts at including it seemed to overcome the
insuperable distance between “the West” and “Russia”.30
The fact remains, however, that Russia’s efforts to industrialise in the 18th
century continued to be highly dependent on the country’s military needs: it
was in fact dominated by the political goal of conquest and the needs of war.
Thus essential sectors like mining and textiles were directed by the state first
to provide weapons and uniforms for the army, whereas intensive paper
production served the state’s bureaucratic requirements.
In truth, even Great Britain financed its army and wars (including the
Napoleonic wars and subsequently for several decades) by drawing resources
mainly from industrial development, but mainly through the tariff system. In
Imperial Russia, on the other hand (with a less protectionist regime than
England), industrial and fiscal policies served almost exclusively the needs of
power politics.31
As mentioned previously, given the shortage of available private capital,
taxation was used unscrupulously by the czars to collect the funds necessary
to sustain production mainly for military or administrative purposes. The
result was uneven, discontinuous development, unable to produce stable and
long-lasting results that could produce new wealth in sectors not necessarily
connected to the needs of the military or of power. Quite the contrary, it
burned up accumulated resources, making great victories possible but also
causing sudden halts each time the tax authorities exhausted their capacity to
raise capital due to systematic exploitation of the population, particularly in
the countryside. At that point industry slowed down, and with it, Russia’s
offensive capacity, forcing the czar to sign armistices or peace treaties (as
occurred several times between Peter the Great and Sweden and Turkey).32
In conclusion, a complex combination of factors (religious, political, social,
ethical, cultural and behavioural) contributed over time to creating the con-
ditions for backwardness in Eastern Europe just when Great Britain was
beginning to develop.
The significance of each of these factors differed depending on historical
legacies, political experiences and cultural sedimentations constituting each
micro-region’s specific nature in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, regardless
of the main factor, whether it was international, religious, economic, social,
cultural or a combination of these, the fact remains that the entire area found
itself facing the challenges of modernisation in the first decades of the 19th
century, with a political and social system that was technologically and
structurally inadequate. Indeed, the system seemed static in Central Europe
and Russia, while in the Ottoman Empire, by then considered the “sick man
of Europe”, disintegrative forces intensified.
Indeed, in both cases (not just in the case of the Sublime Porte), contact
with industrial modernisation accentuated political instability and intensified
Development and backwardness 37
the debate of ideas. The fear of a socially based Russian revolution was, for
example, quite widespread among intellectuals and conservative classes, as
well as among the imperial courts following the upheavals caused by the
French Revolution and Napoleon’s adventures.
At the beginning of the 19th century Joseph de Maistre, during his stay in
St. Petersburg as ambassador of the Kingdom of Sardinia, had the opportunity
to observe the tensions running through Russian society. A conservative and
anti-modernist aristocrat, he recommended that serfdom be maintained and
that public education be abandoned along with the establishment of the
Academy and the introduction of the sciences, which he considered dangerous
as they were outside the control of the Catholic Church.
Marquis de Custine’s premonitions were similar in nature. He was also
concerned about a possible social revolution in Russia, brought on by the
conditions of the peasantry and also encouraged by the possible influence of
religious sects.
In contrast, fear of social turmoil led Baron Von Haxthausen (himself a
junker, a Prussian landed aristocrat) to suggest the development of village
communities, enhancing their hierarchic and patriarchal structure and
through skilful management introducing technical innovations on large
landed estates so as to stabilise conservative-aristocratic control over rural
society in Prussian and Russian Europe.33
These are a few important examples of the conservative nobility’s growing
unrest. This stemmed from the perception of imminent radical changes with the
expansion of modernisation and its accompanying phenomena, e.g. indus-
trialisation, urbanisation, secularisation and mass education. In addition,
there was the push to build nation-states that would disrupt continental geo-
politics but most of all would sweep away the legitimacy of monarchic and
noble power with the progressive assertion of liberalism and democratic
ideals.
It was obvious that the conservative landed aristocracy, i.e. the same local
magnate aristocracy that had prevented the emergence of the bourgeoisie in
Bohemia and Hungary between the 16th and 17th centuries and had agreed
to “Germanise” itself (to show its allegiance to the imperial house of Central
Europe), feared any change that might weaken its role. Above all it sensed, to
its dismay, the risk of a revolution that could permanently overturn the social
status quo. In a way, in areas with particularly weak institutions like the
Ottoman Empire, the Serbian peasant uprisings in 1804 made it clear how
social problems, by assuming the features of a national revolt, were able to
accelerate the destabilisation of the multinational empires.34
The “fear of revolution”, on the other hand, was a sign of the aristocracy’s
awareness of how wide the gap was between the expectations of social trans-
formation in the various strata of society (bourgeoisie, workers, peasants) and
the increasingly tenacious resistance of the landed aristocracy (be it large
landowners or owners of small yet inheritable plots of land) who were firmly
against upsetting the “traditional” order. This gap fully demonstrated the
38 Development and backwardness
tension between the desire for change and obstacles preventing that change,
thus identifying itself as the very essence of backwardness which can be seen
at once as a relative and dynamic concept.
It was against this complex background that heated debates on moder-
nisation and the best conditions for ensuring a country’s development took
shape, in successive stages and in keeping with the times. The contents of this
debate ended up translating into a vision of “politics” with a strong social
imprint.
In other words, it was at this time that the foundations and the social ori-
gins of East European politics were defined. This basis was a widespread
phenomenon, shared by “late comers” (to use an old definition of Hobs-
bawm’s35) across the region, in spite of local differences and peculiarities. In
fact, also due to the relative speed (in general faster than many West Eur-
opean contexts) with which, after the Great War, universal suffrage and the
mobilisation of mass consensus was achieved, social problems ranging from
equity to development strongly influenced the programmes and stances of all
political forces from the Elbe to the Ural Mountains, from the Baltic to the
Aegean. These social problems defined domestic and international alignments
and political alliances, and mobilised the populations’ passions in a frame of
reference that oscillated for a long time between autarky and interdependence,
between openness to new things and the refusal to change.
Notes
1 See among others the “classics” by R.M. Hartwell, The Causes of the Industrial
Revolution, Methuen and Co., London, 1967; and, by the same author, “Economic
Change in England and Europe 1780–1830” in The New Cambridge Modern His-
tory, vol. IX, 1965, pp. 31–48; Milward and Saul, The Development of the Econo-
mies of Continental Europe, op. cit.; Paul Bairoch, Rivoluzione industriale e
sottosviluppo, Einaudi, Torino, 1967; Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Back-
wardness in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,
1962.
2 On the construction of the Eurocentric mythology and the typical European-Western
perception of human civilisation, see the provocative and well-documented volumes
by Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Vintage, London, 1991; and John Hobson, The
Eastern Origins of the Western Civilisation, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 2004. These topics will be revisited in more detail at the conclusion of this
comparative study.
3 Cf. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of
the Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 10, p. 356.
4 The concept of tabula rasa was articulated particularly by Leibnitz and became
very popular among the followers of the Enlightenment, especially those who, like
Voltaire, established close ties with Catherine II’s Russia. See also Dieter Groh, La
Russia e l’autocoscienza d’Europa, Einaudi, Torino, 1980, pp. 31–44.
5 Cf., on this, Henry Reynolds, Black Pioneers, Penguin, London, 2000; with the less
recent but equally corrosive volume by George James, Stolen Legacy, Philosophical
Library, New York, 1954.
6 See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990.
Development and backwardness 39
7 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Academic Press,
New York, 1974.
8 See, more broadly, Domenico Caccamo, Introduzione alla Storia dell’Europa
Orientale, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Roma, 1991, pp. 131–34.
9 Basically, landed seigneuries bound peasants to a noble landlord through yearly
rents in kind, while manorial seigneuries bound peasants to the land and imposed
a series of services (corvées) on them, on the basis of which they would pay the
landlord duties for the use of the farm.
10 Cf., e.g., John Lampe and Marvin Jackson, Balkan Economic History, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1982; Jerzy Topolski, La nascita del capitalismo in
Europa, Einaudi, Torino, 1979; Iván T. Berend and Gyorgy Ránki, Economic
Development in East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1974.
11 Daniel Chirot (ed.), The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1989.
12 See essays by John Lampe, “Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Rede-
fining Balkan Backwardness”, and Fikret Adanir, “Tradition and Rural Change in
Southeastern Europe during Ottoman Rule”, in Chirot (ed.), The Origins of Back-
wardness, op. cit., pp. 131–209; with Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), Economic Decline of
Empires, Methuen, London, 1970.
13 By Baltic area here we mean, as indicated by Hugh Seton-Watson, that part of
Central-Eastern Europe where the rivers flow north and empty into the Baltic Sea.
See Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars 1918–1941, Westview
Press, Boulder and London, 1986.
14 Cf. on these events also Riccardo Picchio, “L’Europa Orientale nel XVIII secolo”, in
Ernesto Pontieri (ed.), Storia Universale, Vallardi Commissionaria, Ed., Milano,
1970, pp. 369–71; Péter Hanák (ed.), Storia dell’Ungheria, Angeli, Milano,
1996, pp. 75–83; István Lázár, Hungary, a Brief History, Corvina, Budapest, 1990,
pp. 130–31.
15 The “Republic of Nobles” (szlachta) was de facto decreed by the Union of Lublin
between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569, and by the way in which
Henry of Valois, chosen in 1573 as the first monarch following the extinction of the
Jagiellonian dynasty, was elected. See Riccardo Picchio, L’Europa Orientale dal
Rinascimento all’età illuministica, op. cit., pp. 235–53.
16 Regarding issues of economic development and political dependence, cf. the papers
presented at the conference in Bellagio by Robert Brenner, “Economic Back-
wardness in Eastern Europe in Light of Developments in the West”, Péter Gunst,
“Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe”, and Jacek Kochanowicz,
“The Polish Economy and the Evolution of Dependency”, in Chirot (ed.), The Origins
of Backwardness, op. cit., pp. 5–130; with the studies by Witold Kula, The Pro-
blems and Methods of Economic History, Burlington, Ashgate, 2001; The Cam-
bridge Economic History of Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965;
and for the Balkans, the extensive and detailed work by Jozo Tomasevich, Peasant,
Politics and Economic Change in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
1955. On Russia see in particular the more recent Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Econ-
omy, Batsford, London, 1986; and cf. Valentin Giterman, Storia della Russia, 2
vols, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1973; Teodor Shanin, Russia as a Developing
Society, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1965, in particular chapter 5 on the morphology
of Russia’s backwardness; and Lionel Kochan, The Making of Modern Russia, St.
Martin’s Press, New York, 1983, especially the parts about Peter the Great and his
economic policies.
17 See Jacek Kochanowicz, “The Polish Economy and the Evolution of Dependency”,
in Chirot (ed.), The Origins of Backwardness, op. cit., pp. 120–21.
40 Development and backwardness
18 Which are, to be precise, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali.
19 Compare André Miquel, L’Islam. Storia di una civiltà, SEI, Torino, 1973, pp. 283–84;
Henry Charles Puech, Histoire des Religions. L’Islam, Gallimard, Paris, 1970–76,
vol. 2, pp. 646–94, and vol. 3, pp. 3–179; Nerkez Smajlagić, Leksikon Islama,
Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1990.
20 See Alexander Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror, Cambridge University
Press, London, 1970. See also Milward and Saul, The Development of the Economies
of Continental Europe, op. cit.
21 On discriminatory legislation in the Habsburg Empire see C.A. Macartney, The
Habsburg Empire 1790–1918, Macmillan, New York, 1969. On the Jewish situation
in the Czarist Empire see Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism,
Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1862–1917, Cambridge University Press, New
York, 1981. As Witold Kula had already observed, the Jewish contribution to East
European economic development has not been a preferred area of study, in spite of
its crucial importance, compared to the political-cultural and religious dimension
of the Jewish question which historiography has so far shown it prefers. This tendency
was even confirmed by recent works including Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald
Simkins and Brion Horowitz (eds), The Jews in Eastern Europe, Creighton Uni-
versity Press and University of Nebraska Press, Omaha and Lincoln, 2005; or Glen
Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish, Oxford University
Press, New York, 2006.
22 See Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, op. cit.
23 On Peter the Great and Russia see in particular William Marshall, Peter the Great,
Longman, London, 1996; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, Penguin
Books, London, 2005; Vasily Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great, Macmillan, London,
1958; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History
and Thought, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985; Voltaire, The History of
the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great, 2 vols, Thomson Gale, Farmington
Hills, 2005.
24 On the price revolution in the 16th century and its impact in Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, see M. Postan and H.J. Habakkuk (eds), Cambridge Economic History,
op. cit.; Pierre Vilar, Sviluppo economico e analisi storica, Laterza, Bari, 1978, espe-
cially pp. 122–24; with Ömer L. Barman’s study, “Les mouvements des prix en Tur-
quie entre 1490 et 1655”, in Histoire économique du monde méditerranéen 1450–1650.
Mélanges en honneur de Fernand Braudel, col. 1, Privat, Toulouse, 1973, pp. 65–79.
25 Note that the Ottoman Empire was, in its structure, similar to ancient empires in
the sense that conquest and constant territorial expansion were an essential part of
their success and their system of consensus. On the other hand, crushing military
defeats followed by the loss of land inevitably ended up favouring a growing process of
political, economic and social decline.
26 These çiftlik should not be confused with those, by the same name, legally granted to
Muslim peasants in Thrace, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during Ottoman
expansion (up until Suleiman the Magnificent), and sufficient to maintain a family.
27 See Dunja Rihtman-Augužtin, Struktura tradicijskog mišljenja, Školska knjiga,
Zagreb, 1984.
28 From the extensive literature on the topic, cf. in particular Paul Henri Stahl,
Household, Village and Village Confederation in Southeastern Europe, East Eur-
opean Monographs, Boulder, 1986; Francis Conte, The Slavs, Boulder, New York,
1995; Massimo Guidetti and Paul H. Stahl, Il sangue e la terra, Jaca Book,
Milano, 1977; Henri H. Stahl, Traditional Romanian Village Communities, Cam-
bridge University Press, New York, 1980. A recent study by Maria Todorova raises
alternative explanations for the existence of the zadruga: see Maria Todorova,
Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern, CEU Press, Budapest, 2006
[1993], especially pp. 127–66.
Development and backwardness 41
29 Between 1800 and 1845 English tariffs to protect domestic industry were almost six
times higher than those implemented in Germany between 1850 and 1913 and one
and a half times greater than Russia’s during the period 1870–1913. See John M.
Hobson, The Eastern Origins, op. cit., p. 249.
30 In confirmation of how widespread this opinion was at the beginning of the 18th
century, Dieter Groh cites two poems, one German and one English, respectively
celebrating the glories of Peter the Great and English-Russian affinity. See Dieter
Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza, op. cit., p. 50.
31 The relationship between English militarism and industrialisation had already been
denounced by John A. Hobson in his volume Imperialism, published again in 1968
by Allen and Unwin, London. Cf., in addition D.C.M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and
Politics in British Foreign Policy 1915–1914, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968; and
Paul Gregory, Russian National Income 1885–1913, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1982.
32 Cf., on this subject, Alexander Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror, op.
cit.; and Milward and Saul, The Development of the Economies of Continental
Europe, op. cit. Riasanovsky reaches similar conclusions in his A History of Russia,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2005. Less critical of Peter the Great’s industrial
policies is William Marshall, Peter the Great, op. cit., pp. 63–73.
33 When de Maistre reported his impressions of Russia in Cinq lettres sur l’éducation
publique de la Russie it was 1810, whereas de Custine expressed his vision of Rus-
sia’s social and religious problems in his monumental work of four volumes in
1844. In turn August Von Haxthausen outlined his plan for conservative agrarian
reform following his journeys to Russia in 1847. See Marquis A. de Custine, La
Russie en 1839, Bruxelles, 1844, 4 vols; Joseph de Maistre, Œvres complètes, Lyon,
1884; August Von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, University of
Chicago Press, London, 1972; for a broader vision of the 18th-century debate on
Russia, see Dieter Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza, op. cit., pp. 249–58.
34 Cf. Michael Boro Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, Harcourt Brace Jova-
novich, New York, 2 vols, 1976, especially pp. 27–81; Danica Milić, “Uloga eko-
nomskog faktora u formiranju srpske nacije”, in Dušan Janjić and Mirko Mirković
(eds), Postanak i razvoj srpske nacije, Narodna Knjiga, Beograd, 1979; Srpska
Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, Istorijski značaj srpske revolucije 1804. Godine,
Beograd, 1983.
35 Eric Hobsbawm, “‘First Comers’ and ‘Second Comers’”, in Autori vari, Problemi
storici dell’industrializzazione e dello sviluppo, Argalia, Urbino, 1965, pp. 71–101.
2 Capitalism or rural socialism?
The dilemmas of renewal in Russia and
the Balkans
Notes
1 Cf. on this subject: Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and
Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia, Viking Press, New York, 1977; Valentina
A. Tvardovskaja, Il populismo russo, Editori riuniti, Roma, 1975; Andrzej Walicki,
The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian
Populists, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969; Franco Venturi, Il populismo russo,
Einaudi, Torino, 3 vols, 1979 [from 1952]; Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione”, in
Lenin, Che fare? Einaudi, Torino, 1971.
2 On Alexander I’s constitutional proposals in Russia and the Decembrists see both
Thomas G. Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia. Studies in History, Literature and
60 Capitalism or rural socialism?
Philosophy, Macmillan, New York, 1968, 2 vols, especially the first one; and
Franco Venturi, Il moto decabrista e i fratelli Poggio, Einaudi, Torino, 1956.
3 See Heiko Haumann, A History of East European Jews, op. cit., pp. 86–91; as well
as Marco Brunazzi and Anna Maria Fubini (eds), Gli Ebrei dell’Europa Orientale
dall’utopia alla rivolta, Ed. di Comunità, Milano, 1985.
4 See Paolo Brera, Il Denaro. Saggi di economia e letteratura, Shakespeare & Co.,
Milano, 1984, especially pp. 42–44.
5 On the reform of the zemstvos, cf. Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, op.
cit.; with the enthusiastic hopes placed in them by Pavel Milyukov, Russia and its
Crisis, Collier-Macmillan, London, 1962 [1905], pp. 203–43.
6 On the crisis of Russian Liberalism, see Leonard Shapiro, Rationalism and
Nationalism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, Yale Russian and
East European Studies, New Haven, 1967, especially pp. 143ff.
7 See Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen,
Knopf, New York, 1968 [1867], and From the Other Shore, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1979 [1849], with Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of
Russian Socialism 1812–1855, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1961; and
Venturi, Il populismo russo, op. cit., pp. 3–59.
8 Alexander Herzen, The Russian People and Socialism, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1979.
9 See, for example, the essay by the Serbian writer Svetozar Marković, “La lotta
sociale e politica in Europa”, and analysis of his thought in Marco Dogo’s
“Introduction” to Svetozar Marković, Il socialismo nei Balcani, Guaraldi, Firenze,
1975, especially pp. 10–24. See also Émile Zola, Germinale, Mondadori, Milano,
1976.
10 On Belinsky (who died in 1848 at the age of 37), see Shapiro, Rationalism and
Nationalism, op. cit., pp. 65ff.; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–
1917, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967.
11 Cf. on these exponents of the Narodnichestvo, Walicki, The Controversy over
Capitalism, op. cit., pp. 56–75; Venturi, Il populismo russo, op. cit., vol. II, pp.
420ff.; Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, op. cit., vol. I. On Mikhailovsky a more
recent specific study by Giulia Lami has been published in Italy, Un ribelle legale,
Unicopli, Milano, 1990.
12 The Smorgon Academy, as we will later see, was one of the “communes” established
by the Narodniks to spread their way of thinking. Founded in 1867 in St. Peters-
burg, it only operated for two years until 1869 and its existence was discovered by
the police just a year after it had been closed.
13 See Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism, op. cit., p. 81.
14 Cf. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What is to Be Done? Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
1989; with Leonard Shapiro, Rationalism and Nationalism, op. cit., pp. 106–10.
15 On this, compare Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, op. cit.; and Woodford D.
McClellan, Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Socialism, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1964, pp. 55–60.
16 Mikhailovsky had already begun a polemic with Spencer before dedicating himself
to Darwin, when in 1870 he published his work Darwin’s Theory and Social Sci-
ence. That same year Tkachev had expressed his ideas on social Darwinism in the
essay Science in Poetry and Poetry in Science. See Giulia Lami, Un Ribelle Legale,
op. cit., pp. 68ff.; and Franco Venturi, Il populismo, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 332ff. To
get an idea of the debate on science, modernity and religion between Great Britain
and Russia it is interesting to reconstruct the timing of certain important events.
Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species and The Origin of Man
respectively in 1859 and 1871. Pope Pius IX condemned, among other things, the
absolute popular sovereignty and neutrality of the State over religion in the ency-
clical Quanta cura, published in 1864. The pope added to this document the
Capitalism or rural socialism? 61
Syllabus, a summary of behaviours considered execrable by the Papacy including
freedom of conscience, Liberalism, and the ideas of progress and modernity. In
Russia Danilevsky’s nationalism and creationist anti-Darwinism (addressed below)
surfaced between 1869 and 1871; and while the “Going to the people” movement
arose between 1873 and 1874, Narodnik reactions to social Darwinism dated back
to the 1860s and resurfaced with Mikhailovsky, at least up until 1875–76.
17 Alexander II was called the “liberator” because he signed the decrees abolishing
serfdom in 1861.
18 As is well known, Zemlya i Volya had actually been set up in 1876 (drawing
inspiration for its name from the organisation previously founded by Herzen and
disbanded in the 1870s), but it soon split into two groups that followed very dif-
ferent strategies: Chernyi Peredel (or “Black Division”) emphasised the need to
promote the goal of gradually assigning black lands (so called because volcanic ash
from the Pacific coast, brought by the rains, makes these lands in Ukraine highly
fertile) to poor peasants; the Narodnaya Volya group (whose name played upon
the double meaning of the word Volya, i.e. Will, but also Liberty, of the People/
Narod) aimed at favouring a more rapid change in politics, insisting on a radical
strategy that resorted to terrorism.
19 On Artel, see in particular Francis Conte, The Slavs, Boulder, NY, 1995, pp. 252–55.
20 For Bakunin’s opinion on the rural communities, see Mikhail Bakunin, State and
Anarchy, Revisionist Press, New York, 1976. See also the biography of Edward H.
Carr, Michael Bakunin, Macmillan, London, 1975.
21 Israel Getzler, “Georgij V. Plehanov: la dannazione dell’ortodossia”, in AA.VV.,
Storia del Marxismo, Einaudi, Torino, 1978–82, vol. 2, pp. 413–40.
22 See Marx-Engels, India, Cina, Russia, Milano, 1965, p. 246; also see Valentin
Gitermann, Storia della Russia. Dalle origini alla vigilia dell’invasione napoleonica,
La Nuova Italia, Coll. Strumenti, Firenze, 1992, vol. II, pp. 415–16.
23 Cf. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, op. cit., p. 61; with Teodor
Shanin, Russia as a “Developing Society”, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1985, vol. 1;
Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia, Athe-
neum, New York, 1974; and more recently, Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and
Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
1982.
24 On this topic see Augusta Dimou’s doctoral dissertation Paths towards Modernity:
Intellectuals and the Contextualization of Socialism in the Balkans, European
University Institute, Fiesole, 2003.
25 We will return to this concept in the Conclusion and in the basic bibliography on
the topic, to which the reader may refer.
26 Cf. on Marković in Switzerland, see Svetozar Marković, Il socialismo nei Balcani,
op. cit., p. 34; but also the 1910 volume by Jovan Skerlić, Svetozar Marković.
Njegov život, rad i ideje, Prosveta, Beograd, 1966; Đorđe Mitrović i Savo Andrić,
Svetozar Marković i njegovo doba, Rad, Beograd, 1978, pp. 59–88.
27 On relations between Marković and Karavelov see the records of the Yugo-
Bulgarian conference published by the Serbian Academy, SANU, Svetozar Mar-
ković i Ljuben Karavelov u kontekstu slovenske književnosti i kulture, Beograd,
1992. On Karavelov see S. Bobchev, “Любен Каравелов” [Lyuben Karavelov], in S.
Velikov (ed.), Петко Р. Славейков, Любен Каравелов, Христо Ботев, Захари
Стоянов: В Спомените на Съвременниците Си [Petko R. Slaveikov, Lyuben Kar-
avelov, Hristo Botev, Zakhari Stoyanov: v spomenite na Sŭvremennicite Si (In the
Memories of their Contemporaries)], Sofia, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1967,
especially pp. 224 and 229; or, J. Nathan, История на Икономическата Мисъл в
България [Istoriya na Ikonomicheskata Misŭl v Bŭlgarija (The History of Economic
Thought in Bulgaria)], Sofia, State Publishing Company “Science and Art”, 1964,
pp. 43–49.
62 Capitalism or rural socialism?
28 See Dimitar Blagoev, Кратки Бележки из Моя Живот [Kratki belezhki iz Moya
Zhivot (Short Notes of My Life)], Sofia, Bulgarian Communist Party Publications,
1949, especially pp. 21–28; and by the same author, Избрани Произведения [Izbrani
Proizvedeniya (Selected Works)], Sofia, Bulgarian Communist Party Publications,
1950, and Сборник Документи [Sbornik dokumenti (Documentary Collection)],
Sofia, Bulgarian Communist Party Publications, 1956; insisting on Blagoev’s
Marxist education, J. Nathan, История на, op. cit., p. 6; on Blagoev and his
relationship with Russian Marxism and industrialisation in Bulgaria, see also
Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, op. cit.
29 On the influence exerted on Narodnichestvo and Russian socialism in the Balkans,
cf. Cyril Black, Russia and the Modernization of the Balkans, in Charles and Bar-
bara Jelavich, The Balkans in Transition, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1963, pp. 145–83 (with an extensive bibliography on the subject); and Latinka
Perović, Srpski socijalisti XIX veka, Rad, Beograd, 1985, 2 vols, especially vol. II
dedicated to Svetozar Marković; and Bianca Valota, Constantin Dobrogeanu-
Gherea tra marxismo e populismo, CIRSS, Milano, 1984.
30 On the impact of capitalism and money on agrarian economies in the Balkans, see
the still insuperable Iván T. Berend-György and G. Ránki, Economic Development
in East-Central Europe, op. cit.
31 On the reception of nationalism in Russia by the Slavophiles and the penetration of
this West European idea in Russia, see more extensively Milyukov, Russia and its
Crisis, op. cit., pp. 43–52.
32 V. Alain Touraine, Critica della modernità, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1997 (Critique of
Modernity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1995).
33 On the importance of spirituality in Russian culture, see Dmitrij Tschizewskij,
Russian Intellectual History, Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1978.
34 Cf. Andrzey Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia
in 19th Century Russian Thought, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975; on Chaadaev the
most complete work is still that of Charles Quênet, Lettres philosophiques de Pierre
Tschaadaieff, Paris, 1937; see also Dmitrij Tschizewskij, Russian Intellectual
History, op. cit.; and Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, op. cit., vol. 1.
35 Regarding peasant insurrections in Russia, suffice it to think of those promoted by
Stenka Razin (1670–71) and Pugachev (1773–75), two leaders who became very
close to Bakunin. For their stories see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of
Russia, op. cit. Regarding the village community in the experience beyond the
Russian and Slavic world, cf. the two useful anthologies edited by Massimo
Guidetti and Paul H. Stahl, Il sangue e la terra, and Le radici dell’Europa, but
published for Jaca Book, respectively in 1977 and 1979. Finally, keep in mind that
the system of collective taxation, through the joint responsibility of commune
members, was widespread not only in Russia but also in France up to the begin-
ning of the 19th century. See Margaret Levi, Of Role and Revenue, University of
California Press, Berkeley and London, 1988.
36 Von Haxthausen and his writings are broadly discussed in endnote 33 of Chapter 1,
to which we refer the reader. As for Vladimir Leskov, see in particular his volume
Il popolo russo e lo stato from 1850, while on the historian of law Ivan Belyaev
there are numerous writings referred to by Valentin Gitermann in his Storia della
Russia, op. cit., vol. II, p. 202. On Von Schlötzer see Angelo Tamborra, L’Europa
centro-orientale nei secoli XIX e XX (1800–1920), Vallardi editoriale, Milano,
1971, pp. 80–81. On Danilevsky, see both Tamborra, op. cit., pp. 256–57; and
Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, op. cit., vol. I; as well as Dmitrij Tschizewskij,
Russian Intellectual History, op. cit.; and A.G. Zdravomyslov, Межнациональные
конфликты в постсоветском постранстве [Mezhdunacionalnye konflikty v
postsovetskom postranstve], Aspekt Press, Moskva, 1997, p. 204.
Capitalism or rural socialism? 63
37 Nikolai Danilevsky first published his book Rossiya i Evropa (Russian and Europe)
in 1869 in the journal Zarya; reworked in successive stages in later editions, a
reprinted version of the original Russian Rossiya i Evropa is what appears
published by Johnson Reprint Corp., New York, 1966.
38 In indicating the goal of returning Christianity to St. Sophia, use of the adjective
“oriental” was deliberately avoided, to point out how the project referred to the idea
of Christianity tout court. In fact, the reader should keep in mind that in the pop-
ular culture of Orthodoxy (a term meaning “righteous belief”), it is Roman Cath-
olicism that appears schismatic and the Pope an unacceptable monarchical figure,
whereas bishops and patriarchs are supposed to represent the descendents of
Christ’s Apostles operating in a space that is certainly universal but geopolitically
generated by an Empire in which Rome had lost its function as the capital in 330
as desired by Constantine, so that not the Vatican (located in a provincial city) but
the church of St. Sofia (in the heart of the capital) was still supposed to represent
the centre of Christianity. This centre appears to be culturally “violated” (as is well
known, in fact, the church of St. Sofia was transformed into a mosque by the
Sublime Porte after Bisanzio’s conquest in 1453) and – in Slavophile thought as
well as that of religious Orthodoxy – should have been brought back to its original
function; this interpretation, however, was referred to politically by Danilevsky. See
Nicolas Zernov, Eastern Christiandom. A Study of the Origin and Development of
the Eastern Orthodox Church, Putnam, New York, 1961.
39 There is very little literature on this topic. See Angelo Tamborra, L’Europa Centro-
Orientale, op. cit., pp. 251–53, 310–12.
3 The “peasant state”
Ideology and politics of agrarian
movements in Central-Eastern Europe
between the two world wars
Notes
1 An overall picture of the importance and fate of the peasant movements between
the two wars can be inferred from a comparative analysis of the national histories
of these countries. Cf., for example., the comparative studies by Hugh Seton-
Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars 1918–1941, op. cit.; Joseph Rothschild,
East Central Europe between the Two World Wars, Washington University Press,
Seattle, 1983; the national histories by Maria Dowling, Czechoslovakia, Arnold,
London, 2002; Keith Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1994; Ivan Mužić, Stjepan Radić u kraljevini SHS, Matica Hrvatska, Zagreb, 1988;
Aleksander Gieysztor, History of Poland, PWN, Warsaw, 1979; Ljubo Boban,
Maček i politika HSS 1928–1941, 2 vols, Liber, Zagreb, 1974. On this topic see
also Bianca Valota, L’ondata verde, CIRSS, Milano, 1984.
2 On the Cvetković-Maček compromise the most extensive studies available are by
Ljubo Boban, Maček i politika Hrvatske seljačke stranke, op. cit.; and Alfredo
Breccia, Jugoslavia 1939–1941. Diplomazia della neutralità, Giuffrè, Milano, 1978.
3 On the Bulgarian agrarian experience, the most systematic study is still by John
Bell, Peasants in Power: Alexandŭr Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian
National Union 1899–1923, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1977.
4 See Kurt W. Treptow, “Populism and 20th Century Romanian Politics”, in Joseph
Held (ed.), Populism in Eastern Europe, op. cit., pp. 199–201.
5 In the revolutionary climate of the early post-war years, a Soviet republic (as it was
then called) was proclaimed in Hungary on 21 March 1919 under the leadership of
Béla Kun, and lasted until 1 August of the same year. See more extensively
82 The “peasant state”
Pasquale Fornaro, Crisi postbellica e rivoluzione, Angeli, Milano, 1987, pp. 57–122,
141ff.
6 “Trianon syndrome” indicates the feeling of national frustration that took root in
the country following the painful amputation of territories imposed by the peace
treaties after the Great War, reinforcing Hungarian revisionism. On political cultures
of that time see Miklós Lackó, “Populism in Hungary: Yesterday and Today”, and
György Csepeli, “In the Captivity of Narratives: The Political Socialization of
Populist Writers in Hungary, and the Origin of National Narratives in Eastern
Europe”, in Held (ed.), Populism in Eastern Europe, op. cit., pp. 107–43.
7 In Bulgaria male universal suffrage was granted in 1879. A law in 1937 granted the
right to vote to married, divorced and widowed women, who could exercise this
right in the elections a year later.
8 In Hungary Count Károlyi granted universal suffrage to men over 21 years of age
and to women over 24 years of age (but the latter had to have a certain level of
education) in January 1919. In 1920, once the Republic of the Councils had fallen,
only literate women had the right to vote. In 1922 the right to vote was further
restricted for men and women to the point that in order to control farmers, they
resorted in the countryside to an open vote. In fact, universal suffrage was
introduced in Hungary only in 1945.
9 Cf. Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder, Anthem Press, London, 2002, pp.
73–76; and John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of the Western Civilization, op.
cit., p. 292; and for Hungary see Rothschild, East Central Europe, op. cit., pp. 152–55;
or Péter Hanák (ed.), Storia dell’Ungheria, op. cit.
10 Cf., on the peace treaties, Francesco Caccamo, L’Italia e la “Nuova Europa”, Luni,
Milano, 2000; with Renée Hirschon, “Espulsioni di massa in Grecia e Turchia: la
convenzione di Losanna del 1923’, in Marco Buttino (ed.), In fuga. Guerre, carestie
e migrazioni nel mondo contemporaneo, L’Ancora, Napoli, 2001, pp. 23–33; and
Gieysztor, History of Poland, op. cit., pp. 502–6.
11 Enlightening on this topic is still the study by Jerzy W. Borejsza, Il fascismo e
l’Europa Orientale. Dalla propaganda all’aggressione, Laterza, Bari, 1981.
12 The “Decree on the Land” has recently been re-issued by Ronald Grigor Suny, The
Structure of Soviet History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. 64–65;
among the most important features characterising them was the creation of a
national land fund, created through the acquisition – without compensation – of
land property; the assignment to the local administrations and villages of the task
of proceeding with the distribution of the farms to the peasants without distinction
of gender; the ban on paid labour; and the protection of technologically advanced
farms like model farms where division was not applied.
13 On this subject see Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, op. cit. The
impact of the Bolshevik revolution was particularly felt in Bessarabia, where the
Romanian military intervention of January 1918, though justified by reasons con-
nected to the idea of national unity, was actually encouraged by the desire to
restore the large landed estates that the peasants had occupied and split up. See
Charles King, The Moldovans, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 2000, pp. 32–35.
14 The study most determined to synthesise peasantism as theory, scattered in the
thousands of streams of political and cultural orientations expressed within all the
agrarian parties and by their leaders, was that by David Mitrany, Il marxismo e i
contadini, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1954, whose Italian title, meaning “Marxism
and the peasants”, is in some ways a dilution of the original English title, much
more expressive of the author’s ideological intentions, which read Marx against the
Peasant. A Study in Social Dogmatism (1st ed. University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, 1951).
15 On the topic see Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. A Study of
Collectivization, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968.
The “peasant state” 83
16 Cf. for example, Ghiţa Ionescu, “Eastern Europe”, in Ghiţa Ionescu and Ernest
Gellner (eds), Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, Weindelfel and
Nicolson, London, 1969, p. 108; and Rudolf Herceg, Nemojmo zaboraviti:
Hrvatska politika mora biti seljačka, Zagreb, 1928.
17 See in particular, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski, Селото и градътъ (писано въ зат-
вора) [Seloto i gradt (pisano v zatvora)], and the collection of his writings in
Nikola D. Petkov (ed.), Александъръ Стамболийски. Личность и идеи [Aleksandŭr
Stamboliyski. Lichnost i idei], Pechatnica “Zemled’lsko Zname”, Sofiya, 1930, pp.
226–32.
18 Cf. International Peasant Union, Peasant International in Action, by J. Rutaj,
Melville Press, London, 1948, p. 15; and Ante Radić, Sabrana Djela, Seljačka
sloga, Zagreb, 1939, vol. XII, pp. 156–59, 249–50.
19 Rudolf Herceg, Die Ideologie der kroatischen Bauernbewegung, Rud. Herceg und
Genossen, Zagreb, 1923.
20 Regarding this point please re-read the manifesto with which Green International’s
activities were launched (to be addressed in the next chapter), entitled “Idée de
l’agrarisme universel”, Mezinárodní Agrární Bureau Bulletin (hereafter MAB) n. 1,
1923, 3–4.
21 On this topic the reader is referred to my book Sarajevo le radici dell’odio, Edizioni
Associate, Roma, III ed., 2003, pp. 5–22; as well as Johann Gottfried von Herder,
Philosophical Writings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; and John
Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, Allen and Unwin, London,
1987.
22 On Németh’s thought see in particular, Miklós Lackó, “Populisme et ‘troisième
voie’ en Hongrie”, in Chantal Delsol and Michel Maslowski (eds), Histoire des
idées politiques de l’Europe Centrale, Puf, Paris, 1998, pp. 489–95.
23 On the situation of the Jews in Central-Eastern Europe in those years, see Ezra
Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1983; cf. also Péter Hanák, “The Anti-Capitalist
Ideology of the Populists”, in Joseph Held (ed.), Populism in Eastern Europe, op.
cit., pp. 148–50; with Heiko Haumann, A History of East European Jews, op. cit.,
p. 117–19.
24 See Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, op. cit.; and István Bibó,
Miseria dei piccoli stati dell’Europa Orientale, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1994 [1946], pp.
49ff.
25 A. Radić, Sabrana Djela, Seljačka Sloga, Zagreb, 1936–39, vol. VIII, p. 13.
26 Cf. on this subject, David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant. A Study in Social
Dogmatism, op. cit., pp. 121–22, regarding Madgearu; regarding Mikołajczyk, see
Stanisław Stȩpka, Stanisław Mikołajczyk. Rozprawy i studia, Muzeum Historii
Polskiego Ruchu Ludowego, Warszawa, 2001; and Józef Hampel, “Wizja Polski
ludowej w myśli politycznej i praktyce działania Stanisława Mikołajczyka”, in J.
Gmitruk (ed.), Stanisław Mikołajczyk 1901–1966, materiały z konferencji nauko-
wej, Muzeum Historii Polskiego Ruchu Ludowego, Warszawa, 1998. On the
Czechoslovak-Polish federation, see Piotr S. Wandycz, “Recent Traditions for the
Quest of Unity: Attempted Polish-Czechoslovak and Yugoslav-Bulgarian Con-
federations 1940–1948”, in Jerzy Lukaszewski (ed.), The People’s Democracies
after Prague, De Tempel, Bruges, 1970, especially pp. 35–66.
27 See for example, Milovan Mitrović, Jugoslovenska predratna sociologija, Centar
SSO Srbije, 1982, pp. 86–91; and Dragoljub Jovanović, Sloboda od straha, Filip
Višnjić, Beograd, 1991, especially pp. 356–57; but also Barbara Jelavich, History of
the Balkans, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, vol. 2; and Hugh
Seton-Watson, “Danubian Peasant Parties”, The Economist, London, 11 January
1947, p. 54.
84 The “peasant state”
28 Cf. Nissan Oren, Bulgarian Communism: The Road to Power 1934–1944, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1971, pp. 23–24.
29 Originally the Kolkhozy (an abbreviation of kolektivnoe khoziaistvo, or collective
farm) were cooperative farms in which individual members combined ownership of
non-land assets, while the Sovkhozy (an abbreviation of Sovetskoe khoziaistvo, or
soviet farm) were basically state-owned farms, whose incomes and welfare were,
however, far more secure than those of the collective farms. This difference faded
away to the full advantage of state ownership after the 1965 agricultural reforms.
30 See, for example, the sociology of cooperation developed by Avramović on several
occasions in various studies, including his Socijalne funkcije zadrugarstva, Beograd,
1938; and the evolution of relations between cooperation and socialism in Dra-
goljub Jovanović, Socijalizam i seljaštvo, Politika i društvo, Beograd, 1941. More
broadly on the topic, see Mihailo Vučković, Historija zadružnog pokreta u
Jugoslaviji 1918–1941, Inst. Društvenih nauka, Beograd, 1966.
31 On the role of cooperatives in close connection with the Croatian peasant party,
see works by Juraj Krnjević, “Peasant Movement in Eastern and Danubian
Europe”, Contemporary Review, August 1948; and by Rudolf Bićanić, Kako živi
narod, Zagreb, 1936. On the relationship between culture and peasantism, which
induced groups of young people in various countries to move to the villages and
follow a movement in many ways similar to the Russian “Going to the people”, see
David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant, op. cit., pp. 143–46; but also Joža
Horvat and Petar Šegedin (eds), Socijalistički preobražaj našega sela, Zagreb, 1950.
32 Cf. on this, Rothschild, East Central Europe, op. cit.; and R.J. Crampton, Eastern
Europe in the 20th Century – and After, Routledge, London, 1997.
33 On the Balkan conferences, see more broadly my Sarajevo, le radici dell’odio, op.
cit., pp. 208–9.
34 On the effects of the world economic crisis as well as Schacht’s plan and its impact
on the heavily damaged economies of Eastern Europe, see Iván T. Berend and
Gyorgy Ránki, Economic Development in East-Central Europe, op. cit.
4 Communism and the “third peasant
way”
Competing internationals and development
models in the USSR and Central-Eastern
Europe
Notes
1 On agrarian internationalism cf. “La Politique étrangère et l’Organisation Inter-
nationale des Agriculteurs”, MAB Bullettin du Bureau International Agraire vol.
VIII–IX, 1925; Rudolf Herceg, Izlaz iz svietske krize (Pangea), Zagreb, 1932; J.
Rutaj, Peasant International in Action, Melville Press, London, 1948.
2 On the literature regarding the pan-Slav orientation in this phase, see in particular
George D. Jackson, Komintern and Peasant in East Europe, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1966, pp. 143–44.
3 Actually, the “Green International” survived the fury of the world war with the
name International Peasant Union thanks to the action of a number of exponents
forced into exile, while communism was victoriously established in the East.
4 The term Korenizatsya or indigenisation means the process of enhancing the value
of national cultures promoted by Lenin in the newly formed USSR, and developed
up until 1928. Cf. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to
Self-Determination” (published in Verbote n. 2, April 1916), in Lenin, Collective
Works, Progress, Moscow, 1964, vol. XXII, pp. 143–56; and Iurii M. Garushiants,
“The National Programme of Leninism”, in Henry Huttenbach and Francesco
Privitera (eds), Self-Determination from Versailles to Dayton. Its Historical Legacy,
Longo, Ravenna, 1999, pp. 31–47; with Mihail Gellner and Aleksandr Nekrič,
Utopia in Power: The History of Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, Hutch-
inson, London, 1986 (on the war against Poland); and Adriano Guerra, who
mentions the proclamation of Gen. Brusilov to the former czarist generals to rush
to fight against Poland in the ranks of the Red Army, in Adriano Guerra, Il crollo
dell’Impero sovietico, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1996, p. 83. For the policy of nation-
alities in the 1920s see the first part of the volume by Terry Martin, The Affirmative
Action Empire, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001; and Ronald G. Suny and
Terry Martin (eds), A State of Nations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.
5 There is a vast literature on this subject. For a first approach, see Giovanna Spendel,
Gli intellettuali sovietici negli anni ‘20, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1979; and Vittorio
104 Communism and the “third peasant way”
Strada, Tradizione e rivoluzione nella letteratura russa, Einaudi, Torino, 1969 and
1980.
6 On the problems of women in the USSR, see Barbara Clements, Bolshevik Women,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997. A useful synthesis is that by Wendy
Goldman, “Le donne nella società sovietica”, in AA.VV., Il secolo dei comunismi,
NET, Milano, 2004, pp. 195–205.
7 On atheism and secularisation in USSR, see William B. Husband, “Godless Com-
munists”. Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia 1917–1932, Northern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, DeKalb, 2000; and the anthropological study by Sonja Luehrmann,
Secularism Soviet Style. Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 2011.
8 See Lionel Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1978.
9 On Marx, the Jewish question and its impact of Soviet society see Markus Arkin,
Aspects of Jewish Economic History, The Jewish Publication Society of America,
Philadelphia, 1975, pp. 151–53.
10 On the Komintern’s critical position on the situation in Bulgaria see the appeals of
23 June and September 1923, in Aldo Agosti (ed.), La terza Internazionale. Storia
documentaria, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1974, vol. I, tome II, pp. 738–41, 743–44. Cf.
also Joseph Rotschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development
1883–1936, Columbia University Press, New York, 1959.
11 On relations between Lenin, the Komintern and the peasant question, see in parti-
cular Lenin’s famous article, “Better Fewer but Better” (originally in Pravda n. 49,
4 March 1923), in Lenin’s Collective Works, 2nd English edn, Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1965, Vol. 33, p. 487–502; also in Lenin, L’alliance de la classe ouvrière et
de la paysannerie, Éditions des langues entrangères, Moscou, 1954; Moshe Lewin,
Lenin’s Last Struggle, Pantheon Books, New York, 1968; and Moshe Lewin’s
comments in his volume Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. A Study of Collecti-
vization, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968; also see on this point
Franco Rizzi, “L’internazionale comunista e la questione contadina”, in AA.VV.,
Storia del Marxismo, Einaudi, Torino, 1978–82, vol. 3, tome 1, pp. 495–502; and
Edward H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia. Socialism in One Country 1924–1926,
Vol. 2, Macmillan, London, 1959, pp. 288–90. See also Franco Rizzi, Contadini e
comunismo. La questione agraria nella Terza Internazionale 1919–1928, Angeli,
Milano, 1981.
12 See Radek’s report to the XI meeting of the IV Congress of the Komintern, Ofan-
ziva kapitala in Institut za međunarodni radnički pokret, Komunistička Inter-
nacionala. Stenogrami i documenti kongresa, Privredna knjiga, Gornji Milanovac,
1981, vol. IV, pp. 258–59. See also the Resolution of the III Plenum of the
Komintern on government, worker and peasant in Aldo Agosti (ed.), La terza
Internazionale. Storia documentaria, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1974, vol. I, tome II,
pp. 714–16.
13 More broadly on these events see George D. Jackson, Komintern and Peasant, op.
cit., pp. 59–70. In fact after 1927 the Krestintern continued in the shadow of the
Komintern. Apparently it was formally dissolved only after 1939.
14 On this aspect see Edward H. Carr, in A History of Soviet Russia. Socialism in One
Country, op. cit., (quotation from p. 661 of Italian edn).
15 On the position assumed by Bukharin, see more extensively Stephen Cohen,
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. A Political Biography 1988–1938, Alfred A.
Knopf, New York, 1973, but also his speeches in Nikolaj Bucharin, Le vie della
rivoluzione 1925–1936, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1980.
16 On the Komintern’s attitude towards the Balkan question, see “Risoluzione del V
congresso sulle questioni nazionali dell’Europa centrale e nei Balcani” (July 1924),
and “Risoluzione del Presidium sulla questione jugoslava” (April 1925), in Aldo
Communism and the “third peasant way” 105
Agosti (ed.), La terza Internazionale, op. cit., vol. I, tome II, respectively pp. 160
and 319. Also see Gordana Vlajčić, Jugoslavenska revolucija i nacionalno pitanje
1919–1927, Globus, Zagreb, 1984, all of chapter 4, but especially pp. 162–216.
17 Ivan Muzić, Stjepan Radić u kraljevini SHS, op. cit., pp. 157–63.
18 See Trotsky, Zinov’ev and others, La piattaforma dell’opposizione nell’URSS,
Samonà e Savelli, Roma, 1969. There is a vast bibliography on Trotsky’s opposi-
tion. We refer here, among others, to the second volume of the famous trilogy by
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed. Trotsky 1921–1929, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1959; Victor Serge, Vita e morte di Trotskij, Laterza, Bari, 1973;
Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in USSR, Monthly Review Press, New York,
1976.
19 The scissors crisis consisted of the rapid growth in prices of industrial products and
a fall in agricultural prices, overturning their relationship compared to the previous
year. See for example, Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917,
International Publishers, New York, 1967; and Alec Nove, An Economic History of
USSR, Allen Lane, London, 1969.
20 Cf. Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialisation Debate 1924–1928, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1960; with the documents gathered by Lisa Foa (ed.),
La strategia sovietica per lo sviluppo economico 1924–1930, Einaudi, Torino, 1970;
Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, op. cit.; Alec Nove, “Economia
sovietica e marxismo: quale modello socialista?”, in AA.VV., Storia del Marxismo,
op. cit., vol. 3, tome I, pp. 605–34.
21 On the upheaval in Russia caused by the long period of war, see Edward H. Carr,
A History of Soviet Russia, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 270–71; Alec Nove, An Economic
History, op. cit.; William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921, op.
cit.; Robert Daniels, The Roots of Confrontation, Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge, MA, 1985, pp. 134–35; Nicholas Werth, Storia della Russia nel Novecento,
Il Mulino, Bologna, 2000, p. 186.
22 On this subject, see in particular Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Storia diplomatica dal
1919 al 1979, Ed. dell’Ateneo, Roma, 1972, pp. 32–44.
23 See Edward H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 351–62, 371–
80; Alec Nove, An Economic History, op. cit.; and more recently Robert Donaldson
and Joseph Nogee, The Foreign Policy of Russia, Sharpe, Armonk, 2002, p. 55.
24 On this subject cf. Alan M. Ball, Imagining America, op. cit., especially pp. 24–30,
75ff; with Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers. Ritual in Industrial Society – the
Soviet Case, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1981;
and Nicoletta Marcialis (ed.), E i Russi scoprirono l’America, Editori Riuniti,
Roma, 1989.
25 Nikolai Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, London, Boston and Henley, 1979; and, by the same author,
“The New Economic Policy of Soviet Russia”, in Al Richardson (ed.), In Defence
of the Russian Revolution. A Selection of Bolshevik Writings 1917–1923, Porcupine
Press, London, 1995, pp. 188–94.
26 See Eugène Preobrajensky, Dalla NEP al socialismo, Jaca Book, Milano, 1970 (this
volume was published in Moscow in 1922 by Moskovsky Rabochy and followed by
La nuova politica economica, published in Moscow in 1925 by the Academy of
Sciences).
27 Stalin’s speech had actually been anticipated by a series of lectures at the Uni-
versity of Sverdlovsk, in which some passages had been included that were con-
sidered ideologically “un-orthodox” and were therefore subsequently eliminated.
However, it soon became clear how his statement on “socialism in one country”
had been asserted in opposition to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and
not so much in terms of sharing the political and economic orientations expressed
by the Party’s “right”. Cf. on this topic, Roj Medvedev, “Il socialismo in un solo
106 Communism and the “third peasant way”
Paese”, in Storia del Marxismo, op. cit., vol. 3, tome I, pp. 561 and ff.; as well as
Bucharin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinov’ev, La rivoluzione permanente e il socialismo in un
Paese solo, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1973, especially pp. 171–80; and Edward H.
Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, op. cit.
28 See on this topic the excellent essay by Baruch Knei-Paz, “Trotsky: rivoluzione
permanente e rivoluzione dell’arretratezza”, in Storia del Marxismo, op. cit., vol. 3,
tome I, pp. 133–65; also Leon Trotsky, “Theses on Industry”, in Richardson (ed.),
In Defence of the Russian Revolution, op. cit., pp. 195–214.
29 For Preobrazhensky equality of exchange was non-existent in capitalism, as it had
been after all during czarism. Therefore in primitive accumulation, similar rules
would have had to be applied also by the Bolshevik state. For more detail, see E.
Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965; and by the
same author, The Crisis of Soviet Industrialisation. Selected Essays, Palgrave
Macmillan, London, 1980.
30 Cf. on these aspects the collection of documents by N. Bucharin and E.
Preobraženskij, L’accumulazione socialista, ed. by Lisa Foa, Editori Riuniti, Roma,
1969; and Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, op. cit.; and the
classic biography of Bukharin by Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik
Revolution, op. cit.
31 This terminology was very much in vogue in the party at the time and Bukharin
loved to refer to it, even though he did not feel there was anything “cursed” about
dealing with relations with the peasants.
32 On the extensive literature on Trotsky, especially in the period discussed here, see
Richard B. Day, Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1973; and Heinz Abosch, Trotsky e il bolscevismo,
Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1977.
33 Cf. on this period of industrialisation and Soviet-American relations, Stephen
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1995, especially pp. 108–45; and Richard Cartwright Austin,
Building Utopia. Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, Kent State University Press,
Kent, 2004 [1930].
34 Ball, Imagining America, op. cit., pp. 119–20, 145.
35 This was the time of the American communist party’s greatest influence on US
politics: at the end of the 1930s approximately 25% of CIO (Congress of Industrial
Organizations) members, which at that time aimed to promote mass production of
cars, steel and electrical machinery, belonged to communist-led trade unions.
During the Spanish war the party managed to organise and send volunteers to
fight Franco, and attracted many intellectuals to its ranks. The communists even
formed a popular front in Minnesota and at times, thanks to the convergence they felt
existed with New Deal policies, they joined some sectors of the Democratic Party.
Thus they also had an influential role, albeit not dominant, in California, Wiscon-
sin and Michigan. Cf. the collection of documents by Harvey Klehr, John Earl
Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1998; and Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and
Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1995.
36 On the issue of wheat and prices at the end of the 1920s as a pretext for a new
policy towards the countryside, see Sigrid Grosskopf, L’alliance ouvrière et pay-
sanne en URSS (1921–1928). Le problème du blé, Maspero, Paris, 1976; and more
recently Andrea Graziosi, Dai Balcani agli Urali, Donzelli, Roma, 1999, pp. 88–99.
37 On this issue, see Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War. Bolsheviks and
Peasants 1917–1933, Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies, Cambridge, MA, 1996,
especially pp. 47ff.; and by the same author, Lettere da Kharkov, Einaudi, Roma,
1991.
Communism and the “third peasant way” 107
38 On these topics, see Lynne Viola (ed.), Contending with Stalinism. Soviet Power
and Popular Resistance in the 1940s, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2002; and
Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago and London, 2001, pp. 181ff. On the human costs of Stalinist poli-
cies Andrea Graziosi has recently returned with his volume, L’URSS di Lenin e
Stalin, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2007, especially pp. 295ff.
39 Explicit in this sense are the theories approved at the VI Congress of the Komintern
in 1928 as well as the article entitled “For the Fatherland!”, published in Pravda, 9
June 1934. See Robert Daniels (ed.), A Documentary History of Communism,
University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1984, respectively vol. II,
pp. 83–87, vol. I, pp. 243–44. A recent detailed study on nationality policy and the
Russification of the USSR see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action, op. cit.; and
the volume edited by Suny and Martin (eds), A State of Nations, op. cit., especially
pp. 253–99.
40 There is a huge literature on this topic. For a first approach, see Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror, A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990.
41 Just one example of this was the distorted use of reason according to which
Bukharin and others were tortured, vigorously and effectively described by Arthur
Köstler in his novel Darkness at Noon, Macmillan, New York, 1941.
5 Market socialism, national roads to
socialism and competition with the West
5.1 The end of the Second World War and political ruralism
De-Stalinisation began in Moscow just seconds after Stalin’s death, when with
the formation of the troika, a collective solution was found to his succession.
Nonetheless, it was only when Nikita Khrushchev read his two reports, the
public one and the secret one, to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, that the premises were established for
launching a new debate on industrialisation and development models on a
vast scale, inevitably extending itself, given the time frame, to socialism’s roles
and function in Europe and the world.
Compared to the 1920s, however, the circumstances had profoundly chan-
ged. First of all, some networks of trans-European relations had been dis-
rupted. The Holocaust had eliminated almost the entire Jewish presence, even
though some individuals had survived the Shoah and some of them (belong-
ing to leftist currents) had reached dominant positions in communist parties
and governments, especially in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and
Romania. The German minorities (and with them the Protestant Churches)
had been drastically reduced due to migration to the West caused both by
fear of revenge for supporting Nazism, and forced exodus, encouraged – with
reprisals – by governments of those countries that had suffered most under
Nazi violence. Greek and Armenian diasporas had been annihilated by dis-
asters caused by their respective nationalisms, by the transfer of people and
by massacres (especially of Armenians). Even Catholicism (both Greek and
Roman) had been significantly reduced due to the prevalence of communist
state atheism, and had been discredited by some of their hierarchy’s colla-
boration with Nazi-friendly regimes. This occurred in spite of the fact that
this attitude was later mitigated by anti-communism, as the Catholic Church
was perceived as a bastion of the fight for freedom even by non-religious ele-
ments. However, many networks of relations that characterised Central-Eastern
Europe between the 19th and 20th centuries had been abolished, intimidated
or weakened – for various reasons – by Nazism, anti-Semitism, nationalism
and, finally, by the westward Soviet advance.
Market socialism and national roads to socialism 109
Second, the Soviet system had been imposed on Central-Eastern Europe
(including a part of Germany) and to a large extent on the Balkans (with the
exception of Greece, Turkey and, in certain aspects, Yugoslavia). This introduced a
new network of relations, in this case political-ideological relations based on the
interdependence of communist parties, while the flow of East-West communication
was blocked for many years by the Cold War. In reality, in addition to inter-
European divisions, still others arose between “people’s democracies” following the
break between Yugoslavia and the USSR, while socialism continued to spread and
consolidate in the Far East. However, whereas in the latter case relations between
agriculture and industry, and city and countryside continued to maintain the same
features as in the first half of the century, with the prevalence of quantitative (or
extensive) production, the European situation was very different. Here in the 1950s
and not just in the USSR but across the entire Soviet Camp and in the autono-
mous, but still socialist Yugoslavia, intense industrialisation had taken place and
questions were arising about the relations to establish between industrial
modernity, the quality of development and the new political prospects of socialism.
Third, the situation described above, the result of the repercussions of the
Second World War and the immediate post-war years in Eastern Europe, had
determined among other things a deep social and cultural break from the
interwar period. In fact, at the end of the 1940s the conditions no longer
existed for reviving – in any form whatsoever – the previous exchange of ideas
between peasantism and Bolshevism, between industrialisation and agricultural
development, or between city and countryside.
The communists of Eastern Europe, consistent with their political-cultural
vision, were convinced that they had fully satisfied rural demands when
during 1945–46 the Popular Fronts (heterogeneous anti-fascist coalitions that
came about during the war with the communists’ active contribution) imple-
mented a new wave of agricultural reforms, regenerating the radical spirit of
the aftermath of the First World War.
Large landed estates had been nationalised, cut up and rapidly distributed as
private property to poor peasants, creating a degree of social egalitarianism that
was undoubtedly meant to satisfy old claims. Nevertheless, this was interpreted
by the communists as an act aimed at decisively weakening the previously
dominant social classes’ hold on the economy. Certainly the reform inflicted an
extremely tough blow to the landed aristocracy, to the point that many previous
owners (not only foreign-born ones) decided to abandon their own countries.
Meanwhile, the communists deemed they had rapidly concluded the
“democratic-bourgeois phase” in the countryside, and had thus cleared the
path for the subsequent construction of socialism, as suggested by their
ideology.1 From that moment they focused their attention on industrialisation
and urbanisation, considered essential prerequisites for constructing their
political project, as well as overcoming illiteracy with the introduction of
compulsory education (soon raised to eight years), eliminating church-
sponsored education and social services, and establishing state-sponsored
atheism.
110 Market socialism and national roads to socialism
There was, therefore, a “profound” cultural and political reason, which
developed within the new post-war “people’s democracies”, that prompted the
break both with the interwar period and with existing peasantist formations:
this break rapidly deepened with the worsening of US-USSR relations and the
advance of the Cold War.
Among the first to enter into direct conflict with the communists – sup-
ported by peasantist and leftist social-democratic currents – were the agrarian
parties, which had maintained a strong hold on the electorate, especially in
Hungary (where the Smallholders’ Party obtained 57% of the vote in elections
in November 1945), Poland (where Mikołajczyk was forced by the Yalta
accords to accept a joint government with the Lublin Committee), and partly
in Romania (where Maniu and Mihalache still had some influence). Accused,
and rightly so, of having nationalist leanings before the war as well as having
supported the richest peasants and the urban bourgeoisie to the detriment of the
poorer classes, they were crushed by the rapid convergence of various factors,
ranging mainly from communist control of the interior ministries and the police,
to leftists’ predominantly industrialist orientation and international conditions
stemming from the division of spheres of influence of the Danube-Balkan area
by Churchill and Stalin in Moscow in October 1944.
Between 1946 and 1947 the communists’ critique transformed into ideologi-
cal denigration, and then into accusations of conspiracy (partly invented, partly
true), followed by imprisonment and trials. Decimated by the arrests of their
leaders and disorganised, the agrarian parties (like those of liberal or right-wing
socialist orientations, who had also been part of the anti-fascist coalitions) soon
found it impossible to conduct their activities freely, until Maniu and Mihalache
were condemned to life in prison, Mikołajczyk fled abroad, and the Hungarian
Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy – forced to resign – decided not to return to his
homeland. Shortly thereafter, as mentioned above, the peasantist wings of the
left (which had most strongly backed the alliance with the working class during
the Second World War) were silenced, while left-wing social democrats were
absorbed by the communist and workers’ parties.2
Once the Iron Curtain had fallen and the monopoly of the Communist
Party had been imposed, the break with the past, radical in form and content,
was completed with the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe. In those turbulent times,
the problem of development and modernisation was dealt with regardless of
rural societies’ aspirations. From 1949 onwards, the countryside was force-
fully collectivised and the Stalinist model of industrialisation tested in the
USSR after 1929 was applied everywhere.
As a consequence, the agrarian problem was reduced to a technical ques-
tion of production efficiency and the preservation and distribution of goods,
whereas the aspiration to modernity remained limited by the approach
imposed on it by the communists. As mentioned previously, they identified
modernity with industrial and urban growth, policies of mass literacy and
later higher education, architectural rationality, art that could realistically
reflect the world of work, and an atheistic view of society.
Market socialism and national roads to socialism 111
Once Bolshevik-peasantist competition was over, the international antag-
onism between development models seemed to become simpler, and at least
initially was reduced to mere rivalry between East and West, between socialism
and capitalism, reinforcing the conflict stemming from the Cold War.
Yet this “simplified” image, based on the antagonism between the United
States and the USSR and certainly facilitated by the return of Soviet iso-
lationism (extended to the entire camp) as well as an essentially autarkic
vision of development typical of Stalin, did not fully represent reality. Indeed,
this revealed much more articulated and complex forms at the beginning of
de-Stalinisation and concomitant with decolonisation. We will see how, in
reality, a tendency in this direction had already emerged in Europe after the
Second World War with the original ideas of “people’s democracies”, and
how this would be crushed by the two camps’ rapid solidification. Never-
theless, the changes that occurred in the mid-1950s provided the occasion for
these ideas to resurface in new forms and on an international level.
Thus a rich and fervent season began, multiple and trans-national, which
affected many countries and lasted until the repression of the “Prague
Spring”, with Tito’s Yugoslavia playing the role of an alternative protagonist.
After 1948, in effect, Yugoslav identity had been forged upon the basis of self-
management in internal politics and the country’s joining the Non-Aligned
Movement in foreign policy.
In this situation the concept of “competition” emerged from the rigid Eur-
opean juxtaposition of camps (which came about during the most acute phase
of the Cold War), then to expand geopolitically and take on worldwide sig-
nificance, more in economic-social terms than militarily. This competition
was soon identified not only in Moscow and Washington, but also in Bel-
grade and Beijing, and at play was hegemony over the post-colonial world of
Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Competition remained, of course, contained within the framework of the
conflict between alternative models of development. Not much time had
passed since the phases marked by the East-West opposition between city and
countryside, industry and agriculture, between rural socialism and industrial
socialism; similarly the East-East differences between Bolshevism and pea-
santism, industrialist Stalinism and pro-fascist and/or clerical corporativism
were not yet a distant memory.
Nonetheless, solidly anchored in the more general picture of modernity, in
the mid-1950s the new East-West polarisation of capitalism-communism, as it
had been defined after 1947 in the context of Europe, began to evolve into a
series of peaceful technological and social challenges. The “race to conquer
space” became one of its most distinctive symbols, and the functionality of
the system, the effectiveness of the solutions proposed and the quality of life
soon became the criteria used for measuring an antagonism which, in fact,
tended to lower barriers and increase communication.
Other factors contributing to this were the deliberations in the Socialist
Camp regarding controlled forms of market, the process of democratisation
112 Market socialism and national roads to socialism
both in individual countries and in international economic and political rela-
tions, and the distribution/attraction of resources to/from newly independent
countries in the so-called “Third World”. More broadly, the problem of
technical innovation, the growing use of new instruments of mass-media
communication to present one’s own “product system”, the expansion of
trade and the growing use of international finance were leading to the crea-
tion of a network of connections and progressive world interdependence
which would later develop into globalisation. The USSR and the Socialist
Camp were no longer able to avoid this process, although they attempted to
do so under Brezhnev because it frightened them.
Meanwhile, the issue of the reform of socialism, of its transition from
quantitative to qualitative production, and from a centralised, monolithic
system to one that was complex and differentiated reopened the debate on
relations within the Camp. This debate was in a context of competition with
the West for hegemony over the “Third World”, and Yugoslavia symbolised
the feasibility of a socialist approach characterised by a plurality of models,
with the Soviet system being only one of the possible variations.
the first concerned the efficiency of the Soviet system of production and
distribution;
the second focused on alternatives within the socialist system;
and the third concentrated on the ability of socialism as a whole to be able
to handle the challenge of the industrialised West in a global context.
Notes
1 Interesting from this perspective is Isaac Deutscher’s judgement expressed in his
Stalin. A Political Biography, Oxford University Press, London, 1965, which says
that “the Communist-inspired agrarian reform fulfilled, albeit imperfectly, the
dream of many generations of peasants and intellectuals” to allow for the sub-
sequent and immediate “leap” to industrialisation (quotations from p. 749 of the
Italian edn). On the agrarian question in the socialist societies after the Second
World War see François Fejtö, A History of the People’s Democracies: Eastern
Europe since Stalin, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1977; also Jean le Coz, Le
riforme agrarie, Il Magellano, Milano, 1976, pp. 55–61; my book Tito, Stalin e i
contadini, Unicopli, Milano, 1987; and Andrea Segrè, La rivoluzione bianca, Il
Mulino, Bologna, 1994, p. 111ff.
2 On the fate of peasantist parties see Fejtö, A History of the People’s Democracies,
op. cit.; and Hugh Seton-Watson, The Pattern of Communist Revolution. A His-
torical Analysis, Methuen, London, 1953/1960; as well as David Mitrany, Marx
against the Peasant. A Study in Social Dogmatism, op. cit., pp. 198–204. On the
broader context of communist success in Central-Eastern Europe, see Norman
Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (eds), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in
Eastern Europe 1944–1949, Westview Press, Boulder, 1997. The Russian point of
view was analysed by Fabio Bettanin in Stalin e l’Europa, Carocci, Roma, 2006.
3 On the Twentieth Congress see, among others, Adriano Guerra, Il giorno che
Chruščëv parlò, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1986; and Francesca Gori (ed.), Il XX
Congresso del PCUS, Angeli, Milano, 1988.
4 On political power and de-Stalinisation in the USSR the literature is endless. See,
among others, Alec Nove, Stalinism and After, Allen and Unwin, London, 1975;
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Confiscated Power: How Soviet Russia Really Works,
Harper & Row, New York, 1982; Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership,
Stability and Change in the Soviet Union, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1980; Fabio Bettanin, Pro e contro Stalin, Angeli, Milano, 1988; as well as the
biographies of Nikita Khrushchev, from the one by Edward Crankshaw, Khrush-
chev: A Career, Viking Press, New York, 1966; to that of Roy Medvedev, Khrush-
chev, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983. Also helpful are the memoires by Khrushchev,
Khrushchev Remembers, Deutsch, London, 1971.
5 See for example, Alexandre Adler, “Politica e ideologia nell’esperienza sovietica”,
in AA.VV, Storia del marxismo, Einaudi, Torino, 1978–82, vol. IV, pp. 136–39. For
the performance of the Soviet economy in those years, cf. Moshe Lewin, Political
Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. From Bukharin to the Modern Refor-
mers, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974; as well as Alec Nove, An Eco-
nomic History of USSR, op. cit.; Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development
since 1917, op. cit.; and, by Lewin again, The Making of the Soviet System, Pan-
theon Books, New York, 1985. An interesting analysis of the Soviet economic
Market socialism and national roads to socialism 143
system and its functionality can also be found in Sergej Prokopovič, Storia eco-
nomica dell’URSS, Laterza, Bari, 1957. A recent, wide-ranging reconstruction of
the material life and behaviour of the Soviet people from the Second World War to
the start of de-Stalinisation is that by Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War. Hopes,
Illusions and Disappointments 1945–1957, Sharpe, Armonk, 1998.
6 Kantorovich’s essay can also be found in English. The original was published by
the University of Leningrad publishing house in 1939. It was then translated with
the title “Mathematical Methods of Organizing and Planning Production”,
Management Science vol. VI, 1960, 366–422.
7 On the theses of Novozhilov and the economists close to him see Lisa Foa (ed.), Piano
e profitto nell’economia sovietica, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1965; as well as Novožilov-
Strumilin, La riforma economica nell’URSS, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1969; Birman-
Novozilov, Gestione economica e socialismo, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1971; V.S.
Nemčinov, Valore sociale e prezzo pianificato, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1977.
8 Evsej Liberman, Economic Methods and the Effectiveness of Production, White
Plans, New York, 1971; “Improve Economic Management and Planning: The
Plan, Profit and Bonus”, Pravda, 9 September 1962, translated into English in
Current Digest of the Soviet Press vol. XIV, n. 36, 3 October 1962, 13–15. See also
Alec Nove, “The Liberman Proposals”, Survey n. 47, April 1963; and M.I. Gold-
man, “Economic Controversy in the Soviet Union”, Foreign Affairs, April 1963; as
well as Lewin, Political Undercurrents, op. cit. See also Predrag Vranicki, Storia del
marxismo, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1973, vol. II, pp. 228–30; however, the most
exhaustive reconstruction of the debate remains undoubtedly that by Arrigo Levi,
Il potere in Russia. Da Stalin a Brežnev, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1967, especially pp.
161–226.
9 Alec Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary? Some Problems of Soviet Political Economy,
Allen and Unwin, London, 1964.
10 On Lange’s theories see in particular, Wlodzimierz Brus, Storia economica del-
l’Europa Orientale 1950–1980, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1983, pp. 141–43; but also
by Brus, The Market in a Socialist Economy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1962 and 1972. A concise presentation of the debate that developed at the time can
be found in Claudio Napoleoni, Le teorie economiche del Novecento, Einaudi,
Torino, 1963. Regarding Czesław Bobrowski, see this author’s work La formation
du système soviétique de planification, Mouton, den Haague, 1956; and Il socialismo in
Jugoslavia, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1956.
11 Among the most important works by Ota Šik, see Plan and Market Under Social-
ism, White Plains, New York, 1967; The Third Way. Marxist–Leninist Theory and
the Modern Industrial Society, Wildwood House, London, 1976; Risveglio di
primavera, Ricordi, Sugarco, Milano, 1988.
12 See Kádár’s speech at the Ninth Party Congress in December 1966, excerpts of
which have been published by Robert Daniels (ed.), A Documentary History of
Communism, University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1984, vol.
II, pp. 321–24; as well as Hans-Georg Heinrich, Hungary. Politics, Economics and
Society, Pinter, London, 1986, pp. 144–46. On the price reform in GDR, see Hans
Boehme, “La riforma dei prezzi nella Germania orientale”, in the volume edited
by the CESES, Il sistema dei prezzi nei Paesi socialisti, Angeli, Milano, 1977, pp.
237–57. On Bulgarian planning, see R.J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 198 and ff.
13 On this subject see Francesco Privitera, La transizione continua, Longo, Ravenna,
1996; but also Bruno Dallago, Riforma economica e direzione dell’economia, and
Guido Bimbi, L’Ungheria tra riforma economica e dibattito politico (1968–1973),
reports presented at the seminar “Politica, economia e cultura nell’esperienza
ungherese”, Gramsci Institute, Rome, 26–27 January 1979, mimeographed paper.
144 Market socialism and national roads to socialism
14 An interesting comment on Kosygin’s reform was published by Marshall I. Goldman,
“Economic Revolution in the Soviet Union”, Foreign Affairs, January 1967,
313–31.
15 On these aspects, see the essays by the protagonists of the Prague Spring collected
by Francesco Leoncini, Che cosa fu la Primavera di Praga? Lacaita, Roma, 1989.
16 See Stefano Bianchini, La diversità socialista in Jugoslavia, Est, Trieste, 1984, pp.
20–27; and, edited by the same author, L’autogestione jugoslava, Angeli, Milano,
1982. See also Ivanišević, Pavić, Ramljak, Samoupravljanje, Školska Knjiga,
Zagreb, 1974; Veljko Mratović, Teorija i praksa samoupravnog socijalizma, Školska
Knjiga, Zagreb, 1976; Horvat and others, Il sistema jugoslavo, De Donato, Bari,
1980.
17 The trade union programme calling for the creation of workers’ councils in Hun-
gary was published by Népszava on 26 October 1956. On the documentation
regarding the Hungarian councils, see Laszlo Sekelj (ed.), Socijalni pokreti i poli-
tički sistem u Mađarskoj. Dokumenti, Univerzitet u Beogradu, Beograd, 1988; cf.
also François Fejtö, Ungheria 1945–1957, Einaudi, Torino, 1957, pp. 267–70, pp.
355–65; but also the speeches by Nagy collected in Imre Nagy on Communism: In
the Defense of the New Course, Praeger, New York, 1958; also György Krassó,
“L’esempio del consiglio operaio di Budapest e la rivolta del 1956”, and Sándor
Rácz (interview), “Il Consiglio operaio, come un sigillo, autenticò la rivoluzione”,
both in Classe n. 1, 1986, 167–91; and Ferenc Töke, “Ce que furent les conseils
ouvriers hongrois”, L’Autre Europe n. 11–12, 1986, 164–82. As regards Czecho-
slovakia cf. H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1976, pp. 436–43; or the essay by Franco Bertone,
“Classe operaia e consigli di fabbrica nella ‘Primavera di Praga’”, in Istituto
Gramsci, Il ‘68 cecoslovacco e il socialismo, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1979, pp. 84–
93; or also the essay by Karel Kovanda, “I consigli operai in Cecoslovacchia”, Aut
Aut n. 169, January–February 1979, 2–19; while as regards Poland, see “Il Pro-
gramma di Solidarnosc”, L’Ottavogiorno n. 0, 1982, especially 45–47; or again
Jerzy Osiatynski, Wlodzimierz Pankow and Michal Federowicz, Self-Management
in the Polish Economy 1981–1985, Polish Sociology Association, Warsaw, 1985. A
journal that tenaciously followed the move towards self-management in Europe
was the Yugoslav Socijalizam u Svetu, translated in various languages and titled in
English Socialism in the World. The journal, which contained articles by authors
from around the world, was published regularly in Belgrade until the fall of
communism.
18 In spite of broad-based opinion spread by the media in the wake of the Cold War
that identified “People’s Democracies” with the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe,
these two phases are conceptually and chronologically distinct. There are two
schools of thought, just as different from each other, that address the relationship
between these two phases: the first viewed the “People’s Democracies” as an
intermediate phase, consciously used by the communists to build their own mono-
poly of power (Hugh Seton-Watson); the other emphasised the not inevitable con-
sequentiality between them, as Sovietisation was caused by Stalin’s decision to
bring about “Cold War communism” and was manifested by his opposition to the
Marshall Plan and the formation of the Kominform in June–September 1947
(Fejtö). In any case, the most extensive theoretical analysis of “People’s Democ-
racies” is by Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Camp: Unity and Conflict, Praeger,
New York, 1967. On the other hand, many of the speeches and writings quoted by
Brzezinski are amply quoted, with references to the sources, by Edvard Kardelj in
his O narodnoj demokratiji u Jugoslaviji, Kultura, Beograd, 1949, especially p. 9
and pp. 16–26. It is also useful to compare these texts with Adriano Guerra, Gli
anni del Cominform, Mazzotta, Milano, 1977, pp. 61–66; and François Fejtö, A
History of the People’s Democracies, op. cit.; Karel Kaplan, The Short March. The
Market socialism and national roads to socialism 145
Communist Takeover in Czechslovakia 1945–1948, Hurst, London, 1987, pp. 33–49,
193; and Hugh Seton-Watson, The Pattern of Communist Revolution, op. cit.
19 In this regard some interesting citations from Dimitrov’s and Gottwald’s speeches
can be found respectively in Paolo Spriano, “Il movimento comunista fra guerra e
dopoguerra 1938–1947”, and Jaroslav Opat, “Dall’antifascismo ai “socialismi
reali”: le democrazie popolari”, in AA.VV., Storia del marxismo, op. cit., vol. III,
tome II, pp. 721, 750. Edvard Kardelj talks explicitly about Bierut in O narodnoj
demokratiji op. cit., p. 26.
20 See Josip Broz Tito, “Temelji demokratije novoga tipa”, Komunist n. 2, January
1947, p. 10; or even his speech at Rijeka/Fiume, “O našoj i zapadnoj demokratiji”,
Borba, 26 October 1946; and in Tito, Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije, Kultura, Beograd,
vol. II, 1948, pp. 204–10.
21 Evgeniy Varga’s work “Demokratja novogo tipa”, is in Mirovoe hoziaistvo i mir-
ovaya politika n. 3, 1947; that of A. Leont’ev appeared in Planovoe hoziaistvo n. 4,
1947; and that of I. Trajanin, “Demokratija osobogo tipa”, in Sovetskoe
gosudarstvo i pravo n. 1 and 3, 1947.
22 See the collection of documents edited by Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne and János
M. Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, CEU Press,
Budapest, 2002, pp. 290–91, 334–35.
23 See for example the conclusions of the Piller commission appointed during the
April plenary assembly of the Central Committee to review the trials of the 1950s
and the theories expressed by its secretary, the famous historian Karel Kaplan, in
Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, op. cit., p. 389. The
thesis was explicitly taken and elaborated by François Fejtö in his book Il colpo di
stato di Praga 1948, Bompiani, Milano, 1977, pp. 10–11, 215–21.
24 On this complex Yugoslav-Magyar-Russian matter, see the most recent documents
published in Budapest regarding the revolution of 1956 and, in particular, the study
by Zoltan Ripp on Hungary and Yugoslavia and the biography of Nagy by Janos
Rainer dated 1996–99. On this subject there is a detailed reconstruction available in
Italian in the degree dissertation of Vincenzo Pallucca, Ungheria, da Imre Nagy a
János Kádár e i rapporti jugoslavo-sovietici 1953–1956, University of Bologna, Forlì
campus, academic year 2003/04; the collection of documents edited by Békés et al.,
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, op. cit.; and the memoirs of Yugoslav Ambassador
Veljko Mićunović, Moscow Diary, Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1980.
25 On the Yugoslav-Soviet relationship in those years and on the start of the politics
of non-alignment, cf. Geoffrey Swain and Nigel Swain, Eastern Europe since 1945,
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998, pp. 76–85; my study, “The USSR and the
Soviet Camp between Ideology and Realpolitik, 1947–1958”, in Antonio Varsori
(ed.), 1945–1990: The End of an Era? Macmillan, London, 1994, pp. 117–40; the
important “Hronika nesvrstanosti 1956–1980”, by Olivera Bogetić and Dragan
Bogetić, in Bojana Tadić, Osobenosti i dileme nesvrtanosti, Komunist, Beograd,
1982, especially pp. 103–8; and the volumes by Leo Mates, Međunarodni odnosi
socijalističke Jugoslavije, Nolit, Beograd, 1976; and by Ranko Petković, Nesvrstana
Jugoslavija i savremeni svet, Školska Knjiga, Zagreb, 1985.
26 On self-management in Yugoslavia and in particular on the reform of 1965, I refer
to Carlo Boffito (ed.), Socialismo e mercato in Jugoslavia, Einaudi, Torino, 1968;
Rudolf Bićanić, Economic Policy of Socialist Yugoslavia, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2010 [1973]; my La diversità socialista, op. cit., pp. 57–71; and
my edited volume, L’enigma jugoslavo, le ragioni della crisi, Angeli, Milano, 1989,
with an extensive bibliography on the subject.
27 On the subject of price reform and the debate within the European socialist area,
see in particular the volume edited by CESES, Il sistema dei prezzi, op. cit.; that by
Joseph Wilczynski, The Economics of Socialism, Allen and Unwin, London, 1978;
and the volume by Wlodzimierz Brus, Storia economica, op. cit., pp. 150 and ff.
146 Market socialism and national roads to socialism
28 Comecon, originally the economic organisation of the European communist states,
was wanted by Stalin in 1949 just after the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the
Kominform, with the main purpose of imposing Stalinisation of the economies of
the socialist Camp countries according to the principles that prevailed in the USSR
following the radical turn around of 1929 and based on centralised five-year plan-
ning, prioritary development of heavy industry, collectivisation in the countryside,
nationalisation of production and distribution, and systematic recourse to coercion.
It became necessary to wait until 1959, i.e. ten years after its establishment, for
Comecon to give itself a statute. On Comecon, see in particular Michael Kaser,
Comecon: Integration Problems of the Planned Economies, RIIA, London, 1967; S.
Ausch, Theory and Practice in CMEA Cooperation, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest,
1972; and Marie Lavigne, Le Comecon, Cujas, Paris, 1974.
29 See for example, Peter Wiles, Communist International Economics, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford, 1982; and Edward Hewitt, Foreign Trade Prices in the Council of Mutual
Economic Assistance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974.
30 On the relationship between the reforms in the 1960s and the NEP, see the revealing
book by Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, op. cit.
31 At that time the Romanian Communist Party suffered from a syndrome that saw
agricultural development as an expression of backwardness, to the point that it
muted the contribution of one of Romania’s few Marxists, Constantin Dobrogeanu-
Gherea, because he had dedicated his analyses (published in Bucharest in 1910,
and which proved to have a significant impact in the 1920s) to forms of neo-serfdom
(neoiobǎgia) in the countryside and not to aspects of industrialisation. On this
subject, see Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, CEU
Press, Budapest, 2001, p. 71; and more broadly, on the subject of Soviet-Romanian
relations, Vlad Sobell, The Red Market, Industrial Co-operation and Specialisation
in Comecon, Gower, Aldershot, 1984; as well as François Fejtö, A History of the
People’s Democracies, op. cit.; and my Sarajevo, le radici dell’odio, Edizioni
Associate, Roma, 2003, pp. 119–21.
32 On this subject, see the vast volume by Tibor Kiss, The Market of Socialist Eco-
nomic Integration, Kiado, Budapest, 1973; and by the same author, “L’integrazione
dei mercati nel mondo socialista”, and the reply by John Pinder, “Una Ostpolitik
per la Comunità Europea”, in AA.VV., Riforme e sistema economico nell’Europa
dell’Est, IAI-Il Mulino, Roma-Bologna, 1972, pp. 45–91.
33 Cf. presentations by Antonio Jannazzo, Alberto Scarponi and Roberto Gatti at the
conference Politica, economia e cultura nell’esperienza ungherese, Rome, 26–27
January 1979, mimeographed doc., Istituto Gramsci; or Federica Olivares, “Praxis
e la società jugoslava”, Documentazione sui Paesi dell’Est, CESES, Milan, n. 1–2,
January–April 1976; Jean Marabini, Dossier Russia, Casini ed., Roma, 1968, pp.
389ff.; or AA.VV., Storia del marxismo, op. cit., vol. IV, pp. 145–219.
34 See Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right: Right-wing Ideologies in the Con-
temporary USSR, University of California, Berkeley, 1978; and by the same
author, Détente after Brezhnev: The Domestic Roots of Soviet Foreign Policy,
University of California, Berkeley, 1977.
35 There is a vast international bibliography on this subject. For an initial approach,
see Wendy Godman, “Le donne nella società sovietica”, in Michel Dreyfus, Bruno
Groppo et al. (eds), Il secolo dei comunismi, Net, Milano, 2004, pp. 194–205; and
Sabrina Ramet, “In Tito’s Time”, in Sabrina Ramet (ed.), Gender Politics in the
Western Balkans, Penn State Press, University Park, PA, 1999, pp. 89–105; and
Barbara Clements, Bolshevik Women, op. cit.
36 From this viewpoint it is interesting to see with how much wit and intelligence
Arrigo Levi commented on the relationship between price reform and the drive
towards democratisation in his book, contemporary to the experiments of the time, Il
potere in Russia, op. cit., pp. 223–26.
Market socialism and national roads to socialism 147
37 See Antonín Liehm, “Dalla cultura alla politica”, in Leoncini (ed.), Che cosa fu la
“primavera di Praga?”, op. cit., pp. 127–50; Günter Grass and Pavel Kohout,
Dialogo con Praga, De Donato, Bari, 1969; and Stefano Bianchini (ed.), “La
Primavera di Praga vent’anni dopo”, thematic edn of Transizione n. 11/12, 1988,
Cappelli, Bologna. Ample excerpts from presentations at the Fourth Congress of
Czechoslovak Writers with speeches by Kundera, Kohout, Goldstücker, Klíma,
Havel and Vaculík are in Gianlorenzo Pacini (ed.), La svolta di Praga, Samonà e
Savelli, Roma, 1968.
38 See Zdeněk Mlynář, “Idee sul pluralismo politico nella linea del Partito comunista
di Cecoslovacchia nel 1968”, in Leoncini (ed.), Che cosa fu, op. cit., p. 2.
39 Ibid., pp. 9–39. See also Milož Hájek, “La democratizzazione del Partito”, in
Francesco M. Cataluccio and Francesca Gori (eds), La primavera di Praga,
Angeli, Milano, 1990, pp. 235–40; Roberto Gatti, “Società civile e pluralismo nel
‘68 cecoslovacco”, in Istituto Gramsci, Il ‘68 cecoslovacco e il socialismo, Editori
Riuniti, Roma, 1979, pp. 123–31; on the philosophical thought of the “Spring” see
also Predrag Vranicki, Storia del marxismo, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 274–81.
40 On this subject see more extensively my La diversità socialista, op. cit., especially
pp. 99ff.; from the perspective of the debate over ideas, see also Predrag Vranicki,
“Što se dogodilo u Čehoslovačkoj”, Naže teme n. 2, 1970; and by the same author,
Socijalistička alternativa, Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 1982.
41 On the debate unleashed in those years in Yugoslavia against “technocracy” and
“anarchic liberalism”, see, for example, the volumes by Dragan Marković and Savo
Kržavac, Liberalizam od Ðilasa do danas, Sloboda, Beograd, 1978, 2 vols; or Fuad
Muhić, SKJ i opozicija, Radnički Univerzitet Veljko Vlahović, Subotica, 1977; on
Albania see Antonello Biagini, Storia dell’Albania, Bompiani, Milano, 1998 and
Stephanie Schwandners-Sievers and Bernd J. Fischer (eds), Albanian Identities.
Myth and History, Hurst, London, 2002.
42 The document referred to is the presentation by Kardelj to the Presidency of the
League of Communists on 13 June. See Edvard Kardelj, “Nova područja ljudske
slobode i demokratije”, Komunist, 20 June 1977. Later, Kardelj went back over
these subjects in a more explicit way in his essays: “Pluralismo democratico degli
interessi autogestionali”, Questioni attuali del socialismo n. 5, 1978; Slobodni udru-
ženi rad-Brionske diskusije, Radnička Stampa, Beograd, 1978; Self-Management and
the Political System, STP, Beograd, 1980.
43 See the Fourth General Principle of the Constitution of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, Edit, Rijeka, 1974.
44 On Ðilas, see in particular the articles published in Borba from 11 October 1953 to
4 January 1954 (later collected in Anatomy of a Moral: The Political Essays of
Milovan Djilas, Praeger, New York, 1958); followed by the statement issued to The
New York Times, December 1954, on the two-party system; and the essay The New
Class. An Analysis of the Communist System, Praeger, New York, 1957.
45 On the proposals for economic and political change see the work done by the
Krajger and Vrhovec commissions and in particular the documents: “Polazne
osnove dugoročnog programa ekonomske stabilizacije”, Borba-dokumenti, Beograd, 19
April 1982; “Zaključni deo dugoročnog programa ekonomske stabilizacije”, Sav-
remena Praksa, Beograd, enclosure to issue n. 966, 14 July 1983; Kritička analiza
funkcionisanja političkog sistema socijalističkog samoupravljanja, Centar za rad-
ničko samoupravljanje, Beograd, 24 July 1985 (second edn, same editor, 22
November 1985). See also Bianchini (ed.), L’enigma jugoslavo, op. cit.
46 See Isaac Deutscher, The Great Contest, Russia and the West, Oxford University
Press, London, 1960 (quotation from p. 61 of Italian edn).
47 Ibid.
48 See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Allen and
Unwin, London, 1954.
148 Market socialism and national roads to socialism
49 Alan M. Ball, Imagining America, op. cit., pp. 156–59.
50 On Khrushchev’s views in those years and competition with the United States, see
in particular Khrushchev’s responses to Bertrand Russell’s open letter written to
him and Eisenhower of 23 November 1957 and the reaction of US Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles. The correspondence is in Bertrand Russell, Lettera ai
potenti della terra, Einaudi, Torino, 1958. In addition, see Giuseppe Boffa, Storia
dell’Unione Sovietica, Mondadori, Milano, vol. 2, pp. 565–66; and Crankshaw,
Khrushchev: A Career, op. cit.
51 What convinced Stalin of the validity of these theories were the Westernist choices
of Atatürk in Turkey as well as Chiang Kai-shek in China, and subsequently
India’s decision to join the British Commonwealth. In fact, after the Second World
War and the beginning of the process of colonial independence, Soviet economic
and political isolationism and autarky continued. See Jerry Hough, The Struggle
for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options, The Brookings Institution,
Washington, 1986, pp. 36, 114–19, 226–27.
52 Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960.
53 John Hobson, The Wealth of States: A Comparative Sociology of International
Economic and Political Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, pp.
210ff.
54 On Rostow and his critics, see Bernard Cazes, “Dagli stadi dello sviluppo alle
finalità economiche”, in L. Cafagna et al., Problemi storici dell’industrializzazione e
dello sviluppo, Argalia, Urbino, 1965 pp. 55–69.
55 Cfr. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, op. cit.; with Eric Hobs-
bawm, “‘First Comers’ and ‘Second Comers’”, in Cafagna et al., Problemi storici
dell’industrializzazione, op. cit., pp. 71–102.
56 Colin Clark, National Income and Outlay, London, 1937; and Jean Fourastié, La
Civilisation de 1960, Paris, 1947.
57 Pierre Massé, Prévision et prospective, Puf, Paris, 1967, and previously in
Prospective n. 4, November 1959.
58 See Cafagna et al., Problemi storici dell’industrializzazione, op. cit.; or also Witold
Kula, The Problems and Methods of Economic History, op. cit., pp. 265ff.; and
Ruggiero Romano, Tra storici ed economisti, Einaudi, Torino, 1982.
59 Significantly, the first Trabant model produced was named Sputnik.
60 In this regard, see Hough, The Struggle for the Third World, op. cit. This volume
can be accompanied by reading some volumes that were published at the time of
the US–Soviet dispute, which paint a vivid picture of the passions and topics of the
time. See in particular, Deutscher, The Great Contest, op. cit.; and George Kennan,
Russia, the Atom and the West, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1958.
61 Cf. on this topic Vasilii G. Solodovnikov and Viktor V. Bogoslovskii, Non-Capitalist
Development. An Historical Outline, Progress Publ., Moscow, 1975; and Vassil
Vassilev, Politique d’Aide du Camp Soviétique aux pays en voie de developpement,
OECD, Paris, 1969.
62 We should not forget that at the time Soviet socialism was very critical of
Narodnichestvo.
63 See Hough, The Struggle for the Third World, op. cit., pp. 156–65.
64 The Pancha Shila were actually mentioned for the first time by the Indonesian
leader Sukarno in 1945 and referred to the five Aryan virtues (do not steal, do not
kill, do not lie, do not become inebriated, do not be depraved). In the agreement of
Tibet reached by Zhou Enlai and Nehru on 29 April 1954, the five principles
became the rejection of aggression, the disavowal of interference in the domestic
affairs of other countries, the respect for territorial sovereignty and integrity,
mutual cooperation based on equality, and peaceful coexistence on an interna-
tional level. The Sino-Indonesian Joint Statement of 1954 and extracts of the
Market socialism and national roads to socialism 149
speech by Zhou Enlai at Bandung have been published by Robert Daniels (ed.), A
Documentary History, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 217–19. See also Ranko Petković, Velike
sile i politika nesvrstanosti, Centar za kulturnu djelatnost SSO, Zagreb, 1979, pp.
141–50; and Daniel Colar, Le mouvement des pays non alignés, La documentation
française, Paris, 1981, pp. 11–19; but also Leo Mates, Nesvrstanost. Teorija i
savremena praksa, IMPP, Beograd, 1970, pp. 78–96.
65 On the role of China in Asia at the beginning of the 1950s, see Seton-Watson, The
Pattern of Communist Revolution, op. cit.; Enrica Collotti Pischel, Storia della
rivoluzione cinese, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1973. As to the Conference of Bandung,
see O. Guitard, Bandoung et le réveil des peuples colonisés, PUF, Paris, 1976.
66 On Tito’s foreign policy regarding the Balkan Pact, see Stefano Bianchini, Sarajevo
le radici dell’odio, Edizioni associate, Roma, III ed., 2003, pp. 215–18; and by the
same author, “I mutevoli assetti balcanici e la contesa italo-jugoslava (1948–
1956)”, in Marco Galeazzi (ed.), Roma-Belgrado. Gli anni della guerra fredda,
Longo, Ravenna, 1995, pp. 11–37; as well as Duško Lopandić and Jasminka
Kronja, Regionalne inicijative i multilateralna saradnja na Balkanu, Evropski
Pokret Srbije, Beograd, 2010, pp. 33–50; Milan Skakun, Balkan i velike sile, Arion,
Zemun, 1986; John Iatrides, Balkan Triangle, Mouton, The Hague, 1968. On his
foreign policy toward Asian and African countries in the 1950s, see instead,
Dragan Bogetić, Koreni jugoslovenskog opredeljenja za nesvrstanost, ISI, Beograd,
1990.
67 Among the most important Yugoslav theoretical contributions, see the prolific
Ranko Petković, whose only works we mention here are Teorijski pojmovi nesvr-
stanosti, Rad, Beograd, 1974; and Nesvrstanost, Školska Knjiga, Zagreb, 1981; as
well as Bora Jevtić, Međunarodna uloga nesvrstanosti, Rad, Beograd, 1976; Čedomir
Vučković, Nesvrstani u podeljenom svetu, Rad, Beograd, 1981; Bojana Tadić,
Sukobi među nesvrstanim zemaljama, Međunarodna politika, Beograd, 1987; and
Milan Šahović, Droit International et Non-alignement, Međunarodna politika,
Beograd, 1987. Among the few non-Yugoslav contributions, see the volume by K.P.
Misra and K.R. Narayanan, Non-Alignment in Contemporary International Relations,
Vikas, Delhi, 1981, which gathers together the notes of Indo-Yugoslav talks.
6 Between otherness and globalisation
“Real socialism”, modernity and
Gorbachev
Notes
1 From this point of view, the call for national sovereignty took on great significance,
even though it was cloaked in ambiguity. In fact, each time sovereignty was
attributed to each independent state (with the risk of triggering tensions and breaks
with Moscow), to the Soviet Camp as a whole, in opposition to the Western Camp
(this was the sense of the “Brezhnev doctrine”), or to populations constituting
socialist federations (from the Baltic republics to Croatia). There are no studies of
the history of the idea of sovereignty in socialism. However, useful indications can
be found in Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1999; Sergei Kovalev, “Sovereignty and the International Obligations
of Socialist Countries”, Current Digest of the Soviet Press (CDSP) n. 39, 1968, 10–
12; or Leonid Brezhnev, “Speech to the 5th Congress of the Polish United Workers’
Party”, CDSP n. 46, 1968, 3–5. On the Croatian mass national movement
(Maspok), see my Nazionalismo croato e autogestione, La Pietra, Milano, 1983.
2 Adriano Guerra, Il crollo dell’Impero sovietico, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1996, p. 149.
3 On Gierek’s policies, see Carlo Boffito, “Appunti per una discussione sui rapporti
fra sistema economico e sistema politico nella Polonia degli anni Settanta”, pre-
sentation given at the conference Origini e momenti della crisi polacca, Ist.
Gramsci, Roma, 26–27 March 1982, mimeographed paper.
4 On the fate of the reform processes in the 1960s, see for more detail Iván Berend,
Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993. Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 222–53; and Bülent Gökay,
Eastern Europe since 1970, Longman, New York, 2001.
5 In addition to the studies cited in the preceding endnote, see also Marie Lavigne,
The Economics of Transition. From Socialist Economy to Market Economy, St.
Martin’s Press, New York, 1998, pp. 79–87; and compare with the essays by AA.
VV., “Tendenze economiche dei Paesi socialisti negli anni Settanta: Polonia,
Ungheria e Unione Sovietica”, Quaderni Feltrinelli n. 11, 1980; or “Stabilità e
riforme nei Paesi dell’Est europeo”, Quaderni Feltrinelli n. 27, 1984. See also essays
by Paolo Brera, Carlo Boffito and Gabriele Crespi Reghizzi on self-management,
the Yugoslav banking system and the system of foreign investment, in Stefano
Bianchini (ed.), L’autogestione jugoslava, Angeli, Milano, 1982, pp. 195–220, 248–58.
182 Between otherness and globalisation
6 On the economic crisis of the late 1970s, see D. Mario Nuti, Economic Crisis in
Eastern Europe: Prospects and Repercussions, European University Institute, Fiesole,
1984.
7 Compare Iván Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, op. cit., pp. 229–32; with
Boicho Shushmanov, “Recent Program Developments in USSR and East Eur-
opean Socialist Countries”, Peabody Journal of Education vol. 51, n. 1, October 1973,
12–19.
8 Reagan was, nonetheless, always pragmatic enough to assume behaviours that did
not compromise the interests of his country; thus in 1981 he recalled the embargo
on grain sales to the USSR (implemented the previous year by his predecessor
Carter due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), since this conflicted with the
interests of US farmers, of which Moscow was an excellent customer.
9 On this topic compare Robin Okey, The Demise of Communist East Europe,
Arnold, London, 2004, pp. 38–39; Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism. An Introduc-
tion, Duke University Press, Durham, 1997, pp. 223–31; and Barbara J. Falk,
The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East Central Europe, CEU Press, Budapest,
2003, pp. 143–46.
10 Iván Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, op. cit., pp. 227 and ff.
11 On the state of these economies see, for example, the contemporary (and interest-
ing because of this) studies by Paolo Brera, “L’economia polacca fino allo stato di
guerra e oltre”, and Paolo Santacroce, “Crisi economica: a proposito di alcuni
luoghi comuni”, L’Ottavogiorno n. 0, 1982, 132–49; by Lucia Lanzanova, “Il
commercio Est-Ovest: né con te né senza di te”, and Paolo Brera, “Aspetti della
crisi economica nel Comecon”, L’Ottavogiorno n. 1, 1982, 49–66; or Zdenek
Mlynar, Stabilisation rélative des systèmes de type soviétique dans les années 1970,
Étude n. 2 du Project de récherche “Les crises des systèmes de type soviétique”,
Wien, 1983; as well as the extensive study by Dario Tosi, “Le politiche di investi-
mento nei Paesi dell’Est europeo: dalla fase di adattamento alle nuove direttrici dei
piani 1986–1990 e in prospettiva”, Est-Ovest n. 4, 1986, 65–132.
12 The 24th Congress of the CPSU focused on these topics in one of its conclusive
documents: see “Directives of the 24th Congress of CPSU on the Five-Year Plan of
Development of the National Economy of the USSR in the Years 1971–1975”, 9
April 1972, Current Soviet Policies vol. VI, 1973, especially pp. 151–53. In addi-
tion, compare Robert Daniels, Is Russia Reformable? Westview Press, Boulder, CO,
1988, pp. 106–11; and Giuseppe Boffa, Dall’URSS alla Russia. Storia di una crisi
non finita, Laterza, Bari, 1995, pp. 94–99. See also Žores Medvedev, Soviet Science,
Norton, New York, 1978; and Viktor G. Afanasyev, The Scientific and Technological
Revolution: Its Impact on Management and Education, Progress, Moscow, 1975.
13 On this topic, cf. Iván Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, op. cit., pp. 227; and
Lubomir Sochor, Contribution à l’analyse des traits conservateurs de l’idéologie du
“socialisme réel”, Étude n. 2 du Project de récherche “Les crises des systèmes de
type soviétique”, Wien, 1983, especially pp. 44–45.
14 From 1969 to 1989 only one Soviet won a Nobel Prize for Economics compared
with 15 Americans; if we then compare the period 1953–65 to that of 1966–90, we
see that Nobel Prizes for Physics won by Soviet scientists went from six in the first
period to one in the second, in Chemistry from one to zero, and just one in Eco-
nomics was won in the second period, while in Literature two were won in the first
period and two in the second. Finally, two Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded in the
second period, to the physicist Andrei Sakharov in 1975 and Gorbachev in 1990.
15 See Gustavo Corni, Storia della Germania, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1995, p. 421.
16 See Luigi Vittorio Ferraris, “I diritti dell’uomo da Helsinki a Belgrado: profilo
diplomatico-politico”, in E. Fanara (ed.), I diritti dell’uomo da Helsinki a Belgrado:
risultati e prospettive, Giuffrè, Milano, 1981, pp. 91–103.
Between otherness and globalisation 183
17 Cf. Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas, op. cit.; with Nicolai Petro, The Rebirth of
Russian Democracy, op. cit.; or also Robert Daniels, Is Russia, op. cit., pp. 111–16.
18 On these aspects, see more detail in Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the
West. Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War, op. cit., especially pp.
127–53.
19 A more detailed description of positions on the future of reform in the USSR and
the Camp in the mid-1980s is by Philip Hanson, On the Limitations of the Soviet
Economic Debate, Discussion Papers of the Centre for Russian and East European
Studies, University of Birmingham, July 1985.
20 See Zdeněk Mlynář, “Il crocevia della riforma politica”, in AA.VV., Il progetto
Gorbaciov, Rinascita, Roma, 1987, p. 13.
21 See Adriano Guerra, Il crollo dell’Impero, op. cit., pp. 36–38.
22 Compare Zdeněk Mlynář’s essay, Can Gorbačëv Change the Soviet Union? West-
view Press, Boulder, CO, 1990; with Pierre Kende’s speech, “Gorbaciov non può
cambiare le regole”, in AA.VV., Il progetto, op. cit., pp. 78–82; by Tomothy J.
Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union, Council on Foreign Relations,
New York, 1986; and Alain Besançon, “Breaking the Spell”, in George Urban
(ed.), Can the Soviet System Survive Reforms? Seven Colloquies about the State of
Soviet Socialism Seven Decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, Pinter, London,
1989; as well as Edgard Morin, De la nature de l’URSS. Complexe totalitaire et
nouvel empire, Fayard, Paris, 1983.
23 See Robert Daniels, Is Russia, op. cit. See also George Breslauer (ed.), Can Gor-
bačëv’s Reforms Succeed? University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990; Stephen
White, Gorbačëv in Power, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1990; Michael
E. Urban, More Power to the Soviets: The Democratic Revolution in the USSR,
Edward Elgar, Brookfield, 1990. On the other hand, Moshe Lewin wrote an essay
full of hope of the possible meeting of political will (which he felt was assured with
Gorbachev) and reform programme in the USSR in the volume, La Russia in una
nuova era, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1988. By Giuseppe Boffa, see “Socialismi in
movimento”, in AA.VV., Il progetto Gorbaciov, op. cit., pp. 83–90. Subsequently
the same author summarised many of his theories in a solid and well-documented
volume entitled Dall’Urss alla Russia. Storia di una crisi non finita, Laterza, Bari,
1995.
24 On this topic compare Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism
in Russia 1917–1991, The Free Press, New York, 1994; Fred Coleman, The Decline
and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years that Shook the World from Stalin to
Yeltsyn, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996; and Richard Pipes, Communism: A
History, The Modern Library, New York, 1993. Adriano Guerra collected his
considerations in an essay rich in references to the international debate, entitled Il
crollo dell’Impero sovietico, op. cit.
25 This is a tendency visible also in Putin’s Russia. See Stephen F. Cohen, “Was the
Soviet System Reformable?”, Slavic Review n. 3, vol. 63, Fall 2004, 467. Cohen’s
provocatory analysis stimulated a revival of the debate on the reformability of the
Soviet system: participants in this debate included Archie Brown, Mark Kramer,
Karen Dawisha, Stephen Hanson and Georgi Derluguian, in the pages of the
journal Slavic Review n. 3, vol. 63, Fall 2004, 459–554, which also has an extensive
bibliography that we recommend.
26 We refer the reader first of all to the works of George Kennan (signed “X”), “The
Sources of Soviet Conduct”, Foreign Affairs n. 4, 1947, 566–88; Hélène Carrère
d’Encausse, Decline of an Empire. The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, News-
week Books, New York, 1980; Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until
1984? Harper and Row, New York, 1970; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Great Failure:
The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century, Scribner, New York, 1989.
An extensive description of the debate on the topic, including publications from the
184 Between otherness and globalisation
interwar years, can be found in Adriano Guerra, Il crollo dell’Impero, op. cit.,
especially pp. 15–38. Anna Alberico has also written a rich survey on the subject,
La storiografia italiana su Russia e Unione Sovietica nell’ultimo trentennio, Graphos,
Genova, 1995.
27 The doctrinaires represented a powerful component of the CPSU (even before
Lenin’s seizure of power, as Barrington Moore, Jr stressed in his seminal book of
1951): there was a recurring need to control them in the power management under
communism with evident implications for the implementation of structural adjust-
ments whenever the socialist societies required them symbolically and in substance.
See Barrington Moore, Jr, Soviet Politics – The Dilemmas of Power, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1951, pp. 414 and ff.
28 A rare recent study that explicitly related the collapse of communism, at least in
the USSR, to its inability to cope and interact with globalisation has been pub-
lished after the fall of communism, by David Lockwood, The Destruction of the
Soviet Union: A Study in Globalization, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000, see especially
pp. 75ff.
29 This was the conclusion that the American scholar of Romanian origin Stephen
Fischer-Galati arrived at in his presentation at the ISDEE in Trieste in 1987,
summarised in “Eastern Europe in the Gorbachev Era. A Tentative Assessment”,
Est-Ovest n. 4, 1987, 77–82.
30 Compare Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon. A Historical Interpretation,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988; and the article by Tatyana Zaslavskaya,
Social Factors of Speeding-up the Development of the Soviet Economy, mimeo-
graphed doc. of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Novosi-
birsk, 1986; and the article by the same author in Kommunist n. 13, September
1986. See also Fedor Burlatsky, “The Gorbachev Revolution”, Marxism Today,
February 1987, 14–19.
31 Compare essays by two protagonists of economic reform at the time, Leonid
Abalkin, Il nuovo corso economico in URSS, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1988; and
Abel Aganbegyan, The Challenge: Economics of Perestroika, Hutchinson, London,
1988; with the most comprehensive analysis by Anders Åslund, Gorbachev’s
Struggle for Economic Reform: The Soviet Reform Process 1985–1988, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1989.
32 Compare for example Thane Gustafson and Dawn Mann, “Gorbachev’s First
Year: Building Power and Authority”, Problems of Communism n. 3, May–June
1986, 11–12; with “Le XXVII° Congrès du PCUS”, Problèmes Politiques et
Sociaux, La documentation française, n. 539, June 1986, 7.
33 The long Soviet silence after the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power station
had had a precedent that the world vividly remembered: just three years earlier, on
1 September 1983 over central Siberian skies a South Korean civilian Boeing 747
jet was shot down, mistaken for a spy airplane. On this occasion as well, lies and
silence characterised the Moscow authorities’ behaviour for six days. The repetition
of this behaviour after Chernobyl highlighted the persistence of political continuity
that could have compromised Gorbachev’s reformist image at its outset.
34 Glasnost was inaccurately translated in Italian as “transparency”; actually, it means
(mental) opening or “openness”.
35 Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 27th
Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union. Speech, Novosti Press Agency,
Moscow, 1986 (quotation from Italian edn, pp. 59–68).
36 See Lapo Sestan (ed.), La politica estera della perestrojka, Editori Riuniti, Roma,
1988; but also Eduard Shevardnadze, Crisi del potere e diplomazia internazionale,
Lucarini, Roma, 1991.
37 On the relationship between the NEP and Gorbachev’s first reforms, see Robert W.
Davis, “La riforma economica sovietica: una prospettiva storica”, Transizione n.
Between otherness and globalisation 185
10, 1988, 95–109. For an analysis of the reforms in the second half of the 1980s, see
Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution. Political Change from Gorbachev
to Putin, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001, especially pp. 40–43.
38 Nina Andreyeva, “I Cannot Waive My Principles”, in Isaac J. Tarasulo (ed.),
Gorbachev and Glasnost. Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, DE: Scholarly Resources
Inc., Wilmington, 1989, pp. 277–90.
39 On these subjects see Aldo Ferrari, La rinascita del nazionalismo russo, Ed. all’insegna
del Veltro, Parma, 1990; AA.VV., La Russia che dice di no, Ed. all’insegna del
Veltro, Parma, 1992; and Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia. Russian
Nationalism and the Soviet State 1953–1991, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA, 2000.
40 Compare Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU, op. cit.; and by the
same author, Toward a Better World, Richardon and Steirman, New York, 1987.
See also Zdeněk Mlynář, “Oltre i Soviet”, in AA.VV., Il progetto Gorbaciov, op.
cit., p. 50.
41 Compare Raif Dizdarević, From the Death of Tito to the Death of Yugoslavia,
Šahinpašić, Sarajevo, 2009, pp. 176–82; and Giuseppe Boffa, “Socialismi in movi-
mento”, in AA.VV., Il progetto Gorbaciov, op. cit., pp. 88–89; with the two essays
by Paolo Brera, “L’autogestione svogliata”, Rinascita n. 22, 7 June 1986, 36–38,
and “Chi decide nella rete dei poteri”, Rinascita n. 24, 21 June 1986, 28–30.
42 See Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika. New Thinking for my Country and the
World, Harper and Row, New York, 1987.
43 See for example, Michal Reiman, “La perestrojka sovietica e la Primavera di Praga
del 1968”, Transizione n. 10, 1988, 59–78; Zdeněk Mlynář, “La politica della ‘pri-
mavera di Praga’, l’URSS e la riformabilità dei sistemi comunisti”, in Stefano
Bianchini (ed.), “La Primavera di Praga vent’anni dopo”, Transizione n. 11–12, op.
cit.; but also the excellent study by Zdenek Strmiska, Stagnation et Changement
dans les societés de type sovietique. Project d’un cadre théorique pour une analyse,
Étude n. 15–16 du Project de récherche “Les crises des systèmes de type soviétique”,
Wien, 1989.
44 Compare Documents and Materials: 19th All-Union Conference of CPSU; Reports
and Speeches by Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary General of the CPSU Central
Committee. Resolutions, Embassy of USSR, Washington, DC, 1988 (quotation
from Italian edn, p. 44); AA.VV., Il sistema jugoslavo. Dall’impresa alla società
autogestita: esperienze e progetto, De Donato, Bari, 1980; as well as Milentije
Popović, Udruženi rad i neposredna demokratija, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1977; Edvard
Kardelj, Socijalističko samoupravljanje u našem ustavnom sistemu, Svjetlost, Sar-
ajevo, 1976; and on the withering away of the state, Josip Broz Tito, Samoupravni
socijalizam, Školska Knjiga, Zagreb, 1975, especially pp. 61–86.
45 Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee, op. cit.
(quotation from Italian edn, pp. 46–49); see also Stephen Cohen, “Was the Soviet
System Reformable?” Slavic Review” n. 3, 2004, 471–81; and Michael Urban (with
Vyacheslav Igrunov and Sergei Mitrokhin), The Rebirth of Politics in Russia,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 79ff.
46 John Willerton, Jr, Clientelism in the Soviet Union. An Initial Examination, Center
for Russian and East European Studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, n.
154, 1979; and Gerald M. Easter, Reconstructing the State. Personal Networks and
Elite Identity in Soviet Russia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
47 Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee, op. cit.
(quotation from Italian edn, p. 70). See also Enrico Melchionda, “L’autogestione
di tipo sovietico. Il caso dei collettivi di lavoro”, Quaderni, Department of Social
Sciences, IUO (Eastern University Institute), Napoli, n. 1, 1988, 113–30.
48 Compare Robert W. Davis, “La riforma economica sovietica”, op. cit., p. 109; and
Zdeněk Mlynář, “Oltre i Soviet”, op. cit., pp. 51–52. An effective comparison can
186 Between otherness and globalisation
be made with the more extensive and systematic study of Soviets and their origin
by Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers
Councils 1905–1921, Pantheon Books, New York, 1974.
49 Compare on this subject Enrico Melchionda, “La chance del presidenzialismo”, in
Rita di Leo (ed.), Riformismo o comunismo. Il caso dell’URSS, Liguori, Napoli,
1993, pp. 265–307.
50 Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets, op. cit. On Plekhanov and the primacy of the revo-
lution over democracy, elaborated at the Second Congress of the Russian Social
Democratic Party of 1903, see Israel Getzler, “Georgij V. Plehanov: la dannazione
dell’ortodossia”, in AA.VV., Storia del Marxismo, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 426. The text of the
constitution of the RSFSR is in Michel Mouskhély (ed.), L’URSS. Droit, économie,
sociologie, politique et culture, Sirey, Paris, 1962–64.
51 See Documents and Materials: 19th All-Union Conference of CPSU, op. cit. A sti-
mulating study of the development of politics with the new institutions created by
Gorbachev is that of Michael Urban (with Vyacheslav Igrunov and Sergei Mitrokhin),
The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, op. cit.
52 Here we refer to the complex dynamics that characterised the phase prior to
Trotsky’s defeat and the “turning point of ‘29”, discussed in Chapter 4.
53 Speech made in New York on 7 December 1988, in Mihail Gorbačëv, La Casa
comune europea, Mondadori, Milano, 1989, p. 122.
54 Ibid., p. 116.
55 Compare “Tesi per la XIX Conferenza del PCUS”, in Documenti dall’URSS:
Perestrojka. Amici e nemici, published by L’Unità, Roma, 1988, p. 109; the Kyïv
speech of 23 February 1989 and that of Strasbourg of the 6 July 1989 are in Mihail
Gorbačëv, La casa comune, op. cit., from which see in particular, respectively,
pp. 182 and 212–13; the Prague speech is in Current Digest of Soviet Press, 13 May
1987 (the original appeared in Pravda on 11 April).
56 See, among others, Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity, Oxford University
Press, 2000, p. 228; David S. Mason, Revolution in East Central Europe, Westview,
Boulder, 1992, pp. 50–53; Seweryn Bialer (ed.), Inside Gorbachev’s Russia, West-
view, Boulder, 1989, p. 241; and Robert Donaldson and Joseph Nogee, The Foreign
Policy of Russia. Changing Systems, Enduring Interests, op. cit., pp. 108–9.
57 See Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika, op. cit., pp. 254–80. The speech is also available
in the Current Digest of the Soviet Press vol. LVI, n. 27, 1989, 6ff.
58 On the dramatic events that led to the Soviet collapse between 1989 and 1991, see
Giuseppe Boffa, Dall’URSS alla Russia, op. cit.; Andreï Gratchev, L’Histoire vrai
de la fin de l’URSS, Editions du Rocher, Monaco, 1992; Rita di Leo, Vecchi quadri
e nuovi politici, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1992; Mihail Gorbačëv, Dicembre 1991. La fine
dell’URSS vista dal suo presidente, Ponte alle Grazie, Firenze, 1992; Robert Daniels,
The End of the Communist Revolution, Routledge, London, 1993; John Dunlop, The
Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, Princeton University Press, Prince-
ton, 1993; Victor Zaslavsky, Storia del sistema sovietico, Carocci, Roma, 1995. On
the “500-day plan”, an extensive reconstruction can be found in McFaul, Russia’s
Unfinished Revolution, op. cit., pp. 97–103.
59 On this topic, regarding the USSR, see Michael McFaul, “The Sovereignty Script.
Red Book for Russian Revolutionaries”, in Stephen Krasner (ed.), Problematic
Sovereignty, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001, pp. 195–223; and the
extensive attached bibliography, as well as John Löwenhardt, The Incarnation of
Russia, Duke University Press, Durham, 1995, pp. 82–91; regarding Yugoslavia
and the role Serbia assumed see my Sarajevo, le radici dell’odio, Edizioni Associate,
Roma, 2003 (III ed.), pp. 54ff.; and my essay “Antijugoslavismo e irredentismo: la
rinascita dell’’interesse nazionale serbo’”, Europa Europe n. 1, 1995, 79–100.
Regarding the Czechoslovak case, compare Václav Žak, “The Velvet Divorce –
Institutional Foundations”, in Jiří Musil, The End of Czechoslovakia, CEU Press,
Between otherness and globalisation 187
Budapest, 1995, pp. 252ff.; with Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great
Czech Nation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
60 On this topic see the illuminating book by Robert English, Russia and the Idea of
the West, op. cit.
61 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1991.
62 On Yeltsin’s position regarding Solzhenitsyn’s pamphlet, see John Löwenhardt, The
Incarnation, op. cit., p. 89.
63 Compare Robert Donaldson and Joseph Nogee, The Foreign Policy of Russia, op.
cit., pp. 177–78; and Ann Sheehy, “Commonwealth of Independent States. An
Uneasy Compromise”, RFE/RL Research Report vol. 1, n. 2, 10 January 1992, 2–3
(this contains the text approved by the three Slav presidents at Belavezha); with the
text of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s press conference on the 9 December 1991 in
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Structure of Soviet History, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2003, pp. 471–72.
64 On these topics compare in particular the two volumes by Su Shaozhi, Democracy
and Socialism in China, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1982; and Marxism and Reform
in China, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1993; with Yu Guangyuan, China’s Socialist
Modernization, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1984; the intensive publications
of Mao Zedong’s Centre for Marxist-Leninist-thought in Beijing between 1981 and
1985; also the interpretations of Italian scholars in AA.VV., URSS e Cina. Le
riforme economiche, Angeli, Milano, 1987; and Enrica Collotti Pischel, Dietro Tian
An Men, Angeli, Milano, 1990.
65 On the reasons leading to the diversification of approaches and solutions between
the USSR and China and the impact of Gorbachev’s “Europeanist” vision, see the
acute observations of Georgi Derluguian, “Alternative Pasts, Future Alternatives?”,
Slavic Review n. 3, 2004, 548–49.
66 The “four common spaces” were defined at the EU-Russia summit in St. Peters-
burg on May 2003 and refer to economic cooperation (including energy and
environment); cooperation in the fields of freedom, justice and security; cooperation in
the field of foreign security (which includes the fight against international terror-
ism); and cooperation in research, education and culture. See Commission of the
European Communities, European Neighbourhood Policy. Strategy Paper, 12 May
2004, COM (2004) 373 final, p. 6.
7 Conclusion
The challenges of modernity and
post-modernity
Notes
1 See in particular Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization,
op. cit.
2 Compare Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew
and Le Peng Don’t Understand about Asia”, The New Republic n. 2–3, 1997; and
Xiaorong Li, “‘Asian Values’ and the Universality of Human Rights”, Report from
the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy vol. 16, n. 2, Spring 1996.
3 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project”, in H. Foster (ed.), The
Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, Bay Press, Port Townsend, WA,
1983.
4 The topic of identity and the nation-state does not pertain to our study for reasons
already mentioned in the Introduction, but it constantly comes up in combination
with the topic of development and its reference models. To save time we refer the
reader to the extensive literature on this topic, from which we suggest for an initial
approach the following studies: Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione, Laterza, Bari,
1979; Jean Plumyène, Le nazioni romantiche, Sansoni, Firenze, 1982 (original,
Les Nations Romantiques. Histoire du Nationalisme. Le XIXe siècle, Fayard, Paris,
1979); Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms, op. cit.; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations
and Nationalisms since 1789: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University
Press, New York, 1990; Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford, 1986; as well as Janusz Bugajski, Nations in Turmoil. Conflict
and Cooperation in Eastern Europe, Westview Press, Boulder, 1995; Rogers Bruba-
ker, Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New
Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996; Geoffrey Hosking and
George Schöpflin, Myths and Nationhood, Hurst, London, 1997; Milan Kangrga,
Nacionalizam ili demokratija, Razlog, Zagreb, 2002; Jyoti Puri, Encountering
Nationalism, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2004. For my part, as I was already inter-
ested in the topic, please refer to my Sarajevo le radici dell’odio, Edizioni Associate,
Roma, 2003 (III ed.); and Partitions. Reshaping States and Minds (written with
Rada Iveković, Ranabir Samaddar and Sanjay Chaturvedi), Frank Cass, London,
2005.
5 See Boris B. Gorshkov, “Debating ‘Backwardness’ in Russian History”, in AAASS
Newsnet vol. 47, n. 2, 2007, 3.
6 In Croatia both Hrvatska Pučka Seljačka Tiskara and Seljačka sloga were active in
the publishing field, whereas in Sibinj a peasant theatre was founded, but also in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania peasant literature or literature
dealing with the peasantry flourished, while sociological institutes, for example in
L’viv and Bucharest, dedicated books and journals to the history and culture of the
villages. Subsequently even international anthropology addressed these topics and
names like Dimitri Gusti, Henri and Paul Stahl, Joel and Barbara Halpern, Joseph
Obrebski and David Anderson conducted studies in this field. See among others
David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant. A Study in Social Dogmatism, op. cit.,
pp. 143–46.
7 On the formation and development of Soviet territorial policies compare the cri-
tical analysis of Glauco d’Agostino, Governo del territorio in Unione Sovietica.
Politiche territoriali e sviluppo regionale 1917–1991, Gangemi, Roma, 1993, espe-
cially pp. 46–63; with Richard Cartwright Austin, Building Utopia. op. cit.; and
Alan M. Ball, Imagining America. op. cit.
210 Conclusion
8 Michel Mouskhély (ed.), L’URSS. Droit, économie, sociologie, politique et culture,
Sirey, Paris, 1962–64, vol. II.
9 Compare Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, op. cit.
10 See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, The Open Court
Company, London, 1922, especially VI, VIII and XII.
11 Andrea Graziosi, citing Michael Confino, points out how the NEP was interpreted
to a large extent by the peasants especially in Ukraine as a confirmation of the
feasibility and plausibility of “peasant utopia”, not just propagandised by East
European agrarian parties, but also very much a part of rebellious Ukrainian and
Cossack peasants’ programmes in 1918–19. See Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet
Peasant War. Bolsheviks and Peasants 1917–1933, op. cit., pp. 24–25, 41.
12 Like Mazzini, when it came to the question of self-determination of peoples in
terms of secession in Lenin’s writings from 1916 and subsequent years, Lenin
frankly expressed the conviction that the “state’s minimum size” was essential for
ensuring an acceptable standard of nutrition and the prospect of well-being for the
population, to the point of making the working class’s attitude in favour of secession
conditional upon a “minimum size”.
13 In the course of the 19th century protectionism – for the purpose of consolidating
national industry before entering into competition on international markets with
other countries’ production – was pursued without hesitation by the governments
in London which maintained 20% tariffs on imports until 1860, reducing them to
10% up to 1879 and to 6% only in 1880. Protectionism, justified by national
interest, was theoretically elaborated and scientifically supported by Friedrich List
and the German school of economic history, of which Gustav von Schmoller was
one of the most famous exponents. On this subject compare the volume by Roman
Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism. Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1988, especially chapter 13 on Russia; with Witold Kula,
The Problems and Methods of Economic History, op. cit., pp. 140–41; as well as
John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of the Western Civilisation, op. cit., p. 251.
14 On Soviet policies in the 1920s, see for more detail Anna di Biagio, Le origini
dell’isolazionismo sovietico. L’Unione Sovietica e l’Europa dal 1918 al 1928, Angeli,
Milano, 1990.
15 The fear of worldwide revolution had disturbed the sleep of European
conservatives since the time of de Maistre. It was he who first prognosticated the
possibility of a worldwide revolution starting from Russia and expanding over
Europe, decreeing its decline. Even though communism was still not a widespread
term at the time of the Congress of Vienna, there was still a phobia that lasted
throughout the entire 20th century, during which revolutions followed each other
with growing intensity. See Dieter Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza d’Europa, op.
cit., pp. 130–31.
16 For example, think from this perspective of the impact the Greek Civil War, the
Korean War and the Vietnam War had in the West, as well as the defeat of the Bay
of Pigs and the Sandinista revolution, followed by – during Brezhnev’s nuclear
parity – the Soviet penetration of the Horn of Africa and the Soviet-Chinese
competition in Angola and Mozambique.
17 The West’s secular predisposition for free markets is a myth that one Anglo-
American school of thought in the international literature has dismantled over the
last decades, with solid arguments and factual analysis. Compare, in this vein,
Peter Flora, State, Economy and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975, vol. I,
Macmillan, London, 1983, pp. 281ff.; and John Hobson, The Wealth of States, op.
cit., pp. 19–20, 210–11; as well as Hobson, The Eastern Origins, op. cit., p. 289.
18 See the Soviet leader’s significant speech of the 25 December 1991, when he was
forced to abandon his office due to the dissolution of the USSR: “We Opened
Ourselves to the World”, in Gale Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism. A
Conclusion 211
Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1996, pp. 292–94.
19 A stimulating collection of studies is the book edited by Leonidas Donskis and
.
Ineta Dabašinskiene, European Memory. A Blessing of a Curse? Longo, Ravenna,
2010.
20 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000 (quotation from
Italian edn, p. 14).
21 Here we refer to political democratic claims which in the 1800s played a crucial
role in reducing the liberalism of the early part of the century and its mistrust of
the state. This does not mean that these ideas were not attractive or influential in
Eastern Europe as well, but here it is important to emphasise how some typically
democratic values, such as solidarity and equality (the latter perceived more as
egalitarianism) arose following their own internal paths.
22 On the conception of space in the USSR and Russia, see Silvio Fagiolo, La Russia
di Gorbaciov, Angeli, Milano, 1988, pp. 122–29; and George Kennan, Possiamo
coesistere? Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1982.
23 “Post-modern” is a highly contested concept in politics and literature; however, I
personally think that our European societies are facing dramatic changes that go
far behind the attributes of modernity. Particularly, they are increasingly char-
acterised by polyphonies, métissages, diversities (from gender to generations, from
sexual orientations to cultures or multiple religious prescriptions), and hetero-
geneity. All these elements are, in my view, bridging to a post-modern society as
they are liquefying the pre-existing, modern, homogeneous links of the nation-
state, full sovereignty, state religion, standardised language, group identity and the
heterosexual family (with its notions of morality, virility and respectability).
Following Zygmunt Bauman’s inspirations, and meditating on the growing societal
diversities, I see post-modernity as a prospectively “post nation-state cultural
society”, based on métissages, multiple differences and identities, shared sover-
eignty, multi-level governance, and a high level of people’s mobility, the attributes
of which are already in place, but the acceptance (and democratic management) of
which could be a painful process and may lead to new (trans-national) confronta-
tions. See Leonidas Donskis (ed.), Yet Another Europe after 1984. Re-thinking
Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2012.
24 Little has been written on the complex relationship between pre-modern, modern
and post-modern in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, see in particular Raivo Vetik,
Estonian Nationalism: Premodern, Modern and Postmodern, presentation prepared
for a conference at the State University of Tallinn, “Contested Modernities: An
Interdisciplinary Approach”, Käsmu, 14–15 August 2006, and George Schöpflin’s
reply, as well as that of Raivo Vetik, “The Cultural and Social Makeup of Estonia”, in
Pal Kolstø (ed.), National Integration and Violent Conflict in Post-Soviet Societies,
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2002.
25 Mutatis mutandis, this behaviour was not that different from the resistance to neo-
liberalism which emerged in the West between the 20th and 21st centuries, parti-
cularly in France, Germany, Italy and Austria, where the diffusion of public property
and the welfare state, of social-democratic and Christian-social origins (according
to a logic not far removed from rural solidaristic and East European communist
cultures) appeared in these countries’ predominant opinion to be in conflict with
trends of economic globalisation, based on privatisation, delocalisation, and the
transfer of fiscal and decision-making offices in a global approach that entailed
denationalising the state.
26 Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1991 [1978].
27 Compare on this topic Martin Bernal, Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization, Vintage, London, 1991; and Linda Weiss and John Hobson,
States and Economic Development, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Clive
212 Conclusion
Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers 1870–1914, Longman,
London, 1981.
28 See the interesting West-East comparative diagrams in Hobson, The Eastern
Origins, op. cit., pp. 8, 16.
29 The old EU member states were increasingly absorbed by their Euro-Western-
Centrism and anti-Islamic phobia, particularly after 11 September 2001. As a
result, they did not realise which unprecedented problems the new minorities and
migratory flows were generating in the new member states after the 2004 enlarge-
ment: actually, Central-Eastern Europe – from Estonia to Bulgaria, from Poland to
Slovakia, not to mention Serbia – also because of the USSR’s and non-aligned
Yugoslavia’s “Third World” policies after the 1960s, began to attract unexpected
flows of Chinese, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldavians and Africans. See for
example, Carla Tonini, “Poland after Schengen. Bridge into East or Bulwark of
Europe?”, in Stefano Bianchini, George Schöpflin and Paul Shoup (eds), Post-
Communist Transition as a European Problem, Longo, Ravenna, 2002, pp. 105–15;
and Luisa Chiodi (ed.), The Borders of the Polity. Migrations and Security across
the EU and the Balkans, Longo, Ravenna, 2005.
30 See, for example, Domenico Caccamo, Introduzione alla storia dell’Europa Orientale,
La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Roma, 1991, pp. 103–30.
31 See in particular Ihab Hassan, “The Culture of Postmodernism”, Theory, Culture
and Society n. 3, vol. II, 1985, 119–32.
32 Compare on this subject, Paul A. Bové, “The Ineluctability of Difference: Scientific
Pluralism and the Critical Intelligence”, in Jonathan Arac (ed.), Postmodernism
and Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986; Andreas Huyssens,
“Mapping the Post-Modern”, New German Critique n. 33, 1984, 5–52; Carol
Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982; Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in
Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory, Praeger,
New York, 1981.
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