Most sovietologists shared the general assumptions of modernisation theory, and the most fervent adherents of the totalitarian concept made valiant attempts to preserve the T-model in the face of the challenge from the more dynamic modernisation paradigm or to reconcile the two. In a 1961 discussion, Brzezinski distinguished between the 'totalitarian breakthrough' of Stalinism that destroyed the old order and created the framework for the new and the post-terror totalitarianism of the Khrushchev period.[80] The latter looked much more like the corporate system described by John Armstrong in his study of Ukrainian bureaucrats, managed by the 'Red Executives' analysed by David Granick and Joseph Berliner.[81] Brzezinski pointed out that Soviet ideology was no longer about revolution but the link that legitimised the rule of the party by tying it to the project of technical and economic modernisation. Whereas Brzezinski argued that 'indoctrination has replaced terror as the most distinctive feature of the system', Alfred G. Meyer went further: 'acceptance and internalization of the central principles of the ideology have replaced both terror and frenetic indoctrination.' In what he called 'spontaneous totalitarianism', Meyer noted that 'Soviet citizens have become more satisfied, loyal, and co-operative'.[82] The USSR was simply a giant 'company town' in which all of life was organised by the company.
The two models, however, differed fundamentally. The T-model was based on sharp differences between communist and liberal societies, while the modernisation paradigm proposed a universal and shared development. For many writing in the modernisation mode, the Soviet Union appeared as less aberrant than in the earlier model, a somewhat rougher alternative programme of social and economic development. While some writers expected that the outcome of modernisation would be democratic, more conservative authors were willing to settle for stability and order rather than representation of the popular will. For Samuel P. Huntington, a critic of liberal modernisation theory, communists were not only good at overthrowing governments but at making them. 'They may not provide liberty, but they do provide authority; they do create governments that can govern.'[83]
By the i960s it was evident to observers from the Right and Left that the Soviet Union had recovered from the practice of mass terror, was unlikely to return to it, and was slowly evolving into a modern, articulated urban society with many features shared with other developed countries. In the years when modernisation theory, and its kissing cousin, convergence theory, held sway, the overall impression was that the Soviet Union could become a much more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the totalitarian theorists.[84] Later conservative critics would read this rejection of exceptionalism as a failure to emphasise adequately the stark differences between the West and the Soviet Bloc and to suggest a 'moral equivalence' between them. Deploying the anodyne language of social science, modernisation theory seemed to some to apologise for the worst excesses of Soviet socialism and excuse the violence and forceful use of state power as a necessary externality of development. Social disorder, violence, even genocide could be explained as part ofthe modernisation process. If Kemal Atatiirk was acceptable as a moderniser, why not Lenin or Stalin?[85]
Alternatives
Even though government and many scholars were deeply entrenched in an unmodulated condemnation of all Soviet policies and practices from the late i940s through much of the i960s, no single discourse ever dominated Russian/Soviet studies. A number of influential scholars - E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Theodore von Laue, Alec Nove, Moshe Lewin, Alexander Dallin and Robert C. Tucker - offered alternative pictures of the varieties of Bolshevism and possible trajectories. Edward Hallett Carr was a British diplomat, a journalist, a distinguished realist theorist of international relations, an advocate of appeasement in the i930s, a philosopher of history and the prolific author of a multi-volume history of the Soviet Union, 1917-29.93 Even in the 1930s when Carr hadbeen sympathetic to the Soviet project, what he called 'the Religion ofthe Kilowatt and the Machine', he was critical ofWestern Communists and 'fellow-travellers', like the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb and the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who ignored the 'darker sides of the Soviet regime' and defended them 'by transparent sophistry'.94 During the Second World War, at the moment when the Soviet army and popular endurance halted the Nazi advance, Carr 'revived [his] initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning-point'. 'Looking back on the 1930s,' he later wrote, 'I came to feel that my preoccupation with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one's vision of what was really happening.'95 For more than thirty years, Carr worked on his Soviet history as a story of a desperate and valiant attempt to go beyond bourgeois capitalism in a country where capitalism was weak, democracy absent and the standard of living abysmally low. Politically Carr was committed to democratic socialism, to greater equality than was found
not "necessary", but the possibility of a Stalin was a necessary consequence of the effort of a minority group to keep power and to carry out a vast social-economic revolution in a very short time. And some elements were, in those circumstances, scarcely avoidable.' (Was Stalin Really Necessary? Some Problems of Soviet Political Economy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964) (pp. 17-39), p. 32.) See also, James Millar and Alec Nove, 'A Debate on Collectivization: Was Stalin Really Necessary?' Problems of Communism 25 (July-Aug. i976): 49-66.
93 Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982 (London and New York: Verso, 1999); E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols. (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, i950-78).
94 R. W Davies, 'Introduction', to Edward Hallett Carr, TheRussianRevolution, From Lenin to Stalin (1917-1929) (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. xvi-xvii; Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (London: Routledge, 1948); Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1935).
95 Davies, 'Introduction', p. xvii.
in most capitalist societies, and believed in public control and planning ofthe economic process and a stronger state exercising remedial and constructive functions.[86] Shortly before his death, he glumly remarked to his collaborator Tamara Deutscher, 'The left is foolish and the right is vicious.'[87]
His volume on the Bolshevik revolution appeared in 1950 and challenged the dominant emigre historiography on the October Revolution as a sinister coup d'etat. Carr stood between the Mensheviks, who thought that bourgeois democracy could have been built in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, who took the risk of seizing power in a country ill-prepared for 'a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organisation . . . without the long experience and training which bourgeois democracy, with all its faults had afforded in the west'.[88] Turning later to the 1920s, Carr eschewed a struggle-for-power tale for a narrative that placed the feuding Bolsheviks within the larger economic and social setting. He tied Stalin's victories over Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin to his ability to sense and manipulate opportunities that arose from the play of social forces. Still later Carr argued that collectivisation was unavoidable, given Russia's limited resources for industrialisation, and on this issue he differed from his collaborator, R. W Davies, who had become convinced that industrialisation at a modest pace had been possible within the framework of the New Economic Policy.[89]Carr's work was criticised for its sense of inevitability that tended to justify what happened as necessary and to avoid alternative possibilities.[90] Yet in its extraordinary breadth and depth (a study of twelve momentous years in fourteen volumes), Carr's history combined a sensitivity to political contingency, as in his analysis of Stalin's rise, and an attention to personality and character, as in his different assessments of Lenin and Stalin, with attention to structural determinations, like the ever-present constraints of Russian backwardness.
80
Zbigniew Brzezinski, 'The Nature of the Soviet System',
81
David Granick,
82
Brzezinski, 'The Nature ofthe Soviet System'; Alfred G. Meyer, 'USSR, Incorporated',
83
Huntington,
84
Among works in the 'modernisation school' that continued to subscribe to the language of totalitarianism, one might include Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles and Clyde Kluck- hohn,
85
In a famous essay in the journal
87
Tamara Deutscher, 'E. H. Carr - A Personal Memoir',
88
E. H. Carr,
90
Carr's critics were often impressed by his industriousness and command of the material but wary of his stances towards the Soviet Union. Historian James Billington wrote, 'The work is scrupulously honest and thorough in detail, but the perspective of the whole remains that ofa restrained but admiring recording angel ofthe Leninist Central Committee'