A Kind of Anarchy

This blog is about the Russian Revolution of 1917; however, the Soviet Union’s 70 year history represents the Revolution’s reflection or shadow and is therefore also worthy of study. And if you have a hard time analyzing the Soviet Union’s 70 year history with any degree of confidence, look at the preceding centuries, or the whole of Russia’s long history, to make sense of it. Or look at the recent past, especially the collapse of communism and the transition to a market economy, to see what 1917 was really all about.

It’s an open question whether it’s easier to analyze the years preceding the Revolution or following it. If you wonder what happened to set the stage for the Russian Revolution, you open yourself up to the murkiness of old sources and long centuries. If you look at the transition to a market economy, you get lost in a superabundance of detailed sources and dissenting opinions.

There is no consensus about what should have happened after communism. Walter Adams and James Brock’s Adam Smith Goes to Moscow: A Dialogue on Radical Reform is a commentary on the confusion that still surrounds the end of the Soviet Union and its client states. The two economists simulate the general debate about what should have happened to help the people of these troubled regions. The two authors create a fictional East European politician to argue with a hypothetical radical economic reformer.

The dialogue is an odd stylistic choice for a monograph, but seems to capture the tentative conclusions commentators were able to offer in 1993, to say nothing of 2009.. The essence of the overall argument—the synthesis that arises out of the clash between the political thesis and the economic antithesis--seem to be that capitalist shock treatment should have been tempered by the imperatives of societal stabilization. But aside from the specific analysis of the jolting integration into global capitalism, Adam Smith Goes to Washington illuminates just how fantastic the Soviet economy really was. It’s easy to say that the Soviet Union had a planned economy. That sounds simple enough. But what did that actually mean?

In practice, it meant that government planers attempted to coordinate “50,000 industrial inputs, raw materials, and intermediate goods.” It meant that monstrous agencies like Gosplan had responsibility over huge sectors of human activity and could produce detailed demands that were followed in every corner of the country. It meant the production of “7 million documents” and the performance of “83 million calculations.” It meant scarcity, pent up demand, irrational quotas, oversized factories, excess money that could not really be spent by consumer, as well as a State Pricing Committee that set “over 200,000” specific prices each year. It meant redundant workers, weak consumers, and redundant factories. It meant that over one fourth of all goods produced in the Soviet Union had “negative” value. That is to say, their worth was actually less than the worth of their separate components. It meant inventory lists “four times” higher than those in the West, and lethargic production cycles, and workers who produced roughly half of that which their American counterparts could produce in similar circumstances.

It meant all these things and worse. However, as Adams and Brock point out, the spectacular failure of communism as an economic system had its silver lining even from the perspective of capitalism: Citizens who lived under Communism learned to be resourceful, resilient, flexible, and capable of achieving their goals in the black market whenever necessary.

The Communist Queue

One of the most emblematic aspects of life in the Soviet Union was the queue. Ordinary citizens waited in line for almost anything. The Soviet economy may have produced impressive gains in industrial output. It may (or may not have) dramatically reduced extreme forms of poverty and inequality. It may have launched rockets into space, equipped a powerful army with advanced artillery, and mined huge quantities of mineral resources from the Siberian earth. It could not, however, keep the store shelves full. The history of the Soviet economy is the history of a weak consumer economy. Whereas capitalism struggled with the fact that some citizens couldn’t afford to get a hold of any of the countless products the system produced, communism dealt with a much different paradox: people often had money but nothing to buy with that money.

So what exactly is a queue? Lidiya Ginzburg makes sense of the term in a general sense, even though the breadlines she describes took place at one of the worst moments in a horrible century, the siege of Leningrad. She’s a sociologist analyzing the phenomenon of the queue in exquisite detail.

The queue is made up of hostile, irritable people, who are nevertheless united by a common goal of keeping order and ensuring that line-jumpers don’t overwhelm the structure of the established line. The queue has gender elements: women have more experience with waiting in line for essentials—they did so even before the siege. Women are also more likely to accept the premise that their time is essentially worthless: they can wait all day if need be.

Men aren’t constructed this way. They feel entitled to cut in line and some always attempt to do so. Even when everybody is suffering together, men think that they suffer more precisely because they are not accustomed to suffering. People talk in queues, but their discourse follows special patterns. To begin with, people are extraordinarily rude to anybody they suspect might harbor any feelings of superiority.

The queue is democratic—everybody waits—and it’s important to reassert this fact at all times. People naturally talk about food (or whatever it is for which they are waiting) in the queue. In a siege, the discourse can be divided into four categories, according to Ginzburg: informational, emotive, story-telling, and self-aggrandizing.

Ginzburg’s close reading of the queue procedes right up to the counter, where customers strain every muscle in their neck hoping to see just exactly how much food they will receive. As Ginzburg sees things, the person at the head of the line wants to participate in some kind of ritual by watching the bread as it gets weighed on the scale. She likens this event to horse-racing, where the crowd feels as if it too were carried along by the horses that are actually running the race.

Upon receiving the ration, the lucky person goes home, but new trials wait, as he or she must decide upon a specific strategy of consumption. Is it best to save the scarce item, or devour it at once? In some ways, the queue fits Ginzburg’s larger theme about suffering, that we use suffering to deflect us from recognizing the absolute horror of non-existence. As bad as lines are, they allow us hope that at some point—perhaps in one hour, perhaps in three—we will achieve something definite. There’s a cure for scarcity—waiting—but there is no cure for nonbeing or death.