To the Editors

In his letter to the editors in Kritika 3: 3 (2002), 569-71, Martin Malia remarks approvingly that "Robert Davies ... now acknowledges his 'naiveté' in assessing Stalin's industrialization," and urges "revisionist" historians to follow my example. I presume this is referring to the Preface to my The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929-1930, published in 1989. I quote the passage in full below (from pp. xvii-xviii). I leave it to your readers to decide whether Professor Malia's presentation of my views is somewhat one-sided...:

Some years ago I was a keen advocate of the view that the fateful changes at the end of the 1920s were substantially the necessary consequence of rapid industrialisation. I now regard this conclusion as naive. But it seems to me to be equally naive to argue, along lines very familiar nowadays in the Soviet Union as well as in the West, that the great shifts in policy and system at the end of the 1920s were almost entirely due to the ideologically motivated doctrines of a centralised political dictatorship, or can even be attributed simply to Stalin's efforts to maximise his personal power. I am still convinced that rapid industrialisation was incompatible with the market economy of NEP; the industrial objectives of the leadership required the replacement of NEP by some kind of administrative planning system. As I see it, the ideology and political practice of the Bolshevik party, the heritage from the pre-revolutionary past, and the personality of Stalin, together with the imperatives of industrialisation in a hostile and dangerous world environment, all played their part in imparting to the Soviet economic and political system of the 1930s its particular characteristics, its paradoxical combination of enthusiasm and achievement with vicious repression and waste. Moreover, the economic policies and system adopted at the end of the 1920s proved temporary and even experimental in the sense that they immediately began to be modified under the impact of the practical experience of the industrialisation drive.