Serp i rubl: Konservativnaia modernizatsiia v SSSR, and: La faucille et le rouble: La modernisation conservatrice en URSS (review)

Anatolii Vishnevskii, Serp i rubl': Konservativnaia modernizatsiia v SSSR. Moscow: OGI, 1998. 432 pp. ISBN 5-900241-15-7.

Anatole Vichnevski, La faucille et le rouble: La modernisation conservatrice en URSS. Trans. Marina Vichnevskaia. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. 465 pp. ISBN 2-07-075904-0. fi33.54.

The Sickle and the Ruble: by parodying, not without irony, the alliance that formed the symbolic image of the Soviet 20th century to form a pair that stands in obvious contradiction to the original reference, Anatolii Vishnevskii does not present us, as such, with a study of the advent of capitalism in post-Soviet Russia. His goal is rather the reverse: to immerse us in the longue durée of Russian-Soviet history. By examining the modalities of its development, he intends to bring out the recurring specificities of the country's modernization - characterized by resistance, the concurrence of traditional structures and forms of modernity, and the persistence of the archaic in the evolution of an increasingly complex society. For Vishnevskii, the great singularity of Russia lies in its belated and uneven arrival from a system based on the power of land to a system based on the power of money. After the definitive advent in the West of a market economy after the Renaissance, Russia persisted in a traditional model of a society organized around the land, defined by rules of subservience and social-cultural dynamics remote from Western patterns. The development of Russian agrarian society in the modern age -- characterized especially by the familial-collectivist division of the land, and by essentially holistic values in which the good of the collective supercedes that of the individual -- determined the behavior and ideals that were imprinted in diverse forms on the particular traits of Russia's late modernization. The "sickle and the ruble," therefore, signifies the passage of a traditional society to an industrial, urban modernity, and the specific combination that resulted in the preservation, or resurgence, of the behavioral forms of traditional organizations. The thesis frequently voiced by the author is that this is a modernization that was both conservative and unfulfilled.

The originality of the work stems less from the thesis than from the approach, which applies such diverse fields as economics, demographics, culture, politics, and the study of empire. Indeed, consideration of the particularities of Russian-Soviet modernization has been a longstanding problem in the social sciences. Citing modes of urbanization, which are at the very heart of the process of modernization, the magisterial work of Moshe Lewin illuminated the particularities of this transformation in the USSR. The "ruralization" of cities and Soviet urban culture, he insisted, were tied to the massive exodus from the countryside at the start of the 1930s and the rapid and brutal disruptions that characterized Stalin's Great Break (le Grand tournant stalinien). Vishnevskii's thesis thus follows a line of scholarship that seems unnecessary to survey here. His approach, on the other hand, is more complex: to re-read multiple aspects of the modern history of the country through the dominant prism of the process of modernization and of the currents of thought that accompanied and shaped it.

The great shock of belated industrialization in the last decades of the 19th century created a crisis that was linked to the rapidity and importance of the socio-economic changes at the turn of the 20th. Invoking a number of contemporary writers, notably Lev Tolstoi and Konstantin Leont¢ev, Vishnevskii returns to the great destabilization of the countryside and the break-up of the rural economic-familial unit. This, he maintains, occurred in the context of a blatant, growing gap between rapid industrial expansion and rural economic stagnation. He argues that exacerbation of the cleavage, resistance to change, and expression of these tensions by the intelligentsia (in the context of...