Volume 8 Numbers 1- 2

Winter/ Spring 1999

Constitutional Reviews
     Stealing the State: Control and Collaps in Soviet Institutions
     by Steven L. Solnic (Harvard University Press, 1998)
      Reviewed by Andre Liebich

"Property is theft," declared the French socialist and anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Karl Marx coolly pointed out that theft presumes property and that Proudhon's statement was, therefore, nonsense. But history has retained Proudhon's arresting formula and has disregarded Marx's rebuttal. Steven Solnick's striking title Stealing the State poses similar conceptual difficulties, though they should not discourage readers. His book is a subtle and sophisticated analysis of three case studies of the former Soviet Union—the Komsomol (or Young Communists), the system of job allocation for graduates, and the military draft. Together they cast light on the demise of the Soviet system as well as on the origins of the indefinable order that has followed. In the author's words: "This book asks why the reforms of the perestroika era caused Soviet institutional structures to break down rather than to adapt or evolve" (p. 2).

Readers should be forewarned that Solnick's marvelously illustrative case studies are buttressed by a heavy—too heavy—theoretical apparatus. Just as scholars in communist countries had to display prowess in quotations from Lenin, thesis or tenure imperatives today call for virtuosity in fashionable theory. Solnick, however, is a true believer, and he preaches a neoinstitutional rational-choice message with more fervor than his subject or his material warrants. The world of methodological individualism, into which Solnick invites us, offers an eerie perspective on reality, as if someone were arguing that an X-ray, rather than a sketch or a photograph, is the truest likeness of a person. The logic of collective action, invoked here, is notorious for its inability to explain why some people—say, Baltic nationalists—behave so irrationally.1 Solnick rightly insists that politics is not extrinsic to economics, but, like others of his persuasion, he cannot really convince himself that ideology, too, should be taken seriously. Moreover, it is in reading Solnick on the Soviet Union that one realizes how thoroughly the theoretical approaches he adopts are embedded in the narrow historical experience of the late-capitalist world. For instance, his concept of property is thoroughly undifferentiated (even in classic Roman terms of usus, fructus, abusus) and unproblematic in relation to markets or authority. Last summer, Moscow was bedecked with banners for the First Youth Olympics, one of which declared, in anticipation of an international concert, "The Whole World is Orchestra." In Solnick's universe, where the capitalist enterprise is the prototype of all human organizations, one could hoist a banner reading "The Whole World is Firm."

It is all the more agreeable, therefore, to turn to the three carefully crafted case studies. Solnick brilliantly demonstrates how the forced growth of Komsomol membership was its undoing and how ostensibly sensible reforms, such as encouraging new Komsomol activities and budgetary decentralization, produced perverse effects. In reading this account, one is reminded of Marx's description of primitive accumulation in the first volume of Capital. Instead of dispossessing monasteries, nascent Russian capitalists stripped social assets, such as those of Komsomol. Let it be noted, for the record, that the Russians proceeded less violently than did their English predecessors. Solnick's second case study, that of Soviet raspredelenie, or the matching of graduates with jobs, splendidly hammers home a similar message of dysfunctionalities and unintended consequences. It also provides a premonitory lesson for those who would design an educational-cum-industrial policy. Just as complicity between runaway serfs and modernizing burghers or landowners undermined the feudal order, the resourcefulness of Soviet enterprises and graduates, in outwitting the system of raspredelenie, brought about the system's effective demise even before it formally disappeared along with the Soviet Union. Solnick concludes that, in the end, "the real victims of the collapse of the job-placement system were the VUZ [higher-education institutions] graduates" (p. 174).

Solnick's final case study is the only one that deals with a still-subsisting institution, the military draft. Here, too, the consequences of limited policy changes outran expectations. A decision to demobilize students in 1989 "opened the floodgates" (p. 216), transforming defiance of the draft from a widespread but unacknowledged trend to an openly flaunted one. Solnick insists, in conformity to his theoretical model, that the key to change lies in the behavior of "field agents" (in this case, the draft boards). On his own account, however, other factors may have been equally decisive: social pressure, notably from the committees of soldiers' mothers, and such intangibles as the fact that "the Ministry of Defense was unable to perpetuate the myth that military service was honored as a 'sacred duty' by citizens in all parts of the country" (p. 216).

Solnick's purpose in this book is to test a set of general hypotheses. As a result, he relentlessly dissects his case studies in terms of "opportunism" and "rent-seeking," "hidden action" and "hidden or asymmetrical information problems," "asset specificities" and "bank runs." Usually—although not always—Solnick succeeds in avoiding tautologies or platitudes, such as "once the servants of the state stopped obeying orders from above, its fate was sealed" (p. 3, emphasis in original). Tocqueville and Crane Brinton told us as much, and more, long ago. Solnick also mentions other substantial and more-interesting common features among his case studies, but he does not make as much of them as one might wish. For example, all three case studies deal with youth, and, although Solnick warns us that neither "generational conflict nor ideological decay" can explain the disintegration he describes, because they set in long before the "regime's startling loss of control over institutions in the late 1980s" (p. 59), there is surely a line of inquiry to be pursued here. The meagerness of
Solnick's findings, squeezed out of information from emigré survey data about youth attitudes, contrasts with the methodological sophistication of the exercise. He does not help himself, either, by blurring the lines between attitudinal shifts and policy changes. Similarly, he mentions that a severe demographic crisis underlies the changes recorded in all three of his case studies (for example, p. 102) but does not emphasize the fact, perhaps because it escapes the book's dominant individualist framework.

Methodological considerations may also explain Solnick's apparent unwillingness to dwell on distinctions among his case studies. In the case of the Komsomol, elements of belief and peer pressure were surely key in making or breaking the institution. With raspredelenie, the question was one of the alternatives available to both graduates and employers, whereas in the case of the military draft levels of coercion, outright or indirect, may well have been decisive. Solnick does attempt to draw distinctions by briefly comparing the Soviet Union with China. This exercise is interesting but not entirely convincing. He points out that the two countries' recent historical experiences imposed unique imperatives: even as Gorbachev and his reformers combated Brezhnevite "stability of cadres," the post–Cultural Revolution Chinese leaders deliberately sought such stability. Of course, this does not explain why the latter were successful in their quest any more than do the other factors Solnick invokes: Why, in China, did "intraparty discipline," "hybrid organizational forms," "local state corporatism," and the rise of "cadre enterpreneurs" overpower "opportunism," "rent seeking" and "hidden action problems," while these latter factors prevailed in the Soviet Union? And the assumption here, as so often in this type of analysis, is that China finds itself in a state of long-term equilibrium (a questionable assumption to say the least). Solnick might well have found a richer basis of comparison by looking at countries such as Hungary and Poland, where, at first glance at least, one can identify processes similar to those that occurred in the Soviet Union and, more significantly, ones that have run their course and can therefore be examined as completed wholes.

Solnick's analysis naturally leads to reflection on the nature of the processes ongoing in Russia today. Relations between "principals" and "agents," one of the basic threads running through the book, have undergone both a reversal of identities and a fundamental transformation. As Solnick reminds us, "many of Russia's most powerful financiers in the early 1990s are [sic] the young men who established commercial banks with the help of Komsomol assets in the late 1990s" (p. 251). To the extent that the order they have set up is not simply unfathomable, it can perhaps be described as a hybrid, "neither state nor market" in the words of a recent publication.2 One serious commentator writes of a transition from "criminal communism to criminal capitalism" and adds that "Russia's problem is not economic and it has never been economic—it is basically a moral problem and until that problem is solved, no reasonable economic system, no market economy . . . has a chance of taking root there."3 One Russian historian suggests that Russia is russifying capitalism just as it previously russified communism.4 Those who quip that the worst thing about communism is what succeeds it are being unfair. But it may well be that the perplexing nature of the postcommunist order in Russia makes communism appear retrospectively rational or at least comprehensible.

More than a half century ago, recognizing that Marxist categories had become inadequate to explain Soviet realities, some Marxists began to seek out a new framework of explanation, revolving around the concept of totalitarianism.5 One now wonders whether post-Soviet developments will confirm the relevance and utility of the conceptual apparatus on display throughout Solnick's book, or whether these developments will induce yet another paradigm shift. In either case, one can hope only that Solnick will apply his considerable analytical skills to the task of studying the avatars of the processes he has delineated here with such great profit to us.

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Andre Liebich is a professor at and the head of the International History and Politics Section of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. He is the author, most recently, of From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Harvard University Press, 1997) and Les Minorités nationales en Europe centrale et orientale (Georg ed., 1997).

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Notes

1. Solnick refers to Mancur Olson's foray into Soviet studies in 1990. The author of The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Harvard University Press, 1980) and The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press, 1982) explained, then, to a skeptical audience that "Water flows downhill everywhere, whatever the nationality of the people or the peculiarities of the social system. . . . The logic of collective action applies fully as much to the peoples of the Soviet Union as it does to those in the West." Comments from the audience and a response from Jerry Hough suggest that the audience remained unswayed. The exchange is published in Journal of Soviet Nationalities 1, no. 2, pp. 8–65; the quotation is from page 8.

2. Lynnley Browning, "Neither State nor Market: Cozy Reciprocity in Russian Capitalism," published by the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, September 1998.

3. David Satter, "From Criminal Communism to Criminal Capitalism," meeting report (November 9, 1998), Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 16, no. 5.

4. Cited in Robert V. Daniels, "The End of the Yeltsin Era," Dissent (winter 1999), p. 35.

5. The locus classicus of this reorientation is an article by the leading German social democratic politician and Marxist theorist, Rudolf Hilferding, originally published in a Russian-language Menshevik journal, in Paris in 1940, and translated into English as "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?" Modern Review 1 no. 4 (1947), pp. 266–71, and reprinted several times thereafter.

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