Abstract
Reviewed by: Francis King, University of East Anglia, UK
Stalin was a Marxist. This meant that economics, the realm of material production, distribution and exchange, was central to his understanding of human society – as it was to all Marxists of his generation. Additionally, as the leader of a revolutionary state surrounded by a hostile and unstable capitalist world, he had an acute need for information and data about that outside world, on which to base his foreign policy decisions. But the closed nature of the USSR, with its strict controls on flows of information into or out of the country, meant that the necessary data was not always easy to find in an accessible form. This was where the Institute for World Economy and World Politics (IMKh) – a research body in Moscow headed by a revolutionary exile from Hungary, Jenö (Eugene) Varga – played an indispensable role throughout the Stalin era.
Kyung Deok Roh’s book looks at the rise and fall of Varga’s institute from before 1927, when Varga took over a small working group created within the ‘Communist Academy’ in Moscow, through 1947, when the institute was formally dissolved, and up to the death of Stalin in 1953. On the basis of both published and archival materials, Roh shows how the reports and briefing papers on the condition of the major capitalist economies, produced for Stalin and other CPSU leaders by Varga and his close colleagues, helped shape Soviet foreign policy. Over five main chapters, Roh examines the history of the institute, the ways it operated, the specific approaches to Marxian economics it developed, the ways it presented the capitalist world at different junctures in world and Soviet history, and the hostile campaign against the institute launched in the 1940s by the Russian-nationalist faction around A. A. Zhdanov. What stands out in this story is the remarkable continuity in the operation of Varga’s institute, and in the leading personnel at the centre of its activities. Despite the high proportion of Jews and people either born outside the Russian empire or who had lived abroad among Varga’s core team (not least Varga himself), Roh shows that this group of economists suffered relatively few casualties in the purges and repressions which decimated other Soviet intellectual bodies in the 1930s and 40s. This good fortune, Roh argues, stemmed largely from Stalin’s ‘continuous support’ – to the end he ‘believed in the analytical power of IMKh’s political economy-centred methodology based on the European discourse on imperialism’ (46).
The theoretical approach of the institute was eclectic in terms of Marxist ‘schools’ – their analyses of capitalist crises borrowed both from Rudolf Hilferding, who stressed overproduction as a cause of crisis, and Rosa Luxemburg, who had stressed under-consumption. In addition, as Roh shows, Varga and his colleagues drew heavily on the ideas of Wesley E. Mitchell, an American economist whose seminal work Business Cycles (1913) provided a statistical methodology for analysing concrete economic data. This combination enabled Varga’s team to produce fairly detailed analyses of tendencies in particular capitalist economies within an overall Marxian framework – a style one commentator has dubbed ‘empirical Marxism’ (103). This practical and relatively undogmatic approach was particularly characteristic of the private reports prepared for the party leadership – material for mass consumption could be more formulaic.
A chapter on ‘discourses’ details how Varga and colleagues presented their analyses, and the interpretative frameworks they used. The role of the state in shaping developments and regulating the economy was stressed, against the tradition of seeing it as merely the servant of the capitalist class. The formerly heretical notion of ‘state capitalism’ was used to characterize the development of capitalist war economies in the 1930s, although generally Varga was smart enough not to stray too far into theory – the remit of the party leaders (123).
For all their usefulness and political deftness, the Varga team made enemies, of which the Russian-chauvinist Zhdanov faction was the most malicious. Chapter 5 details the attempts from 1941 to get the institute abolished, using the resentment of younger, ethnic Russian scholars who felt excluded, accusations of ideological deviation, hints about the foreignness and Jewishness of the Varga team, and the dissatisfaction of those who wanted a more ‘international relations’ approach in foreign policy. As Roh shows, Zhdanov was only partially successful in his campaign. In 1947 the institute was folded into the new Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), founded in 1944, but Varga retained his support in very high places, and resisted capitulation and self-criticism for alleged ideological offences. His team joined MGIMO intact.
It was Stalin’s death in 1953 which made Varga’s Marxian, economics-based view of world affairs redundant. For Stalin’s successors, Marxism was something to be used more for ritual than for practical purposes. Roh has presented the sources of Stalin’s foreign policy in a new and stimulating way, and filled in some intriguing details about the workings of his regime.