Problems of Stalinism

Abstract

WE CAN BE SURE that changes of far-reaching importance are taking place in post-Stalin Russia. It is impossible to analyze them day by day, in the hope of predicting the immediate policy implications of this or that shift or demotion. We can never harness the explosions of a crisis and read from them the pattern of the future; they are themselves the froth expelled. Although we may think what we most want to know is whether Malenkov is harder than Bulganin and whether Gromyko and his successors will be unyielding Molotov-type foreign ministers, these are questions the men themselves could not rightly answer, nor would such answers really be of much help to us if we had them. No matter how complete our knowledge, we cannot predict the details of the next Soviet moves. However, we can analyze the larger problems which confront the Soviets. If our analysis is accurate, it will help explain the larger trends which have characterized their post-Stalin crisis and will also help us to make a few tentative conjectures about some of the problems still to be met in the future. We cannot say what their answers will be, but we are not precluded from visualizing possible answers. From the outside a crisis appears to be a time of tremendous flux and innovation, and often it is. However, the apparent contemporaneousness of a crisis hides from our eyes the deeper fact that the crisis has occurred because traditional institutions are for one reason or another incompetent to solve present problems consistently with traditional institutional forms. When the problems come entirely from the outside, as in an invasion or an earthquake, this is serious enough. But when the difficulties are internal, then the events which mark the progress of the crisis are not only novel reactions to new situations but also readjustments to changes too long postponed. Institutions are in this respect like machines in a factory. If they are extremely rugged to start with, they will survive much abuse and last a long time. Their very sturdiness is the measure of both their excellence and their injuriousness. For in being good enough to last a long time they are good enough also to survive beyond their technological obsolescence. As with Henry Ford's fabulous Model A plant, institutions may be so attuned to the problems of the past that even after they are obsolete they can be supplanted only with great difficulty in a long and serious crisis.