Technology and ideology

Closely related to the conflict between supporters of consumption on the one hand, and heavy industry and defence on the other, was that between the ideologues and the 'technocrats’. Ideological supporters of heavy industry and defence tended to emphasise politika, taking a more hard-line stance internationally, while avoiding the use of 'capitalist’ market incentives at home. Technocrats, in contrast, called for policy-making to be informed by scientific expertise and tekhnika, and usually argued for the 'pragmatic’ use of market incentives; this required more investment in consumer industries for them to

Be effective, and less in defence. There were various ways of combining tekhnika and politika. We can identify a trajectory similar to that seen in the conflict over investment priorities: a late Stalinist compromise, in which politika, which still had the major role but did not have the power it had had in the 1930s, gave way after Stalin’s death to a sharp policy conflict. Extreme technocrats had a brief prominence, but that period was followed by a new tense and unstable relationship between tekhnika and politika under Khrushchev. Yet, the nature of the debate did change under Khrushchev because his conception of the content of the ideology differed from Stalin’s. Khrushchev’s Marxism-Leninism was internationalist, rather than quasi-nationalistic and xenophobic, and it emphasised popular mobilisation, in contrast to Stalin’s advocacy of elite control. He also attempted to reconcile a commitment to Marxism-Leninism with an economic policy that broadly favoured consumption.

The tension between tekhnika and politika was fundamental to Bolshevism.715 For technocratic Bolsheviks, the best way of building a powerful and wealthy state was to rely on educated experts to plan the economy and organise the state rationally, using a mixture of discipline and material incentives (but not going so far as to introduce a market system). For more 'revivalist’ Bolsheviks, these strategies did not take account of the peculiarly socialist nature of the regime: they created hierarchies of expertise and were too 'bourgeois’; they also neglected the economic and military advantages that true socialism could bring. Ifparty spirit were revived and the population mobilised, revivalists argued, the system could achieve heroic feats because 'moral’ incentives were much more effective than material ones. Thus, Bolshevik revivalism was closely connected with economic voluntarism - the notion that willpower and enthusiasm could generate economic miracles. This division over ideology and strategy was often, although not always, associated with the institutional division between party and state. As the party’s role was to inspire the masses and ensure that the regime remained socialist, it was likely that it would stress the power of ideas to mobilise the masses, while the 'state’ bureaucracy, which was dominated by the ministries that ran the economy, was more likely to adopt a technocratic approach.

Stalin’s political position, like that of most Bolshevik leaders, changed over time, but it is possible to identify a reasonably consistent belief in the primacy of politika. Yet, his interpretation of revivalism was of a particular type: he was

Interested in the mobilising power of Marxism-Leninism, but his views often had a xenophobic colouring. He was always worried about the power of foreign ideological influence to corrupt the population and undermine its willingness to build and fight for socialism. In the Terror of 1936-38, for example, he combined a populist 'class struggle’ against officials and experts with xenophobic campaigns against particular ethnic groups within the USSR, such as Germans, Poles, and Koreans.

The Terror, and especially its antibureaucratic elements, was extremely damaging to economic success and military preparedness because it virtually destroyed expert bureaucracies. From the late 1930s, Stalin was forced to move away from politika towards tekhnika, and the power of managers and economic officials was strengthened against political interference. These trends continued during the war. Political commissars in the army were subordinated to officers, and Stalin himselfdelegated a great deal ofauthority over the economy to his subordinates. More generally, political and ideological restrictions were relaxed. The leadership used more explicitly Russian nationalist messages and made fewer efforts to associate them with socialist ideology once Stalin recruited the Orthodox Church to the patriotic cause in 1943. At the same time, the status and influence of scientists increased. They were credited with a major role in winning the war, and their importance in the nuclear-arms race was fully accepted. They were given a good deal of independence from the requirements of the party and ideology. They were also encouraged to collaborate with their Western colleagues so that they could learn from and overtake the West.716

However, soon after the war this ideological laxity was reversed, and Stalin pursued versions of the campaigns he had waged during the 1930s. Given his long-established concerns about the dangers of foreign ideas, it is probable that Stalin would have wanted to impose greater ideological conformity after the war, whatever the relations were with the West. There is a great deal of evidence that returning soldiers were particularly assertive and critical. They believed that their sacrifices in war had earned them a less repressive political system. Many had witnessed the higher living standards in the West, an experience that was an 'emotional and psychological shock’, as the playwright Konstantin Simonov put it.717

Yet deteriorating relations with the West also contributed to Stalin’s hardening line. In the spring of 1946, at a time of increasing tension, he began his ideological campaigns in earnest, using both Marxist-Leninist and Russian nationalist (and particularly anti-Semitic) themes to attack the West. In April, Stalin criticised the literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad for their openness to Western influences, and in August he used his chief ideologist, Andrei Zhdanov, to launch a broader condemnation of 'cringing before philistine foreign literature’.718 The next stage came the following April, shortly after Harry S. Truman’s announcement of his 'doctrine’. Several months before, Stalin had criticised a new History of Western European Philosophy by the head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, G. F. Aleksandrov, for neglecting the achievements of Russian philosophy. Now, Stalin tried to use the case to signal a larger assault on Western values. At the same time, 'honour courts’ were established in state institutions in order to stage trials of officials and academics accused of harbouring unpatriotic attitudes.

The socialist patriotic campaign also spread to the natural sciences, and scientists were accused of 'servility to the West’. The first significant attack on scientists came with the criticism of Nina Kliueva and her husband Grigorii Roskin (the 'KR affair’), medical researchers who were accused of giving details of a cancer cure to the Americans. Even so, Stalin, while using the campaigns to promote a broader attack on the West and its culture, did not want to damage scientific research. Those criticised, including Kliueva and Roskin, were allowed to continue their work. Other established scientists also retained some influence. The antigeneticist 'Marxist-Leninist’ biologist Trofim Lysenko, for example, failed to secure political support in 1947, even though he tried to use the patriotic campaign against his academic enemies.

It was only in the summer of 1948, again in response to a deterioration in East-West relations, that Stalin decided to intervene in support of Lysenko. Stalin deliberately used the Lysenko affair to demonstrate the fundamental differences between East and West and the superiority of Soviet science and the Soviet system more generally. The victory of Lysenkoism in biology certainly demonstrated that the party had extended its power in the scientific realm and that science had been subordinated to ideology; yet Stalin remained unwilling to jeopardise research in areas which he believed were of particular importance, such as physics and nuclear weapons. A conference designed to denounce 'Western’ ideas in physics, planned for March 1949, was cancelled at

Short notice, possibly because Beriia realised that this might imperil the nuclear programme.719

In many respects, then, the socialist patriotic campaigns of the late 1940s echoed the revivalist campaigns of the late 1930s: the balance between politika and tekhnika was tipped in favour of the former, the party was allowed to interfere in some areas of technical expertise, and the ideological mobilisation of the population against the Western threat was the priority. While the 'ideology’ promoted in the 1940s included more nationalistic elements than it had in the 1930s, this was not a conventional ethnic nationalism. 'Enemies’ were still defined according to their relationship with socialism; the Jews thus took the place of the Germans, Poles, and Koreans as potential fifth columnists. Yet there were important differences between the campaigns of the 1930s and those ofthe 1940s. The revivalism ofthe postwar period was more limited and relied less on popular mobilisation than that of the 1930s. Science was never fully subordinated to ideology, possibly because the leadership had learned lessons from the 1930s, but also because science and expertise were now seen as crucial weapons in the Cold War. Stalin had never claimed that there was a special proletarian science, superior to bourgeois science, but in the 1930s he had argued that working-class 'practical people’, such as the heroic Stakhanovite workers, could be as expert as qualified scientists and technicians.720 In the 1940s and 1950s, however, he expressed very different sentiments. While Stalin believed that he, as the 'coryphaeus of science’, had the right to be closely involved in scientific debates, he insisted that there were objective scientific and economic laws independent of Marxism.721 For instance, in 1948, he crossed out Lysenko’s statement 'any science is class-based’ and wrote in the margin: 'HA-HA-HA!!! And what about mathematics? And what about Darwinism?’722 Stalin, therefore, did recognise, in theory, that science had to develop free from politics, although his willingness to launch political campaigns against scientists had a seriously detrimental effect on Soviet science.

Stalin’s campaigns against scientists were also much more targeted than they had been in the 1930s, and did not involve a populist 'class struggle’. They affected the scientific elite, and were propagandistic in intent, designed to mobilise the population against the West. The scientists themselves were generally not arrested, and these campaigns did not lead to purges of technicians throughout the country. More generally, the power and status of managers and technicians in relation to workers rose in the postwar period, and strict hierarchies were maintained in factories. Most obviously, the campaigns did not lead to mass violence against 'enemies’. Officials were executed in various purges of the period, but the victims were relatively few. It may be that Stalin was planning mass violence against Jews in 1952-53, just before his death, in connection with the so-called Doctors’ Plot, but, given evidence currently available, this seems unlikely.723

This balance, which gave politika primacy but was more favourable to tekhnika than before the war, is also evident in the power structure that emerged at the very top during the postwar Stalinist period. Stalin used purges and aggressive bullying to restore some of the powers he had been forced to delegate to his inner circle during the war. Nonetheless, he knew that he could not exercise personal control over the economy. In February 1947, therefore, he acquiesced in granting the 'state’ Council of Ministers (Sovmin) almost complete control over the economy. Stalin did not participate in Sovmin meetings which largely involved leaders interested in economic affairs, such as Beriia and Malenkov. But he wholly controlled the party Politburo, which dealt with 'political’ and foreign-policy questions. This was a departure from the 1930s, when Stalin had been closely involved in economic management. In the political sphere, Stalin maintained his arbitrary, personalistic form of rule, often involving his subordinates in terrifying late-night meetings. In contrast, Sovmin developed a formal bureaucratic structure and a hierarchy of specialised committees.724

This balance between politika and tekhnika, and between party and state, made sense during the early Cold War, at a time when the Soviet Union was forced to compete with the West in a struggle that was both ideological and military, but it was clearly an unstable one. For the more technocratic Beriia and Malenkov, political interference damaged scientific progress and the state’s ability to manage the economy. For those associated with the party

And interested in ideology, such as Khrushchev, the potential of Bolshevism to mobilise the population was being neglected: the 'Marxism-Leninism’ promoted by Stalin was too elitist and xenophobic. The party apparatus, moreover, resented its subordination in economic affairs. In large part its discontent at the late Stalinist compromise was driven by institutional conflicts and long-established ideological tensions. But the international environment also had an influence. At a time when the Cold War was becoming associated with decolonisation struggles, an emphasis on the universalistic element of Marxism-Leninism clearly appeared attractive. The critics of Stalin’s xenophobia, therefore, had powerful arguments in favour of change. At the same time, however, the nuclearisation of the Cold War strengthened those technocrats who argued both that conventional defence spending could be cut and that the world was too dangerous for continued ideological competition.

The first significant challenge to the Stalinist compromise came fTom Beriia and Malenkov, both technocrats and leaders in the state apparatus. Beriia rapidly moved to reduce the politicisation of justice and to undermine the power of the party over the ministries.725 He also criticised the Russian nationalist elements of late Stalinist ideology, condemning the power of Russians in high positions in non-Russian republics and criticising the dominance of the Russian language. On Beriia’s fall, Malenkov took up the baton and continued the departure from the Stalinist compromise. He tried to free the intelligentsia from ideological restrictions and asked for advice from leading economists and scientists. The former called for greater economic liberalisation, and the latter demanded an end to the power of Lysenko in the biological sciences.726

However, the tense international environment in 1954-55 strengthened those who took ideology seriously both at home and in the struggle against the West. Khrushchev, the head of the party apparatus, was in a particularly good position to take advantage of this situation. For Khrushchev, the party was to retain its international ideological role, as promoter of world Communism. Inside the USSR, he adopted a revivalist position: the party had to be strengthened in its relationship with the state apparatus so that it could imbue the population with enthusiasm for a non-Stalinist 'democratic’ socialism. This would strengthen the legitimacy of the regime and inspire people to work harder. He made more serious efforts than Stalin to reconcile these strategies

With the demands of scientific autonomy, but understandably he found it difficult to resolve tensions between his encouragement of scientific excellence and his enthusiasm for a renewal of Marxism-Leninism.

Khrushchev’s partial denunciation of Stalin in October 1956 allowed him to justify these policies. He did not condemn the essence of the Stalinist system - collectivisation, industrialisation, the plan, and the centralisation of political power - but concentrated on criticising the 1936-38 Terror. He presented it as a departure fTom Bolshevik 'democracy’ and as an attack on the party (neglecting the larger numbers of non-party members persecuted under Stalin).

In many ways Khrushchev was returning to the populist revivalism of the Bolshevik Left in the 1920s. His ideas were universalistic and atheistic, rather than quasi-nationalistic. They emphasised the importance of 'democracy’ and 'struggles against bureaucratism’. Attempts were made to raise the enthusiasm of the masses by 'democratising’ the party and industrial management. The party rank and file and workers were encouraged to participate in discussions of decision-making. The masses were not to challenge party rule, but were to put pressure on 'bureaucratic’ officials. At the same time, Khrushchev gave the party much more power over economic managers by destroying the economic ministries and creating regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy), which could be more effectively influenced by the party.727

Party influence was also closely associated with economic voluntarism, particularly in agriculture, Khrushchev’s particular area of interest. Khrushchev had a typical revivalist Bolshevik view of the miraculous power of labour heroism. When 'people come to know their own strength’, he declared, 'they create miracles’. He did place a high priority on science, and he was sympathetic to the view that Stalinist controls had damaged the intelligentsia.728 However, in a rather more populist vein, he at times had contempt for 'pointy-headed intellectuals’ who did not understand production as well as 'working people’.729 At the same time, he set himself the task of competing with the West in the area of consumption, and his voluntarism often won out in his disastrous pursuit of high plan targets against the advice of experts. His support for Lysenko, who promised agricultural miracles, showed he was still a revivalist, prepared to put pressure on scientists to endorse impractical economic goals. Lysenko did not regain the degree of influence over science he had held in the late Stalinist era, and scientific debate

36. Women welders chatting, USSR, 1962.

Remained much more open than it had been. But for many in the party leadership, one of Khrushchev’s main faults was his subordination of science to politics. As Pravda declared in its explanation for his removal on 16 October 1964, he was guilty of 'unwillingness to take into account what science and practical experience have already worked out’.730