Russia fifty years after
Sir: Two comments seem in order on Tibor Szamuely's final article on 'Russia: Fifty Years After' (3 November). Firstly, it seems highly dis- ingenuous of a writer with Mr Szamuely's marxist historical training to contrast in quite the way he does the Soviet model of development with what he calls 'the European type of modernisation.' The point, surely, is that the political and social charac- teristics of advanced capitalist societies which he praises emerged only after the process of economic growth was well under way and this had involved (only with a different ideological rationalisation) at least as much human misery and deprivation as occurred under the command economy of the Stalin era. The Afro-Asian states are in a situation where they must seek to achieve concurrently, rather than consecutively, the goals of economic and social progress. That the Soviet model of development— which, whatever its practical shortcomings assessed in terms of contemporary liberal democracy, seems in good measure to have provided the means of doing just that—should have appealed to them is not surprising, and their subsequent difficulties de- serve a more sympathetic hearing than Mr Szamuely gives them. Secondly, Mr Szamuely's comments on the Soviet achievement itself are somewhat misleading. To discuss economic progress under the Bolsheviks from the base of 1913 figures is not fair. If in 1913 Russia's industrial capacity was about 12 per cent that of the United States, it was certainly very much less than this after the civil war: according to the estimate only 13 per cent of prewar indus- trial plant then remained, while personnel difficul- ties were immense. Further, Mr Szamuely can hardly ignore the development of the Central Asian areas of Russia since 1917 (to which his data on the Tsarist economy have practically no relevance, but whose situation was once closely comparable to that of many Afro-Asian states today). As he must know, recent western scholarship has demon- strated a very high level of economic and social advance in these regions, certainly way ahead of anything achieved in Iran or Turkey, to cite two countries mentioned by Mr Szamuely, neither of which, incidentally, seems conspicuous for that 'remarkable degree of freedom' he associates with 'liberal industrial capitalism.'
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