All entries for May 2009

Comrade Frumkin Was Right

This is about a forgotten prophet of the twentieth century. In 1951, the case of party member M. S. Frumkin came for investigation to the party control commission in Moscow. Frumkin was accused of adopting "a Trotskyist standpoint on matters of building socialism." 

The scandal arose in the context of a lecture that Frumkin gave on April 11, 1951, to teachers of the USSR transport ministry college for commanders of its armed security forces. The unpromising subject of Frumkin's lecture was "The conditions of material life of society." In the course of the lecture Frumkin remarked:

Transitional forms of production relations can exist not only during the transition from capitalism to socialism but also, conversely, during the transition from socialism to capitalism.

This opaque remark caused uproar. As the investigator commented afterwards, Frumkin had contradicted Stalin's "entirely clear" teaching on the transition from capitalism to socialism; according to Stalin, transitional production relations arose only in the context of movement from a lower form of society to a higher form -- not the other way around. The listeners protested. What was this "transition from socialism to capitalism"? One commented:

Comrade Frumkin's statement contradicts the laws of historical development of society ... it would follow from this formulation that the socialist system should be replaced by the capitalist [system].

Another asked:

Why was so much blood spilt in the struggle for socialism, if a return to capitalism is inevitable?

Instead of recognizing his mistake, however, Frumkin went on to defend it to the listeners, giving three historical examples of transition from socialism to capitalism:

• The fall of the Paris Commune (1871)
• The crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919)
• And the defection of Yugoslavia to the camp of imperialism (1948)

As I read the report (in the Hoover Institution's Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and State collection, RGANI, fond 6, opis 6, file 1643, folios 26 to 28), my interest mounted. These seemed like good examples to me. How would the listeners respond? But they objected: "These examples are incorrect!" Frumkin took a step back: the issue had "not been worked through and was for discussion."

Over the next few weeks Frumkin maintained this position. During this time he was first criticized at a party committee meeting in the college, and then reprimanded by the township party committee "for the political error that he committed and for reluctance to correct it at the proper time."

When the matter came finally to the party control commission, Frumkin accepted his mistake, putting it down to a "slip of the tongue." He claimed that he had confused it with the possibility of a violent capitalist restoration from outside, of the sort that Stalin himself had admitted in a letter "On the Final Victory of Socialism in the USSR," published in Pravda on February 14, 1938. Since Frumkin now accepted his mistake, and had been penalized within the party, the party control reporter proposed no further action.

Who was Frumkin? We are given only a few details. We know his initials but not his given name or patronymic. He was born in Russia in 1903; his family background was working-class. He joined the communist party in 1925. In 1935 he graduated from the Lenin Military-Political Academy in Leningrad. From there he was sent to teach in military schools in Briansk, then Gor'kii.

In 1943 Frumkin was taken into the Red Army where he served until 1946 as deputy chief of the political department of the 153 rifle division. On demobilization he was appointed deputy chief of administration of educational establishments for the RSFSR ministry of trade, and then section chief of the ministry of transport college where the incident took place. By the time of the investigation he had been moved on -- or down -- to be a political instructor in the security establishment of the Moscow-Riazan railway.

In short, Frumkin was a functionary of his time; there were millions like him in everything but that instinct that led him, for a few weeks in 1951, to defend the idea that history could go in reverse. Frumkin would have turned 88 in 1991, so he is unlikely to have lived to see his prophesy come true.

Mark Harrison : 31 May 2009 23:37 |  Tags: History Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What Should Every Econ Grad Student Read?

We sat round the table discussing what is missing from the reading lists of today's graduate students in economics. Today's syllabuses concentrate heavily on stocking up their mathematical and econometric toolkit. I don't have a problem with that. On the contrary, I regret the technical deficiencies in my own background, and I regret them more as it becomes less likely that I'll ever make them good.

Still, we worried: do today's syllabuses neglect a broader understanding of how institutions have evolved and of what history shows? What should every economics graduate student read?

There has been a lot of comment recently on how to educate today's kids in animal spirits, neuroeconomics, and behavioral stuff. But that was not at the centre of our concern, important though it is (I wrote about it recently here). This is a correction that is already under way. When Thomas Sargent says that rational expectations is "oversimplified," it won't take long to trickle down into advanced macro.

What bothered us is deeper issues: are today's graduate students learning, discussing, and debating how successful market economies have evolved, and how and why markets work, what stops them working, and how best to let them work?

One suggestion was that the graduate students should all read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776). The only Nobel laureate at the table (for this was Stanford) dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. "Too eighteenth century," he said.

Overawed, I kept my mouth shut. Here is what I thought afterwards.

My first recommendation is an article called "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Friedrich von Hayek (1945). Here, Hayek explained how markets economize on information. In a market economy, supply and demand allocate resources without outsiders or superiors needing to possess complete information about individual preferences or firms' capabilities. Bureaucracies, in contrast, need to know everything about you, me, and everyone else, before they can make decisions. Where market economies thrive on information, bureaucracies choke on it -- something that I see daily, sitting in the Hoover Archive among the milliions of documents bequeathed to history by the Soviet command economy.

Having read that, a natural question, particularly in our present-day context, is: what should be done when markets nonetheless fail? Here I turn to Oliver Williamson (1985), who proposed the idea of the "impossibility" of selective intervention. Most people think we should aim to combine the best of market forces and political action (I do too). Let the market economy do its wonders where it can; where it can't, let the government intervene and fix things. Williamson points out that in principle this cannot work out. The reason is that there is intrinsic uncertainty about where political action can allocate resources better than markets. If you give politicians the power to intervene selectively, it is certain that some of their interventions will make things worse. (And they do! Look around you!) As a result, no government, democratic or otherwise, can commit to intervene only when the result will improve social welfare.

Despite this, governments do intervene. When they do, do they improve things on balance? An essential handle on this question is provided by an article on "The New Comparative Economics" by Djankov et al. (2003). I do not know whether this article has truly founded a "new comparative economics" but it does conceptualize and model a fundamental idea. This is that every society faces its own trade-off between losses from political action and inaction. The absolute losses can be large or small, depending on each society's institutional arrangements, but every society has its own optimum. There is no guarantee that an optimum will be reached, however. Learning where we are in relation to our own optimum is similar to understanding whether we are suffering from too much or too little intervention.

Finally, although selective intervention is impossible, government have historically intervened and have often required the advice of economists to do so wisely. And they will continue to do so. Therefore, graduate economists need to understand how their advice can affect both economic policy and the economic lives of millions. In particular, every graduate student should know more about the Great Depression. No one has written a better account than Peter Temin (2000), and the story he wrote ten years ago has vivid, extraordinary relevance for the present day. I hope he is proud of it; he should be.

Unless you have a better idea ...

References

• Djankov, Simeon, Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. 2003. The New Comparative Economics. Journal of Comparative Economics 31:4, pp. 595-619.
• Hayek, F.A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review 35(4), pp. 519-30.
• Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In four volumes. Edinburgh.
• Temin, Peter. 2000. The Great Depression. In The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Volume III: The Twentieth Century. Edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000
• Williamson, Oliver E. 1985. The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. New York: The Free Press.

Mark Harrison : 18 May 2009 04:23 |  Tags: Economics Universities |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

At the Centre of the Gulag Archipelago, a Quiet Lagoon …

What sights and sensations does the word "lagoon" evoke? The poet Sheri Hoff thinks of:

A quiet lagoon...
Floating in the salty, blue water,
the sun shining on my face.

That's what it makes me think of, too.

If you like playing with words, there can be other associations. For Germans and Russians the first syllable of this beautiful word might evoke less pleasurable images. If the British invented the concentration camp (at the time of the Boer war), the Germans abbreviated the term to konzentrationslager and the Russians imported the word lager from German for their own forced labour camps. "Lag" was the Soviet-era abbreviation of anything to do with the institutions of forced labour. GULAG for example, was the chief administration of labour camps of the USSR interior ministry in Moscow; Siblag, Sevlag, among many others, were respectively the Siberian and Northern camp complexes.

But how could you get from the frostbitten outposts of the Soviet empire, encircled by barbed wire, to a lagoon? While some could only dream, others played with words.

On July 5, 1946, Lt. Col. Luferov, chief of the secretariat of GULAG (the chief administration of labour camps) of the USSR MVD (interior ministry) in Moscow, signed off a curt memorandum to his party comrade Major Silant'ev, chief of the control and inspection department (the document is in the Soviet archives collection of the Hoover Institution: GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1 dop., d. 144A, folio 91):

I inform you that the word "Laguna" is assigned to GULAG as its customary telegraphic address.

I request you to inform all departments and administrations of the USSR interior ministry chief administration of labour camps and also the peripheral units: ITL MVD [the labour camps themselves], UITLK MVD (the administration of labour camps and colonies), OITK MVD [the department of labour colonies], and PFL MVD [the verification and filtration camps for returning Soviet prisoners of war and labourers previously held in Germany].

This story shows that even the most heartless of Soviet bureaucrats could hear the poetry of word-play in his soul.

Mark Harrison : 14 May 2009 21:47 |  Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Truth in Humour; No Humour in Truth

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounted the Stalin-era joke of the labour camp guard who asked a newly arrived convict about the length of his sentence.

The man says 25 years, but proclaims he is innocent!

The guard retorts that he must have done something because the innocent are only given 10 years.

There can be a grain of truth in humour; that's what makes it funny. In this case, it's a matter of historical record that millions of people suffered unjust imprisonment or execution in Stalin's time. It isn't funny when the victim says it; the joke is when it is said by the perpetrator.

This next bit isn't a joke.

On January 31, 1938, the Politburo of the party Central Committee in Moscow considered the problem of foreign refugees. (The document is in the Soviet archives collection of the Hoover Institution: RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 11, folio 53). The minutes of the meeting record:

It has been established that foreign intelligence services are casting their mass espionage and sabotage network of agents into the USSR, mainly under the guise of refugees and those apparently seeking a political safe haven, better economic conditions in consequence of unemployment, deserters from military units and border security, and returning migrants and emigrants.

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) resolves:

1. To propose to the USSR NKVD [interior ministry in charge of state security] to arrest immediately and subject to meticulous interrogation all refugees detained at the border, regardless of their motives for entering the territory of the USSR.
2. All refugees for whom it is established directly or indirectly that they entered the territory of the USSR with espionage, sabotage, or other anti-Soviet intentions -- to hand them over to the court of the Military Tribunal, with mandatory application of [death by] shooting. 
3. Cases of all refugees for whom it is established that they entered the territory of the USSR without ill intentions -- to hand them over for consideration by the USSR NKVD Special Asssembly, with application of the penalty of 10 years' imprisonment ... [emphasis added]

So: Guilty, death. Innocent, ten years. It didn't make me laugh.

Mark Harrison : 02 May 2009 01:32 |  Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia Stalin |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem