Stalin, Seventy Years On

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/comment/harrison_1979_stalin_centenary.pdf

Stalin died on 5 March 1953 -- seventy years ago today. How should Stalin be remembered? I answered this question once before, in 1979 on the centenary of the Soviet dictator's birth. My article was published in Marxism Today, the monthly "theoretical and discussion jouirnal" of the Communist Party of Great Britain -- of which I was, at the time, a fully paid-up and active member. (I've written more about the communist party and me here.)

If you take a look at my 1979 article, you might be curious about a couple of strange details. One is the date of Stalin's birth, given in my article as 21 December 1879. This date was generally accepted at the time I wrote, but in 1990 it was discovered that in 1920 for unknown reasons Stalin had taken a year off his age. He was actually born on 6 December 1878. The other odd thing is that the article doesn't have my name on it, again for unknown reasons. I was listed as author on the journal contents page, and that's all.

Earlier this year I was prompted to think about how my answer might have changed since then, when someone wrote to me out of the blue.

I have recently read an article on Soviet history in an ancient copy of Marxism today and just wondered if you were the author?

I replied:

Yes, that would be me.

My correspondent came back to me:

I thought it was a very interesting take on the subject and the great majority has stood the test of time.

That sounded nice, but I wasn't too sure. What exactly had I written more than forty years ago? I dug the 1979 original out of my personal archive and read it carefully. Then, I replied:

I thought I had better reread the article before taking your praise for granted. I continued to work on the subject for the rest of my career, which included thirty years in various former Soviet archives dealing with military and economic affairs and internal security). These experiences have perhaps left me with a darker view of the Stalin era (or of the whole Soviet experience) now than I had at the time.

Writing about the Russian Revolution today, I would probably not ascribe agency to the working class as a class (there was plenty of agency, but not of the working class as such).

If Stalin’s rise can be ascribed to an “organic” relationship that he developed with anyone, it was with the party cadres more than the working class.

Turning to the 1930s, what I wrote about a reformist faction led by Kirov was nonsense: as we know now, there were never any disagreements within Stalin’s circle, and no factions whatsoever, only transient personal alliances of convenience that were quickly dissolved as soon as Stalin got to know about them.

I was ignorant of the motives, mechanisms, and scale of the mass purges of 1937-38, and of the extent to which they were started, managed, and then stopped on Stalin’s personal instructions.

I described the “enemies” destroyed by the purges as “non-existent” because I had not fully understood Stalin’s anticipation of war nor had I come across his belief that Soviet society was full of “unconscious” or “potential” enemies who would become traitors when war broke out. I had not really grasped how Stalin thought he could identify the potential enemies based on family background and social and ethnic markers. I was unaware of Stalin’s rule that it was better to kill 20 people than to let one spy get away and I did not understand the encompassing Soviet definition of a spy.

I skated past Stalin’s role as Hitler’s accessory in starting World War II.

I overstated Stalin’s postwar efforts to return Soviet society to its prewar mould: by 1945, we now know, Stalin was physically no longer able to control everything as he had done before, and this set many changes in motion that would become fully apparent only in 1956.

Finally, I did not stress enough what is suggested by the article’s illustrations (which I did not choose): military power-building (which long pre-dated Hitler) and the comprehensive militarization of Soviet society.

Of course, I wrote what I wrote. I’m pleased if I got anything right, and I’m also pleased if it was possible to learn from my mistakes. You can decide for yourself whether the points above count as minor or major corrections.

I went on to explain the circumstances under which I wrote the article.

The article has a back story that is not completely without interest. As you say, Monty Johnstone was the party’s premier expert on the Soviet Union, and I joined the party only after meeting him in London and spending a day talking with him. Others of his generation included the economist Maurice Dobb, Dennis Ogden (who had reported for the Morning Star from Moscow in the 1960s), Brian Pollitt (son of Harry Pollitt, the party’s general secretary from 1929 to 1960), and Pat Sloan, who had visited Russia on a number of occasions. In my slightly younger generation, several others had similar interests: Jon Bloomfield, Geoff Roberts, Jan Sling, and Ken Spours to name a few. (Also Julian Cooper, but our perspectives had less in common then than now.) We had encouragement from Monty and Dennis.

The thing is that the British party leaders were very sensitive to what could be written about the Soviet Union -- and by whom. In 1975 or thereabouts I submitted an article to James Klugmann, then the editor of Marxism Today, for publication on the twentieth anniversary of the twentieth Soviet party congress. The article never appeared, and I no longer have a copy. When the occasion arrived, Marxism Today published another article, this one written by John Gollan (the general secretary who succeeded Pollitt). Gollan’s article included a number of passages using my words. It turned out that Klugmann had shared my draft with Gollan, who borrowed from it. At first my nose was put out of joint, but Klugmann explained to me that this was politics, and I should take it as a compliment. Anyway, I took advantage of the next anniversary (I don’t recall if it was on Klugmann’s initiative or mine) to send in the article that you have to hand.

The one thing missing from this explanation is something that I knew perfectly well but had momentarily forgotten: by the time of my 1979 article, James Klugmann had stepped aside from Marxism Today and Martin Jacques had taken over as editor, so it was thanks to Martin that my article was accepted and published.

Mark Harrison : 05 Mar 2023 08:00 |  Tags: Communism History Marxism Politics Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Can Western sanctions on Russia be effective without an energy embargo?

Writing about web page https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/05/13/russia-is-on-track-for-a-record-trade-surplus

Yes, Western sanctions on Russia can be effective without an energy embargo. If "effective" means enough to raise the costs of Russia's war effort and undermine its sustainability, then Western sanctions are already effective. Adding an energy embargo is not only unnecessary but might also get in the way of Western support for Ukraine.

This argument seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, so I will present it as carefully as I can. Objections and counter-arguments are welcome.

Russia is a major exporter of energy to the world, including the West. From the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has been said that by paying a billion Euros a day to Russia, Western economies are effectively paying for Putin’s war. There have been corresponding calls for an immediate Western embargo on Russian energy, despite the wrenching adjustments that this would require.

Who stands to lose more by stopping Russia’s energy exports? When Putin’s war is grinding on far longer than anyone anticipated, the argument that it is paid for out of Russia’s export revenues suggests that Russia must be desperate to keep its place in the world energy market. Meanwhile, most Western powers are working hard towards an embargo on Russia’s exports. They are also expending considerable political capital on efforts to bring backsliders into line, notably Hungary.

Yet Russia itself does not look desperate to maintain its export markets. Rather, the Russian government sets obscure financial conditions for Western buyers, such as payment in rubles, and has already halted gas supplies to Poland, Bulgaria, and Finland.

It seems that both sides are treating Russian exports as their own weapon. While NATO threatens Russia with a stop on purchases, Russia threatens NATO with a stop on sales.

If you find this confusing, then you’ve been paying attention. Too many Western commentators have fallen victim to an old mercantilist error—that the strength of an economy is measured by its ability to attract gold from others through its export trade.

What are the underlying facts?

First, Russia has a large and growing export surplus. The Economist puts last year’s trade surplus at 7.5 per cent of Russia’s GDP . This year, it is expected to rise to 15 per cent of last year’s GDP (this year’s GDP will be smaller by an unknown amount, perhaps 10 or 20 percent, pushing the share of the trade surplus still higher).

The reason for Russia’s growing export surplus is that, while exports are holding up, imports from a broad sample of Russia’s trading partners are collapsing—running at half the level of before the war’s outbreak. Why? There are two possibilities. One is that Western sanctions on Russia’s imports are working. The other is capital flight—holders of ruble balances are converting them into Western currencies, causing the ruble exchange rate to decline sharply and pushing up import prices for Russian consumers. In the short run it does not matter which.

An expert quoted by The Economist finds Russia’s growing trade surplus “disappointing.” Although sanctions on Russia’s imports may be working, it seems we are still buying Russian energy exports at levels similar to before. We are still “paying for Putin’s war”—or so it is said.

To understand what Russia’s growing trade surplus really means, it’s necessary to recall that the money flows are the counterpart of flows of real resources. As money flows into Russian hands, real resources flow the other way. If Russia’s trade surplus will be 15 percent (or more) of its GDP this year, then in terms of the real resources produced Russia is sending the same proportion of its domestic product abroad to be utilized by foreigners.

How does that matter for financing Putin’s war? It is sometimes said that GDP is a measure of a country’s capacity to fight a war, and this is correct—approximately. But when the shooting begins, wars are not fought with GDP. They are fought using the real resources available. For this purpose, exports are not available. What is available is domestic production not exported, plus imports.

The national accounting concept of the resources available to a country at war is not GDP but “domestic absorption”—the total of domestic expenditure, including expenditure on net imports.

With percentage points of last year’s GDP as the units, Russia’s trade surplus of 7.5 units left 92.5 for domestic absorption. This year, absorption will fall by the fall in GDP (say 20) plus the increase in the trade surplus (7.5), so 27.5. A GDP decline by one fifth becomes an absorption decline by nearly one third.

Two things follow. One, the fact that Russia is exporting one seventh of its national income to the rest of the work is weakening, not strengthening its war effort. Two, Russia’s exports are not “paying for Putin’s war.” They are certainly paying for something, but not that. What they are paying for is the accumulation of idle balances of foreign currency. This currency may be held by the state (within Russia) or by private citizens abroad (in the case of capital flight). But, if they cannot be used to import resources into Russia, they are not paying for Putin’s war.

A reality check is available. In two World Wars, the Allies blockaded Germany to prevent the import (not export) of resources. In both wars, Germany responded by confiscating resources from the countries it occupied, just as Russia today is accused of stealing grain and other valuables from Ukraine. In fact, in World War II Germany’s plan of overland occupation of the Eastern territories was designed in the expectation of an Allied blockade German overseas trade. It has been calculated that net imports from Germany’s wartime empire paid for more than one quarter of Germany’s war effort. Net imports, not net exports!

What are the implications?

• First, Western sanctions are working. They are working either directly (by cutting Russia’s imports) or indirectly (by causing capital flight). By the measure of real resources, Russia’s economy is suffering arterial blood loss at an increasing rate
• Second, Russia’s most likely retaliation will indeed be to reduce exports by cutting off energy supplies to the West. The rationale for this will be not only to damage Western economies but also to redirect capital and labour from the energy sector to Russia’s war sector.

It is sensible for Western countries to prepare for this. An efficient way to do so is to impose a tax on purchases of Russian energy, reflecting the risk attached to continued reliance. But it is also wise to ensure that, when the pinch comes, the blame for the disruption is seen to lie where it should belong, with Russia.

• Fourth, by pressing the unwilling, not only in Hungary but potentially in all Western countries, to do without Russian energy before the need arises, we are pointlessly spending NATO’s political capital (and sympathy for Ukraine) while exacerbating the national and social divisions on which Putin relies to make progress.
• Finally, are there risks in allowing Russia to continue to accumulate financial claims on Western economies accruing from energy sales? Yes, but as long as sanctions on Russia’s imports and financial institutions remain in place these risks are long term. The shape of the long term will be decided by the outcome of Putin’s war, which is being decided now.

It is far more important for everyone to do what it takes to win that war now, including focusing on Ukraine’s military needs, than to be distracted by worry about the distant financial implications of continuing to buy and pay cash for Russian energy while we can -- cash that Russia cannot currently spend.

Mark Harrison : 30 May 2022 14:34 |  Tags: Energy Russia Sanctions Ukraine War |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

When Deterrence Fails, Defence is the Only Option

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/expertcomment/ukraine_invasion_university

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows that Western deterrence has failed. Also, Russian deterrence is working: we daren't help Ukraine militarily because of the fear of what Russia would do next. So the situation now resembles a Cold War nuclear standoff: When the Soviet Union suppressed uprisings in East Germany or Hungary, fear of nuclear war forced the West to accept that this was Russia's backyard. This situation is exactly what Putin wanted when he called recently for a new Yalta agreement – one that would assign the Russian backyard to Russian control.

Was the failure of Western deterrence avoidable? Possibly, although not easily. NATO countries, and Britain in particular, have made at least two unforced errors.

First, we have placed far too much reliance on economic sanctions for crisis management. Of all weapons, economic measures are slowest to work (and, incidentally, have the highest ratio of collateral damage to intended damage). So the adversary that is economically weak but militarily strong will always be tempted to escalate military violence in response. Besides, in the short term, Russia is not weak in fiscal capacity. I heard a government minister claim on the radio this morning [yesterday 24 February 2022] that we are going to strike at Russia's capacity to fund the war, he emphasized the damage being done by the overnight fall in Russian equities. Unfortunately this is nonsense. If anything, the climb in oil and gas prices is making Russia stronger, not weaker.

Second, for the same reasons, economic measures are not a way to avoid conflict. They go with (not instead of) military defence and deterrence. If we engage in economic war with Russia and we don’t have strong military defences, Russia will respond with more war. Britain and other Western European state have underinvested in defence for many years. It is not a good time to say so, given Britain’s needs to fund health care, the courts, and the levelling up agenda. At the same time, we also need to look to our defences.

Mark Harrison : 25 Feb 2022 14:02 |  Tags: Russia Ukraine War |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Russia vs NATO: What Can Economic Sanctions Achieve?

Writing about web page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqfHEedYv2c

Lukas Smith of the Vienna-based International Center for Advanced and Comparative EU-Russia-NIS Research (ICEUR-Vienna) interviewed me the other day about the present tensions focused on Ukraine (12 minutes 40 seconds here). Part of the interview was focused on what economic sanctions -- or the threat of them -- can achieve in managing the confrontation. Afterwards I wrote up my notes as follows.

In the context of the present dispute between Russia and NATO over the status of Ukraine and the stationing of NATO forces in Eastern Europe, I am in favour of the use of further economic sanctions to limit Russia's aggression. Promised sanctions can act as a threat and a deterrent, and they can be a countermeasure in the event of conflict.

But . . . there's a large "but."

I'm concerned that the public, and maybe politicians too, often lack clarity about what sanctions can achieve and what are the risks. When we contemplate sanctions, the starting point should always be: What is the adversary’s best response?

Too often we think: Economic sanctions will impose an unaffordable burden. The adversary will be deterred – end of story. In practice economic sanctions take time to work and can often be predicted. The adversary always has ways to work around the sanctions or to neutralize them. It’s true that the countermeasures may be costly. But, all too often, the costs of the countermeasures turn out to be quite affordable.

One way to think about this is that sanctions have an immediate effect and an ultimate effect. And the ultimate impact of sanctions is never the immediate impact as it seems at first sight. The ultimate impact will be to force the adversary to pay the cost of countermeasures, and generally the ultimate costs will be smaller than the immediate costs appear.

Another factor is that the adversary might become more ready to pay the costs than appeared beforehand. The reason is that an attack on the adversary’s economy is still an attack, and it is usually experienced as warfare. In the short run, at least, warfare tends to stiffen national feeling and makes people more ready to pay the price of war, even if they were unready beforehand. You can see this today. Because Russia has threatened NATO, the NATO countries today are more unified and more ready for war than they were yesterday. The question is: is Russia also becoming more ready for war?

What are the countermeasures to Western sanctions available to Russia? Russia’s leaders can make the Russian economy less dependent on the West for markets, currencies, payment systems, and internet technologies. They can strengthen ties with China. They can also wage economic warfare against us. They can frighten foreign investors out of Ukraine. They can blockade Ukraine on land and sea, and they can throttle back gas supplies to the EU. Most of these things are already happening or beginning to happen.

But Russia’s countermeasures might not be confined to the economy. There is also a military response: to escalate violence. To escalate, not de-escalate. History suggests a number of examples, but the clearest case might well be found in 1940.

In 1940, the United States wanted to stop Japan’s war of aggression and conquest in China. America imposed oil sanctions on Japan, which were expected to be extremely costly to the Japanese economy. The Japanese response is instructive. Japan’s leaders did not say to each other: “We cannot afford this. We must either wait for our war capability to be ground down, or we must give up now.” Instead, they launched a surprise attack on the United States in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. They knew that this was an outrageous gamble, and in fact the gamble failed, because the United States went on to win the war in the Pacific. The point is that Japan’s leaders preferred the gamble to the alternative, which was certain defeat.

As I said before, in the present context, I favour economic sanctions against Russia, especially if a wider war is realized. But we should understand that economic sanctions are not a cheap way to avoid military conflict. They are not a substitute for military force. They are a phase of conflict, not an alternative to conflict.

In particular, economic sanctions can contribute to deterrence only if they are combined with a strong military defence. If we wish to achieve our foreign goals without violence, strong defences are also necessary.

If we signal to the adversary, which today is Russia, that they are strong militarily but we are strong economically, the signal can have an unfortunate effect. We might make Russia’s leaders more likely to turn to their strength, which is the capacity to escalate the confrontation by violent means.

In short, the threat of sanctions has to be complemented by strong defences. Without those strong defences, the effect of sanctions can be exactly opposite to what what we wanted in the first place.

Mark Harrison : 16 Feb 2022 11:12 |  Tags: Economics Politics Russia Ukraine |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

When Three Wars Collided: Moscow, April 1982

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/moscow1982/

This column is about a moment when three wars collided: the Cold War, the Second World War, and the Falklands War. It was April 1982; the Cold War was in full swing, and East-West relations were not in good shape. I was in Moscow for a month, thanks to the British Academy's exchange programme with the Soviet Academy of Sciences; I was engaged in a project on the Soviet economy in the Second World War. As I arrived, the Falklands War broke out.

The events that led directly to the Falklands War were taking place as I left the UK. But I had paid little or no attention, so I arrived in Moscow more or less unaware that the Falklands Islands were a British possession, that their sovereignty was disputed, who lived there, and even which hemisphere or ocean they were in. Once in Moscow I was pretty much on my own, with no access to Western radio or newspapers, and I was busy, so I did not even try to follow the news. All in all, I was the last person to find out.

The first I knew of the conflict was a chance remark at the Institute of USSR History, where I was visiting – someone I knew distantly broke into a conversation in a corridor to as: "Why is your country at war with Argentina?" I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. As I recall, I thought it must be some obscure Soviet joke that I did not understand, so I probably smiled enigmatically and carried on with the conversation as before.

After that, I tried to catch up. But my only source was Pravda, the daily party newspaper. In the first days of the conflict, the Soviet line was strongly anti-imperialist and pro-Argentinian, so they called the Falklands the Malvinas, and they portrayed Argentina as helping the Falkland Islanders to free themselves from colonial oppression and exploitation. I picked up the idea that the islanders were originally brought there as plantation slaves.

After a few days the line shifted. I don't know why, but the Soviet stance became more neutral. The press began to refer to the "Falklands/Malvinas" and, most importantly from my perspective, to report developments from both sides in a more objective way. So I began to get a more accurate fix on what was going on.

In the midst of all this I continued to work on my project, which was on Soviet economic planning in the Second World War and would lead eventually to my first book. Something I was trying to puzzle out was the reliability and consistency of the Soviet official measures of the scale of the war effort. In those days there was absolutely no question of getting archival access to such information, so I had spent a long time combing through all the Soviet publications on World War II and putting together all the data I could find. Not surprisingly, I was left with a lot of questions: things like the concepts and methods used to calculate the growth and scale of Soviet war production, the proportions of resources used for the war, the squeeze on wartime consumption, the role of Allied aid, and so on. The reason I wanted to do this was to be able to make more accurate comparisons of how the different countries fought the war.

I hoped that in Moscow I might find some answers. Of course, I knew that all this information was quite sensitive. I also knew that the Soviets were very proud of their war effort, but I did not see any way in which my digging away would threaten that. With that in mind, asking for help seemed reasonable to me.

In the Institute of USSR History I was attached to the sector on military history. I had a number of interesting conversations there, but i did not get any help with my data issues. When I raised this, I was told: You'd better talk to Mitrofanova.

Avgusta Vasil'evna Mitrofanova was a well-known figure; she'd written the definitive history of the Soviet working class in the war, and at least some of the figures I was puzzling over came from her big book (published in 1971), so this seemed like a good idea. A meeting was arranged. As I was not completely confident in my Russian, I wrote my questions down.

The afternoon of our meeting came around. We met at the institute in a large, rather dingy room. Avgusta Vasil'evna (as I called her, respectfully) was in her early sixties. After all this time I couldn't give much of a description, but I remember a trim lady with an authoritative manner and unshakeable self-possession. There was no small talk. I described my project, and I explained that I had a bunch of unresolved questions which I'd written down, and I passed her the list. She took it and read it. Then, she looked up at me. She said:

Mr Harrison, tell me. Are you an economist, or a historian -- or what?

This was not a good start. Not everyone will recall the atmosphere of the time, but the Cold War meaning of "or what" was perfectly clear to me in that moment. She was asking me if I was a spy. I replied politely. I said that I was a scholar, an economist by training, and my field was economic history: I was an economic historian.

Her next question:

Mr Harrison, who told you to work on these questions?

She might as well have asked who put me up to it. I explained that it had been my decision: no one had assigned the topic to me. She gave me to understand she didn't believe me; I was too young and too junior to choose my own research. Afterwards I remember figuring out that perhaps she was just thinking on Soviet lines. If I'd been a young Soviet scholar, I wouldn't have had the authority to define my own project. My department or sector would have had a plan of work, agreed with the administration and the party committee, and I would have been assigned a part of that plan. Anyway, her implication was that I was really just a hired investigator.

By then I knew I was in trouble. I would have continued to argue my case, but she said to me:

Mr Harrison, I don't know the answers to your questions.

And, if I did, I wouldn't tell you.

After that, there were no more questions. Instead, she gave me a lecture. As I recall, it went on for well over an hour, maybe an hour and a half. It certainly felt like a long time. The highlights that I can remember were the great sacrifices of the Soviet people in the war, her own personal sacrifice (her husband was killed in the defence of Moscow), the huge costs of the war effort, the deaths, the destruction, the homeless refugees, the struggle for postwar recovery. I wondered what I could say. Then I realized there was no point my saying anything. I was not expected to respond.

When Mitrofanova reached her conclusion, I nearly tried to prolong the discussion. I think she'd gone back to the iniquities of capitalism and the shirking and backstabbing of the Soviet Union by the wartime Allies. Her final words were:

But, you see, ours is a different social system. We don't need other people's islands.

Ah! I thought. Now we're back in the present, and she's thinking about the Falklands. But me, I'm thinking about an interesting analogy: If yours is a different social system, why does the Soviet Union continue to hold onto the Kurile Islands and Southern Sakhalin, which historically belonged to Japan but were occupied in the final days of World War II and never returned? That's a great question! Why don’t I ask her?

Perhaps better not. My desire to escape from the room defeated my curiosity. I held my tongue. The meeting was over. Mitrofanova swept out through the door, and I strolled after her into the bright sunlight and the warm breeze of an April afternoon.

Avgusta Vasil'evna Mitrofanova lived for another 30 years, dying in 2003 according to an obituary that I found online. She was born in Akmolinsk in 1910. Her childhood and adolescence were marked by war, revolution, civil war, and famine. Evidently a true believer, she became a party worker in the press and a party lecturer; that's how she passed the years of collectivization, more famine, rearmament, terror, and war again. A woman in a man's world, she successfully converted her skills to scholarship, at least as the Soviet Union understood the term.

In our only meeting she was condescending and confrontational, but in the Soviet Union it was often hard to know who was sincere and who was just playing the role that the situation required of them. Maybe the circumstances and timing of our meeting were sure to provoke an East-West confrontation. Maybe in less formal circumstances or at another time she'd have looked for some common ground. But I think she probably meant every word.

One thing that never occurred to me was to say to her: Why are we fighting? Aren't we both on the same side? For, like her, at that time I was a communist party member. All I can say is that it didn't feel as if we were on the same side. Her communism wasn't mine, and I didn't want to pretend it was.

As for the questions on my list, I had to wait another ten years. In April 1982, the country was on the edge of change. Most of the top party leaders were near the end of their biological lifespans. Leonid Brezhnev was 75 and obviously ill. He died before the end of the year. The Politburo voted twice for continuity, appointing first Yurii Andropov (who died in 1984), then Konstantin Chernenko (who died in 1985).

At last the Politburo bowed to the inevitable, turning to the next generation in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev. After several years of attempted reforms, Gorbachev surrendered the party's monopoly of power. It turned out there was nothing else to the pillars holding up the temple, which collapsed. In 1992 the secret archives were opened, and I found my answers (the result was another book).

In 1982 the spring weather was beautiful. During my time in Moscow I walked around with a camera in my pocket (an Olympus Xa-1 or Xa-2, I think) and I took a ton of photographs. I walked a lot around Oktyabr'skaya square, where I was staying, the roads to the city centre, and a few other places. I remember a disused monastery, a visit to friends in the suburb of Sviblovo, and a short trip out of town to the flea market in Malakhovka.

Recently I noticed that my photos were fading. I decided to scan them and to put them online as my record of Moscow towards the end of the Cold War, on the edge of unimaginable changes.

Mark Harrison : 22 Mar 2021 09:30 |  Tags: Communism History Politics Russia War |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

For VEDay75: Economic Warfare in Two World Wars

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/wp468.2020.pdf

In two world wars the Allies employed economic warfare against their principal adversaries – Germany in World War I, German and Japan in World War II. Economic warfare meant attacking the enemy not head on by a clash of military forces, but indirectly by attacking their supply chains. In World War I this meant a naval blockade of German ports and restrictions on Germany’s neutral trading partners. In World War II there was a novel dimension: bombing of the enemy’s industrial towns and ports.

What difference did economic warfare make? Its most resolute advocates saw it as a war-winning weapon, one that would avoid wasteful attrition on the battlefield. Sceptical observers saw it as a waste of lives and resources on a project that distracted from the main task, that of defeating the enemy’s armed forces on the battlefield. The truth lay somewhere in between, but where?

I’d taught this subject for twenty years, maybe more, but never written about it. Last year I wrote a short piece on economic warfare in World War II, for The Economics of the Second World War: Seventy-five Years on, edited by Stephen Broadberry and me, and published by CEPR earlier this week. I decided to write a longer paper that would wrap up the issues with others I had been thinking about and seeking to integrate into my thinking.

This was much more difficult than I anticipated. I hoped to write a short, zippy paper with a few bullet-point takeaways. That didn’t happen. My paper is a long read. Much of it is about one campaign – the Allied air offensive against Germany, the most comprehensive and controversial episode of economic warfare in two world wars. The answers to my questions depended. I knew, on the effects of economic warfare, which could be understood only after considering how the adversary’s economy and society responded to being attacked. There was no one answer to what happened next.

On the internet, “TL;DR” stands for “”Too long; didn’t read.” It’s a signal to stop droning on and cut to the finish. In that spirit I’ll paste in my conclusions, of which there are seven. If they make you want to read the paper, the full text is linked here.

This survey points to seven conclusions. (1) It was often hoped that economic warfare would act as a substitute for combat, but experience showed that this was largely an illusion. The complementarities between economic warfare and combat were much stronger.

(2) The most important effect of economic warfare was to raise the overall costs of the adversary’s war effort. This was a gradual process, one that gave the adversary ample opportunity for countermeasures.

(3) The main countermeasures were Olsonian substitution, nationalism, and the escalation of violence. Substitution and nationalism did not nullify the effects of economic warfare, but they redistributed them and postponed them. Heightened violence aimed to pre-empt the effects of economic warfare by breaking out. Whichever of the three routes was taken, the one thing that was certain was that economic warfare found its logic only in protracted wars of resources.

(4) Wars of resources evoked vast productive efforts, and it was easy to conclude from this that the objective of economic warfare should be to attack production. The example of the Allied air war against the German economy in World War II suggests that the most effective way to prevent production from taking place was not to attack production facilities directly, but to demolish the transport system, which provided the means of supply-chain cooperation and coordination. This had to be done at many points at once, which could not be done without air superiority. Thus, success in economic warfare relied on success in combat – another aspect of their complementarity.

(5) Wars of resources were also wars of attrition. Economic warfare was sometimes seen as a way to avoid the attrition of armed forces. Instead, economic warfare turned out to be a phase of the war of attrition. This too emphasizes the complementarity between economic warfare and combat, because the resources available to each side for attrition in deployment and combat were limited to those that survived the attrition arising from the other side’s economic warfare. From another perspective it suggests that economic warfare and combat were not so much separable elements of warfare as neighbouring bands on the continuum of warlike activities.

(6) The complementarity of economic warfare and combat is further illustrated by cases in which choosing one over the other carried high costs. It was inefficient to engage in combat without considering the possibility of striking at the enemy’s supply chain, as the Soviet Union did in 1941. It was reckless to embark on economic warfare without the readiness to engage in combat, as the United States did in 1940; this encouraged the adversary to respond by aggression.

(7) While the age of mass warfare is hopefully over, similar lessons may apply to the peacetime use of trade sanctions to resolve disputes. When an economy is sanctioned, losses to civilians are inevitable. A country under siege can exploit Olsonian substitution and nationalism to mitigate the effects. If sanctions raise the cost of resistance by enough, violence may become an attractive option. If trade sanctions heighten the risks of militarized conflict, strong defences or credible deterrents are required to manage them.

Mark Harrison : 07 May 2020 06:41 |  Tags: Blockade Bombing Economics War |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dazed and Confused in the Cold War

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/papers/there_was_a_front_ver_6.pdf

For a few months in the 1970s I was a graduate student in Moscow. Capitalism and communism were fighting the Cold War. What was it like? I was dazed and confused. Now I've written a short memoir of that time. It covers cultural exchange, learning Russian, travelling to Russia, making wonderful friends, learning about informers and surveillance, feeling my way through Soviet academia and economic thought, being misunderstood, trust and mistrust, and travelling for work and for leisure, including my epic visit to a collective farm near Voronezh. I include a few photos from the time. Also, I reflect on what we know now about the Soviet system that I didn’t know then.

My memoir is called: “There was a front, but damned if we knew where.” To explain why, here is an excerpt from towards the end, a section that describes my homecoming. If you want to read more, the full version is here.

It was time to leave. I booked a train ticket on the direct service from Moscow to London, three days and two nights via Warsaw and East Berlin, including a Channel crossing by boat from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. Out of interest, I added on a 24-hour layover in Warsaw – my only visit to another East European country under communism.

I was sad to leave but I was also tired and ready. It was a long journey and I would sit the whole way in a shared compartment. There was some small talk in the carriage, but the countryside was flat and monotonous, and the hours of daylight were few.

At the Soviet border, the whole train was raised off the track while the broad-gauge bogeys were removed and replaced by standard-gauge for the remainder of the journey. While this was done the carriages were inspected inside and out, under and over, by the Soviet border troops, looking for contraband manuscripts and Soviet citizens who for any reason did not want to live out the rest of their lives in the socialist paradise.

In Warsaw, I wandered around the old city, meticulously restored after the war. The only language I had in common with most Poles was Russian, which did little for friendship.

Berlin was shocking. The train rolled through the divided city in the middle of the night. I blinked at the sudden passage from the darkened East to the bright lights of West Berlin. We did not stop, and the lights went out again after a few minutes because West Berlin was an island, and the train rolled back over into the Eastern zone.

As with the journey out, it was better to travel than to arrive. Adjusting to home life was hard. It was hard for me and I’m sure I did not make it easy for others. Time had not stood still while I was away. My friends and loved ones had as much stored up to tell me as I had to tell them. The Britain to which I returned was not the normal country of the anecdote; it was preoccupied with its own class struggle. Many of my friends were warriors for social justice, and I aspired to be one too. To some the Soviet Union was a distraction; to others, it was “my enemy’s enemy” and therefore perhaps a friend. Their appetite for my stories was limited.

For weeks I dreamed about Moscow night after night. In my dreams Moscow was dark, confusing, and utterly strange; I was lost in it and could not find my way back. I saved myself by pouring everything into finishing my dissertation. Looking back, I am reminded of the words that Joan Littlewood put in the mouths of the soldiers returning from the Great War:

And when they ask us,
How dangerous it was,
Oh, we'll never tell them,
No, we'll never tell them:
We spent our pay in some café,
And fought wild women night and day,
’Twas the cushiest job
We ever had.

And when they ask us,
And they're certainly going to ask us,
The reason why we didn't win
The Croix de Guerre,
Oh, we'll never tell them,
No, we'll never tell them
There was a front,
But damned if we knew where.

The Cold War was not the Great War, and we were not soldiers. In Moscow no rockets flew nor bullets winged. The hazards we faced were only moral. Still, I had been to the other side, and I had returned, and I couldn’t explain it, even to myself. It changed my life. I spent the decades from then to now trying to understand where I had been and to come to terms with it. I am still trying. The only ones to whom I had nothing to explain were the former comrades-in-arms who had been there too, whose lives were also changed, just as surely as mine. So, I was not alone.

Mark Harrison : 28 Apr 2020 13:52 |  Tags: Communism History Politics Russia |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

COVID–19: When This Lousy War is Over

Writing about web page https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/coronavirus-what-happens-war-won-21852580

Nigel Nelson, political editor of the Sunday Mirror, was kind enough to quote me at the end of his article Coronavirus: What happens when war is won as UK stands on crossroads as in 1945, in this morning’s paper. Here’s the notes I sent him last week.

Do you think Boris Johnson will come out of this crisis as the hero of it or could he go the same way as his great hero Winston Churchill?

World War II fuelled a desire for change in British society, with more social provision for those people who faced the greatest risks that no one could control – sickness, old age, and unemployment. Churchill was (and for many still is) the hero of the war, but the voters still tossed him out afterwards because he did not sufficiently identify with the turn to a welfare state. Attlee and the Labour Party went that way and took the voters with them.

In a time of national crisis, it’s natural that people rally round the leader, and the polls suggest a degree of rallying around Boris Johnson right now. That may not last. Whether Boris keeps hold of the halo afterwards depends on whether he “gets” the swing of the popular mood and is able to go with it.

How are British values changing (clearly we put a new value on the worth of NHS staff and key workers who have been undervalued for so long)?

Our society is going through a severe shock. Lots of things we took for granted have suddenly been taken away: jobs, schools, incomes, easy shopping, foreign holidays, contact with friends and family. There is risk to life – of our parents and friends. There is fear of a rather cruel way to die. It’s natural to suppose that we will come out of this with a much greater desire for security against these risks. We will look to the government to “do something” to give us that extra security, so we will have greater expectations of the government than before.

There were signs of this before the coronavirus struck. The new Johnson government already did not look like an old-style Conservative free-market austerity administration. Whoever won the election was going to pay more attention to public services, infrastructure, and levelling up. These trends will be reinforced by the coronavirus emergency.

If that is correct, then we should expect that key workers and care workers will be paid more, social security will become more generous, and public services like the NHS will be allowed to build a margin of spare capacity in order to be able to respond better to emergencies. So cost-cutting and “efficiency gains” will go out of fashion. Meanwhile the taxpayers will be under much greater pressure to pay for all this – as well as for servicing our much larger public debt. Putting it all together, there will also be some levelling of inequalities.

Once we come through the crisis, not everything will go right. Mistakes will be made, and some measures will be taken too far. Some people will find they enjoy bossing others around in the name of the community, and they will find ingenious ways of defending their authority. Efficiency will be neglected in public services, even when it would benefit everyone. This also happened after World War II. Britain did not have to have food rationing for nine years after the war, but that’s what happened.

And more broadly will our attitudes to what is important be permanently changed by what we've been through in the way they were after the war?

The crisis has already shown that most people are thoughtful and sensible, they balance self-interest with concern for others, and they put a high value on community. Three quarters of a million of them have already volunteered to help with the NHS and care support. There are other people who might try to be like that, but they are also thoughtless or behave in ways that are divisive. A tiny minority are selfish and take advantage of the situation to exploit others. This won’t change.

What seems likely is that for most people community will feel a lot more real than before. We don’t have a foreign enemy, but we do have a common cause. Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, none of us can be excused. Those who serve in health care are in deadly danger. To help protect them, others stay home. The sacrifices may not be equal, but everyone contributes something. We all depend on each other for survival. These are important lessons, and they could last for a generation.

After that, it will probably be time for another change of direction.

Mark Harrison : 12 Apr 2020 10:28 |  Tags: Coronavirus Politics War |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Alexander Nove Award goes to . . .

Writing about web page http://basees.org/news/2020/2/4/the-alexander-nove-award-for-distinguished-scholarship-for-the-industrialisation-of-soviet-russianbsp-vol1-7

Tonight I hoped to be in Cambridge for the annual conference dinner of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. My plan was to pick up a prize -- the Alexander Nove Award for Distinguished Scholarship, which was to be presented to my three co-authors and me. Well, something that began quietly last December in Wuhan, China, and went on to creep around the world has got in the way. Like miillions, maybe billions of others I'm staying home. I'm not complaining: this is the least of anyone's problems. I'll just quietly raise a glass to my co-authors.

To explain the award, here's the prize committee's citation:

BASEES is delighted to announce that the Alexander Nove Award for Distinguished Scholarship goes to the seven-volume economic history of Russia The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, which has come to the end with the publication of the seventh and final volume: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937-1939 (Palgrave, 2018). The pivotal role in the series has been played by R. W. (Bob) Davies (b. 1925), a mighty figure in Soviet (Russian) and East European Studies, and a founding member of this association, serving on the precursor NASEES committee from 1963-1977. The final volume of the series, is co-authored by Mark Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, & Stephen G Wheatcroft and Stephen Wheatcroft also co-authored volume 5.

The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia was a continuation of E. H. Carr’s project to write a history of the Bolshevik revolution. Between 1950 and 1969 Carr published 14 volumes of his History of Soviet Russia, covering the period from 1917 to 1929. To help with the final set of volumes, entitled Foundations of a Planned Economy, he recruited a co-author, the young economist R. W. Davies of the University of Birmingham. When he got to 1929, Carr stepped back from his project citing the increasing secrecy of the Soviet regime in the 1930s and the lack of primary documentation as his reason. Where Carr stopped, Davies took up the work. The seven volumes of his own series, entitled The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, cover the period from 1929 to 1939. In what must be a record, the project was funded continuously by the Economic and Social Research Council from 1973 to 2010.

While the project continued, the world changed. The Soviet Union opened up, and then collapsed. Its archives became available to the world, solving the obstacle that had defeated Carr. Davies became a leading figure among many who made the Soviet state the best documented authoritarian regime of modern times. The topics embraced by the seven volumes include forced industrialisation and collectivisation, famine, the emergence of the command system and how it worked, the limited scope for reforms, mass killings and forced labour, the path of consumption and living standards, the militarisation of the economy and war preparations, and the character of Soviet economic growth and development.

In case you're not bored yet, here are some links to further detail:

• For students, an open-access preprint of Volume 7's concluding chapter, The Soviet economy: the late 1930s in historical perspective.
• For non-specialists, a summary in the Spring 2019 issue of the CAGE Advantage magazine (starting on page 7) under the title Mobilisation, terror, and rearmament: The Soviet economy on the eve of World War II.
• For buyers, the Palgrave Macmillan page for Volume 7.

Finally who was Alexander Nove -- or Alec, as everyone called him and as he called himself?

Mark Harrison : 04 Apr 2020 08:00 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The War on COVID–19: Lessons from Wartime

Writing about web page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c8nq32jw8r1t/boris-johnson

Many people have likened the war on COVID-19 to World War II. Those I've noted range from US Senators Bernie Sanders and Lindsey Graham to the head of Britain's Office of Budget Responsibility Robert Chote. Our own Boris Johnson says it is as if we have a wartime government.

I have some sympathy with this view. The time we are going through will be seen as an historical watershed, like the two world wars. The reason is that it is changing the way of life of every family worldwide, in a way quite unlike 9/11 or a financial panic. Moreover its effect will be persistent, at least for several years. Our world after COVID-19 will be more nervous, more prepared, and less globalized and interlinked for some time to come.

When historical novels are written about our time, every author will have choose the setting: before, during, or after the coronovirus epidemic?

Yesterday I was interviewed on this subject for a radio programme. Understandably, I think, the interview was spiked in favour of more practical and pressing concerns. Beforehand I made some notes, based on questions I was given. Below, I'll share my notes.

Was there any similarity in the challenges facing governments now and at the start of World War 2?

There are several similarities, although not a perfect fit. As in WW2, we face a clear enemy: a disease.

It is a surprise attack – even more than in WW2. In 1941 the Soviet Union suffered a surprise attack by Germany and the USA suffered a surprise attack by Japan, but still most people had seen a war building since the 1930s, so just about all governments had incorporated war into their thinking. This is not the case today: we are at a standing start.

Resistance requires resources to be mobilized urgently into the medical sector: people, equipment, power supplies and provisions.

At the same time the enemy is striking at our supply chains – it attacks economic cooperation and the division of labour. It is forcing us into isolation and self-sufficiency and isolated, self-sufficient people are very unproductive, so our economic capacity is falling. This is what bombing and invasion did in WW2, but the coronavirus is doing it much more efficiently. It is already among us and it is unseen.

There is fear and anxiety. Before WW2 many people feared a bombing apocalypse, which did not actually happen until 1945. A similar fear is present today.

Were there bailouts and nationalisations of businesses and industries disrupted by WW2? What about coronavirus?

World War II brought an explosion of demand. Rather than people losing their jobs, they were called up to serve in the military or in war production. Schools, shops, and pubs did not close but their staff of working or fighting age did. The war economy still required films and entertainment. As for business, most businesses repurposed their production for the war effort. The government paid for the building or converting of factories to war production. There was very little nationalisation. There were very limited bailouts (money for nothing) because the government was primarily spending money to pay people to do something else.

It is true that some small businesses lost out, but most people understood the needs of the war and complaints were muted. I have a letter of 1942 from the wholesale cocoa distributors to the London Chamber of Commerce. They complain that the government has taken over the distribution of chocolate. They no longer have a business. Milk wholesalers have been compensated: what about us? Will we not be needed again after the war?

So some suffered financially. Wealthy people took a hit. But everyone had a role. The war killed, injured, and bereaved millions, but no one was cast into destitution because everyone had a role and could find a job. Old people (fewer than now) benefited from a widening social safety net. After the war, British society was a lot more equal than before.

How did governments manage shortages and supply chain disruptions?

The main tools were licensing and rationing. These converted our market economy into a command economy. There were still markets and money and prices, but for the most part you could not spend money on anything without a government license. The most important exception was bread: through the war you could always buy as much bread as you wanted, so no one went undernourished. This made Britain different from many other countries at war.

But to buy steel or components, a business needed a license. To import materials, you needed a license. To borrow for investment, you needed a licence. You got this licence only if you were on the government’s priority list: important for the war effort. In this way the government could protect the essential industries and the inessential parts of the economy withered.

The problem was inflation – not price inflation, but priority inflation. At first, a few things were seen as crucial – priority A1. As the economy became more and more stretched many other things competed for top priority. When everything was top priority, the priority system stopped working, and government committees had to set limits even on top priorities. You’d think you could never have enough soldiers in a war, but in 1942 the government had to cap the armed forces at 5 million in order to keep enough workers in the war factories and other essential industries.

How was production of munitions (then, medical equipment now) ramped up, and how were people recruited for the war effort (then, for intensive care units etc. now)?

I read today that the government is hoping to find British manufacturers of a basic ventilator – 30,000 in two weeks. Here the standing start is important. For years before WW2, the governments of all the major powers were ordering new weapon designs and thinking about the industrial capacities that the next war would require. Nearly all the major aircraft types of WW2 were designed before the war broke out. Here we are in the middle of our war with a blank sheet of paper.

War preparations made it possible to boost war production to peak levels within one or two years of the outbreak. One or two years, not two weeks.

Market economies do have great flexibility. If the government throws enough money at it, I am absolutely sure that something will be achieved, although not necessarily on the timescale that is demanded, because of our unpreparedness.

My guess is that ECMO machines will be the tip of the iceberg. We have a £2 trillion economy. If we pay the top rate for ventilators, which is £50k, and buy 100,000, they will cost us only a fraction of a percent of national income. BUT in addition to producing them, you have to build the new infrastructure.

Again, I read that a bed in intensive care costs £15k a day – that’s staffing, maintenance, paying off the building. Keeping 100,000 of these beds open for a year would be a big slice of Britains’s GDP, maybe a quarter. And we are a rich country. No doubt we could do it for less by makeshift building and cutting back on training and standards.

And at the same time, we will be having a big recession: output might fall by 10, 20, or 30 percent, so the burden could be even greater. That’s more like Russia in 1942 than Britain or America.

Uncertainty: Did governments have to make things up on the fly?

To some extent. But most governments had spent a long time thinking about how the next war would go, and this helped. It was only 20 years from WW1 and every government had tried to learn the lessons. WW1 was much more improvised than World War II. In WW1 it took years to learn how to get out of the trenches and move on the battlefield. It took years to learn about the public-private partnership and the public finance necessary to ramp up production. So, in WW2 governments generally made fewer mistakes than in WW1.

That’s also probably why Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are having a better time today. They had the experience of SARS in 2003, and they were determined to learn from it.

What were long term effects on how the government ran the economy? And on society?

I think we are going to see a lot more compulsion in a short time. Certainly, compulsion in terms of quarantine. Everyone needs to understand there’s no such thing as a public health measure that doesn’t end up infringing on someone’s rights. The clue is in the name: public, not private health.

Compulsion in rationing basic supplies? Maybe. But my instinct is that we will soon all be making do with less.

Compulsion in service? Medical service, like military service in a war, is going to be dangerous. I hope there may soon be a pool of young, willing volunteers who have survived exposure and been immunized by it.

The persistence of these regulatory changes may be for years after, but not for decades after. The war gave Britain a much larger state and food rationing and food subsidies lasted for years after. The war essentially created the basic elements of a national health service, formalized after the war. But the war did not create nationalized industries. It was postwar socialism, not the war, that led to nationalization. If you look at the share of the state in economic activity in neutral Sweden over the long run, it follows a similar course as in Britain. There were deeper forces at work than the war. The war just brought things a forward a bit.

The same may be happening now. Before we were struck by the plague, things were already changing. Austerity was already ending, the government was already set to throw money at the police, the health service, infrastructure and the regions. That had already begun; maybe now it will be reinforced. There’s visible pressure in society for government to do the right thing and be accountable for it.

I would like to live in a free society and in most settings, it seems to me, free markets will do the best job. But in the present setting I would support a little more of the clarity that comes from compulsory rules. How do I reconcile these things? You can think about compulsion in two ways. One is the Chinese way: do as the unelected party tells you or fear the consequences. But there is also a British way, which is different: when the elected government tells you it’s your turn to do the right thing. It’s your turn to serve in a hospital, or stay at home, or go out to buy the goods you need. There’s a line: don’t step out of it.

That’s how it worked in Britain in WW2. There were lots of rules, which most people accepted, and the few that didn’t were vigorously pursued, with the support of most people. It did continue for too long after the war; that’s something we should aim to avoid.

Mark Harrison : 18 Mar 2020 17:53 |  Tags: Coronavirus Economics Politics War |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem