The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2107975
AutoresWilliam G Rosenberg (University of Michigan, autor de correspondencia)
Año1994
Volumen36
Número2
Páginas356-396
Fecha de publicación1994-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417500019083
OpenAlexW2125668453
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas37

If the market has emerged in current Soviet and Western discourse as a notional Rosetta stone capable of deciphering the coded blueprints of post-Soviet reconstruction, its apparent destruction by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and subsequent resurrection under the New Economic Policy (NEP) is often seen as a similarly defining element of the whole early Soviet project. As many would have it, the party's initial urge to control entirely the whole complex of economic exchange relations firmly situates Soviet totalitarianism in a Leninist political economy. The brutal repression of free traders and the mindless nationalization of production clearly evidences the calamitous utopianism of Bolshevik class-based ideology, while the reemergence after 1921 of limited market mechanisms, even if only a reluctant concession to political weakness and economic devastation, opened alternative paths to a non-Stalinist Soviet modernity involving elements of a civil social order. In a phrase, reified conceptions of the market broadly shape historical constructions of a unique and problematic Soviet past, just as they purportedly demonstrate what is peculiar about the post-Soviet present and necessary for the future

Communism · Economic system · Economics · Economy · Element (criminal law) · Ideology · Modernity · Notional amount · Order (exchange) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition · Russia and Soviet political economy