Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 30 – Most people see
a market economy and totalitarianism as antithetical phenomena and believe that
where one exists, the other cannot. But in fact, even in the darkest days of
Stalin’s totalitarian system, a kind of market economy existed albeit not in
its own name; and a similar arrangement now exists in Putin’s Russia, Dimitry
Savvin says.
The editor of the Riga-based
conservative Russian portal Harbin points to the case of Nikolay
Pavlenko who created a private construction firm which operated in the USSR
between 1948 and 1952, a case described by Russian historian Oleg Khlevnyuk in
a 2023 Moscow book, The Corporation of Imposters (harbin.lv/algoritm-rynochnogo-pererozhdeniya).
What Pavlenko did was criminal
“only” in the official Soviet understanding, Savvin says. In fact, what he did
was to “establish a private construction enterprise masked as a military
institution and over the course of several years successfully conduct
commercial activity” in a totalitarian state.
As “phantasmagorical” as that may
seem, he continues, “in essence, the mechanisms of coexistence with a
totalitarian state and a private commercial enterprise which Pavlenko developed
are in many respects typical” and were later employed “not only in the Soviet
Union” but also in North Korea and since the 1990s by entrepreneurs in Russia.
Shortly after the German invasion of
the USSR in 1941, Pavlenko, “suddenly discovered” that if one had the write papers
and stamps, one could operate as a kind of covert free market player. He ran
one such business during the war and established a second in 1948, when he was
routinely sought out by officials because of his good and speedy work.
Eventually the party leadership
caught up with him; and in 1952, hie operation was shut down and he was shot.
But his operation, which was certainly far from unique, dis played four
characteristics that help to explain why such things reemerged in some other
communist countries, the post-Soviet USSR, and especially in Putin’s time.
First of all, Pavlenko’s organization
was not political but commercial in the purest sense. Second, his organization
mimicked state institutions; third, he did nothing criminal except for
operating as a private firm in a system that denied that possibility; and
fourth, if the leadership hadn’t been obsessed with defending socialism, what
he did might have continued.
“We see that little islands of
market arrangements are natural for man and humanity” and emerge in communist
and other totalitarian states, Savvin says, a pattern that requires us to
recognize that with the proper masking, free market phenomena can and will
exist under totalitarianism rather than being totally excluded by it.
Savvin’s observation carries with it
another implication that he doesn’t discuss but that is critical for those who
want to overcome totalitarianism. In the 1990s, many Western leaders believed
that if they got the economy right in the Russian Federation, totalitarianism
would be precluded. But in fact that was not true.
Had such leaders focused more on
democratic procedures and laws and worried somewhat less about the economy
which they expected would do all the heavy lifting Russians and the world might
have been spared the rise of the new totalitarianism under Vladimir Putin now.
