In his later and much more influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), Rostow proposed that peoples moved from traditional society through the preconditions for take-off, to take-off, on to the drive to maturity, and finally to the age of high mass-consumption. He trumpeted that Russia, “as a great nation, well endowed by nature and history to create a modern economy and a modern society,” was in fact developing parallel to the West.91 But traditional society gave way slowly in Russia, and its take-off came only in the mid-1890s, thirty years after the United States, and its drive to maturity in the first five-year plans. Its growth was remarkable, but there was no need for alarm in the West, for its growth was built on under-consumption. Communism, which for Rostow was “a disease of the transition,” “is likely to wither in the age of high mass-consumption.”92
Most Sovietologists shared the general assumptions of modernization theory, and the most fervent adherents of the totalitarian concept made valiant attempts to preserve the T-model in the face of the challenge from the more dynamic modernization paradigm, or to reconcile the two. In a 1961 discussion, Brzezinski distinguished between the “totalitarian breakthrough” of Stalinism that destroyed the old order and created the framework for the new and the post-terror totalitarianism of the Khrushchev period.93 The latter looked much more like the corporate system described by John Armstrong (1922–2010) in his study of Ukrainian bureaucrats, managed by the “Red Executives” analyzed by David Granick (1926–1990) and Joseph Berliner (1921–2001).94 Brzezinski pointed out that Soviet ideology was no longer about revolution but the link that legitimized the rule of the party by tying it to the project of technical and economic modernization. Whereas Brzezinski argued that “indoctrination has replaced terror as the most distinctive feature of the system,” Alfred G. Meyer (1920–1998) went further: “acceptance and internalization of the central principles of the ideology have replaced both terror and frenetic indoctrination.” In what he called “spontaneous totalitarianism,” Meyer noted that “Soviet citizens have become more satisfied, loyal, and co-operative.”95 The USSR was simply a giant “company town” in which all of life is organized by the company.
The two models, however, differed fundamentally. The T-model was based on sharp differences between communist and liberal societies, while the modernization paradigm proposed a universal and shared development. For many writing in the modernization mode, the Soviet Union appeared as less aberrant than in the earlier model, a somewhat rougher alternative program of social and economic development. While some writers expected that the outcome of modernization would be democratic, more conservative authors were willing to settle for stability and order rather than representation of the popular will. For Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), a critic of liberal modernization theory, Communists were not only good at overthrowing governments but at making them. “They may not provide liberty, but they do provide authority; they do create governments that can govern.”96
By the 1960s, it was evident to observers from the Right and Left that the Soviet Union had recovered from the practice of mass terror, was unlikely to return to it, and was slowly evolving into a modern, articulated urban society sharing many features with other developed countries. In the years when modernization theory, and its kissing cousin, convergence theory, held sway, the overall impression was that the Soviet Union could become a much more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the totalitarian theorists.97 Later conservative critics would read this rejection of exceptionalism as a failure to emphasize adequately the stark differences between the West and the Soviet Bloc, and to suggest a “moral equivalence” between them. Deploying the anodyne language of social science, modernization theory seemed to some to apologize for the worst excesses of Soviet socialism and excuse the violence and forceful use of state power as a necessary externality of development. Social disorder, violence, even genocide could be explained as part of the modernization process. If Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was acceptable as a modernizer, why not Lenin or Stalin?98
Alternatives
Even though government and many scholars were deeply invested in an unmodulated condemnation of all Soviet policies and practices from the late 1940s through much of the 1960s, no single discourse ever dominated Russian/Soviet studies. A number of influential scholars—E. H. Carr (1892–1982), Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967), Theodore von Laue (1916–2000), Alec Nove (1915–1994), Moshe Lewin (1921–2010), Alexander Dallin (1924–2000), and Robert C. Tucker (1918–2010)—offered alternative pictures of the varieties of Bolshevism and possible trajectories. Edward Hallett Carr was a British diplomat, a journalist, a distinguished realist theorist of international relations, an advocate of appeasement in the 1930s, a philosopher of history, and the prolific author of a multi-volume history of the Soviet Union, 1917–29.99 Even in the 1930s, when Carr had been sympathetic to the Soviet project, what he called “the Religion of the Kilowatt and the Machine,” he was critical of Western Communists and “fellow travelers,” like the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb (1900–1976) and the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who ignored the “darker sides of the Soviet regime” and defended them “by transparent sophistry.”100 During World War II, at the moment when the Soviet army and popular endurance halted the Nazi advance, Carr “revived [his] initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning-point.” “Looking back on the 1930s,” he later wrote, “I came to feel that my preoccupation with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one’s vision of what was really happening.”101 For more than thirty years, Carr worked on his Soviet history as a story of a desperate and valiant attempt to go beyond bourgeois capitalism in a country where capitalism was weak, democracy absent, and the standard of living abysmally low. Politically, Carr was committed to democratic socialism, to a greater equality than was found in most capitalist societies. He believed in public control and planning of the economic process, and a stronger state exercising remedial and constructive functions.102 Shortly before his death, he glumly remarked to his collaborator Tamara Deutscher: “The left is foolish and the right is vicious.”103
His volume on the Bolshevik revolution appeared in 1950 and challenged the dominant émigré historiography on the October revolution as a sinister coup d’état. Carr stood between the Mensheviks, who thought that bourgeois democracy could have been built in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, who took the risk of seizing power in a country ill-prepared for “a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organization … without the long experience and training which bourgeois democracy, with all its faults, had afforded in the west.”104 Turning later to the 1920s, Carr eschewed a struggle-for-power tale for a narrative that placed the feuding Bolsheviks within the larger economic and social setting. He tied Stalin’s victories over Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin to his ability