Chapter 7 Russia in the World System: Geography or History?

The double collapse of Sovietism as a social project distinct from capitalism and of the USSR (now Russia) as a State calls into question all the theories that have been put forward both regarding the capitalism/socialism conflict and the analysis of the positions and functions of the different countries and regions in the world system.

In the tradition of historical Marxism, and particularly in its predominant version in the former USSR, the only great problem of the contemporary world recognized as worthy of scientific treatment was that of the passage of capitalism to socialism. As from Lenin a theory of revolution and socialist construction was gradually formulated, of which I will summarise the theses in the following terms:

(i) capitalism must finally be overturned throughout the world through the class struggle conducted by the proletariat;

(ii) the socialist revolution has started in certain countries (Russia, later China) rather than in others because the former constituted, for various reasons, the ‘‘weak links” in the chain of world capitalism;

(iii) in those countries the construction of socialism is possible in spite of their late development;

(iv) the transition of capitalism to socialism will therefore evolve in and through the competition between the two State systems, some of which have become socialist, the others having (provisionally) remained capitalist.

In this type of analysis, history—which governs the social and political par­ticularities that constitute the different societies in the modern world (including those of the ‘‘weak links”)—plays the key role, to the point that the geography of the world system, in which the various positions and functions of these societies are determined, is entirely subordinated to history.

Geography, however, takes on another dimension in, for example, an analysis of the movement of modern history inspired by the fundamental principle of what one can call, to be brief, the current way of thinking within the ‘‘world system” approach. What happens at the level of the whole (the world system) controls the evolution of the parts that compose it. The roles played by the Russian Empire and by the USSR would therefore be explained by the evolution of the world system and this is what makes it possible to understand the collapse of the Soviet project. Just as the extremists among the historical Marxists only know the class struggle through history, there is an extremist interpretation possible of the world system approach that virtually eliminates the class struggle because it is incapable of changing the course imposed on it by the evolution of the system as a whole.

I should also mention here that theories about the specificity of Eurasia and its particular place in the world system had preceded the formulation of the world system approach by several decades. Already in the 1920s the Russian historians (Nikolaj Trubetzkoy and others) had put forward such proposals, which were then forgotten by official Soviet conformism, but they were resuscitated in recent years. The theses developed in an article by Andrei Foursov in Review (of the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton) recalls the theory of the Eurasian specificity in certain aspects, distinguishing it from others. I would be in favour of a synthesis of the two types of analysis, particularly as concerns the Russian-Soviet case, having in fact already defended such an approach, in more general terms, which I believe to be enriching for Marxism (Amin 1992a, b).

The world system between the years 1000-1500, was clearly composed of the three main blocs of advanced societies (China, India, the Middle East), to which can be added a fourth, Europe, whose development was extremely rapid.

It seems to me impossible to give a convincing picture of the birth of capitalism without taking into consideration at the same time the two sets of questions concerning (i) the dynamics of the local transformations in response to the chal­lenges confronted by their societies, particularly the dynamics of social struggles; and (ii), the articulation of these dynamics in the evolution of the ancient world system seen as a whole, in particular the transformation of the roles of the different regions that compose it (and therefore what concerns us directly here, the functions of the Eurasian region).

If we are to take the global viewpoint into consideration and thus relativise the regional realities, we must recognize that the great majority of the civilised pop­ulation of the ancient world was concentrated, until very late, in the two Asian blocs (China and India).

Moreover, what is striking is the regularity of growth of these two blocs, whose population of some 50 million inhabitants grew, every two centuries before the Christian era, to respectively 330 and 200 million in 1800 and 450 and 300 million in 1850. These extraordinary increases compare with the stagnation of the Middle East, precisely from the Hellenistic period. The population of the latter probably attained its maximum—50 million—at this time and then declined almost regu­larly, stabilising at around 35 million on the eve of the industrial revolution and European penetration (it should be recalled that the population of Egypt, which had been from 10 to 14 million inhabitants at certain epochs of the pharaonic age fell to 2 million in 1800 and that the decline of Mesopotamia and Syria was of the same order).

It is then easy to understand that Europe, when it became aware of itself, became obsessed with the idea of entering into relationships, if not conquering, this fabulous Orient. Until late in the eighteenth century the Chinese Empire was, for the Europeans, the supreme point of reference, the society that was the most civilised, the best administered, with its technologies that were the finest and most effective (Etiemble 1972). Its power was such that it was only as from the end of the nineteenth century that anyone dared to attack it. In contrast, India, which was more fragile, had already been conquered and its colonisation played a decisive role in the British progress. Fascination with the Far East was the main impulse of the European initiatives. However the discovery and then the conquest of the Americas absorbed European energies for three centuries. The function of Eurasia must be seen in this perspective.

The Middle East, which I consider the region that was the heir of Hellenism (a synthesis of five cultures: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria-Phoenicia, Greece-Anatolia, Iran) constituted the third pole of advanced civilisation.

The intense trade between these three poles thus affected the dynamic of the ancient world. These ‘‘silk routes”, as they are called, crossed the southern region of Eurasia, central Asia, from the Caspian Sea to China, to the south of the Kazakh steppe, from Tian Shan and from Mongolia (Amin 1991).

Nevertheless the relative stagnation of the Middle East pole (for reasons that are not relevant to this study) ended in a gradual decline of its foreign trade. There were at least two important consequences. The first was that Europe became aware, as from the Crusades, that the Middle East was not a rich region to conquer for itself, but the zone to be crossed or bypassed to reach the really interesting regions of Asia.

Europe was, as we have already said, marginal until towards the year 1000. Like Africa—which remained so after the year 1000—it was a region in which the people were not really settled, or constituted in tributary state societies. But this poor periphery of the ancient system suddenly took off, within a particular structure that combined a peripheral feudal tributary form (the fragmentation of powers) and a European universalism of Roman Christianity. During its progress which was to conclude by becoming the centre of the capitalist and industrial world as from the nineteenth century, it is possible to distinguish successive periods which, in turn, define the roles that Eurasia was to play in the accelerated dynamism of the system.

The Crusades (1100-1250) were the first stage in this rapid evolution. Western (Frankish) Europe then sought to break the monopoly of the Middle East, the obligatory (and expensive) passage for its relationships with eastern Asia. This monopoly was in fact shared between Orthodox Christian Byzantium and the Islamic Arab-Persian Caliphate. The Crusades were directed against both these two adversaries and not only the Muslim infidel, as is so often said. However, finally expelled from the region, the Europeans tried other ways of overcoming this obstacle.

The Crusades accelerated the decline of the Middle East, reinforcing still fur­ther the lack of interest of the Chinese in the West. In fact, the Crusades facilitated the ‘turkisation’ of the Middle East: the increased transfer of powers to Turcoman military tribes which were called in for that purpose and hence they prepared the simultaneous destruction of Byzantium and the Caliphate, which were succeeded, from 1450-1500 by the Ottoman Empire.

Furthermore the Crusades enriched the Italian towns, giving them the monopoly over the navigation in the Mediterranean and prepared their active role in seeking ways to bypass the Middle East.

Eurasia entered into history at that time, between 1250 and 1500, that is, during the course of the second phase of this history. Its entry marginalised the ancient silk routes that linked the Middle East to China and to India by the southern part of central Asia, to the benefit of a direct Europe-China liaison, passing further to the north, through the Eurasia of the Genghis Khan Empire (this was exactly the route of Marco Polo). In turn, it opened the secular struggle for the control of Eurasia between the Russians of the forest and the Turko-Mongols of the steppes. The formation of the Muscovite state, its liberation from the Mongol yoke, then its increased expansion through Siberia, its military conquest of the southern steppes up to the Black, Caspian and Aral Seas and the Caucasus mountain range, and finally southern central Asia itself and Transcaucasia: such were the stages of this impressive advance.

This history bequeathed Eurasia with some special characteristics which strongly differentiated it from the European formations as well as those of China. It did not, as is said rather superficially, become (or remain) ‘half-Asian’ (the expression obviously being in a pejorative sense). In fact it is too far away from the Chinese model to be so described. But nor did it become constituted into a densely populated, homogenous state as gradually happened in Europe, with its absolute monarchies and then with its modern bourgeois nation states. The occupation of such a large area weakened such characteristics, in spite of the desire of St. Petersburg, as from 1700, to imitate European absolutism. Also, in the Russian Empire the relationship between the Russians and the Turko-Mongol peoples of the steppes was not the same as that developed by the Europeans in their colonisation abroad. The former did not ‘exploit’ the work of the latter, as the Europeans did in their colonies; it was a political power (Russian) that controlled the spaces occupied by both peoples. This was, in a way, perpetuated in the Soviet Union, where the Russians dominated in political and cultural terms but did not economically exploit the others (on the contrary, the flow of wealth went from Russia to central Asia). It was the popularisation by fashionable media that con­fused these profoundly different systems by superficially terming them both Empires (Amin, Le defi de la mondialisation).

Eurasia did not however play the role of a passageway linking Europe to China except for a short period, between 1250 and 1500, moreover at a stage when Europe did not yet have sufficient absorption capacity to bestow on the transit role of Eurasia the financial brilliance that the maritime commerce had later on. From 1500, in fact, the Atlantic/Indian Ocean route replaced the long continental crossing. And it was not only a geographical substitution. On their westward way the Europeans ‘discovered’ America, conquered it and transformed it into a periphery of their budding capitalism, a destiny that Eurasia had escaped and which it would not be possible to impose upon it. At the same time the Europeans had also learnt how to colonise Asian countries (transforming them into periph­eries of world capitalism), starting with India, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, then Africa and the Middle East, which was done in different ways from those invented by the Russian expansion into Asia.

The maritime route ‘re-marginalised’ Eurasia as from 1500 until 1900 and even after that. The Russians responded to the challenge in an original, and in many aspects, a brilliant way. Foursov remarked that in 1517, the monk Philopheus had proclaimed Moscow to be the third Rome. This observation is worth bearing in mind because, as it was made so shortly after the maritime route had been opened, it gave Russia an alternative perspective, an exclusive role in history. There were some, like Nikolai Berdyaev, for example, who believed that Soviet communism pursued this aim of the Messianic role for Russia in the advancing the progress of all humanity.

Russia therefore built itself up from then on, made an effective synthesis of retreating into itself and opening to the West. The former task, that of a self­centred construction, was therefore in complete opposition to the peripherisation of world capitalism. There was no equivalent to this except for the self-centred construction of the United States pursued since their independence until 1914, or even until 1941.

So there were two large spaces that organised themselves as self-centred con­tinents, obeying one sole political power. There have been no others, except for China as from 1950. Nevertheless, one cannot but note the mediocre results obtained by Russia/USSR compared with the brilliant ones of the United States. There is a conventional explanation for this which contains a lot of truth: the advantage of the United States not having a feudal heritage (an argument that I reinforce when I say that New England was not constituted as a periphery of capitalism). But it is necessary to add that, ‘isolated’ on the American continent, the United States was free from the vicissitudes of European politics and had only one adversary—Mexico—which was too weak to be anything other than a prey, half of whose territory was taken away from it. On the other hand Russia was not able to avoid the European conflicts and had to deal with rivals from western and central Europe: it was thus invaded by the armies of Napoleon, had to endure the affront of the Crimean war and was then twice more invaded, in 1914 and 1941.

This continual interference in the history of Russia and that of Europe was at least in part the result of the Russian—then Soviet—choice not to close itself up in Eurasia but to remain, or to become, as modern—that is, as European, as possible. It was the choice of the St. Petersburg Empire, symbolised by the two-headed eagle, one of whose heads looked towards the West. But it was also the choice of the USSR which infused its ideology into the traditions of the European workers’ movement. Its total rejection of Slavophil and Eurasian ideologies, which had always survived in the Russian Empire, despite its official pro-Western option, is an obvious consequence of this.

The Russian revolution does not seem to me to have constituted at all a less important phenomenon which would hardly influence the course of history, once the Soviet parenthesis was closed. I do not find any other convincing explanation for this revolution than by involving simultaneously history (the new contradic­tions introduced by capitalism) and geography (the position of Russia in the capitalist economic world).

For capitalism certainly introduced a new challenge to the whole of humanity, to the peoples of its advanced centres and to those of its backward peripheries. On this essential point, I remain completely Marxist. By this I mean that capitalism cannot continue ‘indefinitely’ as permanent accumulation and the exponential growth that it entails will end up in certain death for humanity.

Capitalism itself is ripe to be overtaken by another form of civilisation, more advanced and necessary, through the leap in peoples’ capacities of action that accumulation has enabled (and which is a parenthesis in history) and by the ethical and cultural maturation that will accompany it.

The question that the Russians posed in 1917 is neither artificial nor is it the odd product of their so-called ‘Messianic’ or the particular circumstances of their country. It is a question that is now posed to the whole of humankind.

The only questions that have now to be answered are, in my opinion, the following:

(i) why did this need to overtake capitalism so strongly manifest itself here, in Russia, and then in China, and not in the advanced capitalist centres?

(ii) why did the USSR fail to change this need into a lever of irresistible pro­gressive transformation?

In responding to the first question I would say that the geography of the world system certainly played a decisive role. The Leninist formulation of the ‘‘weak link” is, I think a first effort to explain what, in that sense, Mao generalised for the peripheries of the system in the theory of the continuous revolution by stages, starting from New Democracy. It is an explanation that takes into consideration the polarisation produced by the world expansion of capitalism, even though it does it imperfectly, as can be seen today. I would say here that the Russia who believed to be ‘‘starting the world revolution” was not a peripheral country. It had the self­centred structure of a centre, but a backward one, which explained the violence of the social conflicts that took place. I would also say that the second great revo­lution—that of China—developed in the only large country which was not well and truly ‘peripherised’ as in Latin America, the Middle East, India and South-East Asia. It had never been colonised. Instead of the well-known Chinese Marxist formula—a country that is ‘‘half-feudal, half-colonial’’—I would replace it with another which I consider to be more correct: a country ‘‘three-quarters tributary, one-quarter colonial’’, while the other peripheries are ‘‘one-quarter tributary (or feudal if you prefer) and three-quarters colonial’’!

The second question requires a response that starts by challenging the theory of the ‘‘socialist transition’’ as has been sketched above. I think that this is inexact, as concerns both the history and the geography of capitalism. It is based on an under­estimation of the (geographical) polarisation of the centres and peripheries, not recognising that it is not due to particular historical circumstances (the ‘natural’ tendency of capitalist expansion being to homogenise the world) but is the immanent result of this very expansion. It therefore does not see that the revolt of the peoples who are victims of this development, which is necessarily unequal, has to continue as long as capitalism exists. It is also based on the hypothesis that the new (socialist) mode of production does not develop within the old (capitalist) one, but beside it, in the countries having broken with capitalism. I would replace this hypothesis with the one that, in the same way that capitalism first developed within feudalism before breaking out of it, the ‘‘long transition’’ of world capitalism to world socialism is also defined by the internal conflict of all the societies in the system between the trends and forces of the reproduction of capitalistic relations and the (anti-systemic) trends and forces, whose logic has other aspirations— those, precisely, that can be defined as socialism. Although it is not the place here to develop these new theses concerning the ‘‘long transition’’, I felt it necessary to mention them as I think they explain the reasons for the failure of Soviet Russia.

We may conclude by posing the questions that can throw light on the debate concerning not only Russia but also the world system.

The Soviet failure is not due to Russia, nor to the nineteenth century, nor to—as Foursov suggests—the pre-St. Petersburg Moscovite period. For Russia, as for any other country, going back in history makes no sense. It is more a case of freeing oneself from this superficial kind of exercise and look at the future from the viewpoint of an analysis of the present and its new features compared with the past.

How to get out of capitalism and go beyond it, remains the central question for the Russians, the Chinese and all the other peoples of the world. If the thesis of the long transition that is sketched out here is accepted, the immediate step is to deal with the challenge which confronts us all: building up a multipolar world that makes possible, in the different regions that compose it, the maximum develop­ment of anti-systemic forces. This implies for the Russians and for the other peoples of Eurasia (ex USSR), not an illusory capitalist development but the reconstruction of a society capable of going beyond it. A series of problems arising from this study should consider whether the Russians or the Chinese will be able to do this in the immediate future, or whether other peoples will do it more easily.

References

Amin, Samir, 1991: ‘‘The Ancient World System versus the Modern Capitalist World System”, in: Review, 14 (Spring/Summer): 349-386 (Braudel Center).

Amin, Samir, 1992a: ‘‘Capitalisme et Systeme-monde”, in: Sociologie et Societes, 24,2 (Autumn): 181-202.

Amin, Samir, 1992b: ‘‘Le defi de la mondialisation”, in: Actuel Marx, in English, RIPE (Review of International Political Economy).

Etiemble, 1972: L’Europe chinoise (Paris: Gallimard).

Jakobson, Roman (Ed.), 1975: N. S. Trubetskoy’s Letters and Notes (Mouton: The Hague).

Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj, 1991: The Legacy of Genghis Khan and other essays on Russia’s Identity, in: Liberman, Anatoly (Ed.) (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications).

Vernadsky, George, 1961: A History of Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press).