Acknowledgments

The author thanks Susan R. Carlton, Edward F. McClennen, Walter M. Pintner, William G. Rosenberg, Peter Way, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers for many helpful criticisms and insights during the gestation of this essay.

The vigorous revival of institutionalist theories and methods among economists, political scientists, and other social scientists has prompted a broad reconsideration of how political and economic preferences are transformed into social outcomes. In much of the professional literature, this change has stimulated a shift away from behavioral and empirical methods to those that rely on interpretation of the historical evolution of policies in an organizational framework. Focusing on topics as disparate as the implementation of Keynesian economic policies in the 1930s, United States civil service reform at the turn of the twentieth century, or the evolution of property and other rights in early modern England, institutionalist studies by sociologists, political scientists, and economists have, increasingly, addressed problems by using historical narratives.¹

In this essay I make two arguments as a historian who applies institutionalist theories and methods, critically, to historical problems. I argue that the outcomes of the Russian Revolution of 1917 were more continuous with the Russian past than either revolutionary elites or some historians have been prepared to concede. Continuities were particularly evident insofar as many state organizational functions, policies, and policy outcomes were concerned. Such limiting and shaping pre-revolutionary influences as an increasing number of scholars have identified, moreover, can be seen to have emerged well before Russia's entry into World War I. If the revolution and its aftermath are narrated simply as twentieth-century political, social, or cultural history, their meaning for Russian history and for the study of social discontinuities and regime changes will elude us.

I also argue, however, that institutionalism poses considerable risks in the analysis of the relationship between policy preferences and outcomes—especially for the study of regime change on the scale that one finds in the Revolution of 1917. I argue that the most influential exponent of the institutionalist interpretation of the Russian Revolution, Theda Skocpol, failed to demonstrate the institutional or structural constraints she claimed were imposed upon the Revolution: institutionalist theoretical presuppositions were privileged over empirical findings. I refer to these difficulties collectively as “the Skocpol problem” owing to her substantial and continuing influence on the field of historical-institutional studies, especially in political sociology and comparative politics.²

The “Skocpol problem” is, in fact, two problems. First, States and Social Revolutions rests upon a poor grasp of the relevant (at the time of writing) historical literature. But, second and surprisingly, this work, in my view, rests upon a comparatively naïve understanding of institutions and of their dependence on history. More recent work by Skocpol has addressed the second deficiency to some extent, but not the first. As a result, her interpretation of mass social revolution, while regarded by some students of institutionalism as “paradigmatic” and “classic,” yields a distorted understanding of institutional survival across an era of regime change and social discontinuity such as that found in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia.⁴

These problems are part of a broad misunderstanding of the outcomes of the Russian revolution so far as the state is concerned: the post-revolutionary state was the product of many factors including industrialization policy, the structure of state organizations, World War I and its aftermath, and the mass social energies mobilized during the Revolutionary year of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War. An understanding of these phenomena within the confines of an analysis of long-term social development, selected state policies, and intrusive external events without an adequate grasp of the relevant institutional dynamics and range of historical narratives, produces a research strategy that easily falls prey to the self-serving interpretations of revolutionary actors and their political critics. I argue below that these difficulties are not unique to institutionalism and, in fact, that the recent evolution of institutionalist theory and method offers hope of a fuller understanding of what endures or fails to endure during revolutionary regime change.

Institutionalisms

Writers who explain and critique institutionalism—even when they do not refer to the foundation work of Alexis de Tocqueville⁵

The institutionalism with which Skocpol's study of revolutions is associated has deep roots in political science that were undermined by the behavioralism of the 1950s and 1960s and its incorporation of pluralist political assumptions associated with liberal states. The revival of institutionalism, partly under Skocpol's leadership, was owing not only to an increasing chorus of suspicion that aggregations of behavioral data (like the tally of votes on election day) obscured as much of the meaning of political engagement as they revealed. It was also owing to the growing conviction that social, political, and economic structures played a more decisive role in shaping community behavior than behavioralism allowed for. As one student of institutionalism puts it:

Another way to understand how institutionalists now think about institutions is to reflect on the distinction some of them make between institutions and organizations. Does it matter whether we refer to the State Duma as an institution or an organization? It depends upon which line of theory and method one follows within the disciplines of political science, sociology, and economics. To choose from among numerous, prominent examples, James G. March and Johan Olsen make little meaningful distinction, referring to “formally organized” institutions, and to “organizational factors in political life.”⁸

Economists such as Douglass C. North and Jack Knight, by contrast, insist upon a major theoretical and empirical difference between institutions and organizations.⁹

When we find people working in similar organizations with similar physical resources but with dissimilar results—for example, two similar firms producing similar products in two different countries that may chronically show quite different balance sheets—we naturally conclude that there is something operating that does not, as it were, meet the eye. For these institutionalists, it is the “institutions” that account for, or at least structure, the preferences, norms, boundaries, and cognitive characteristics which distinguish two physically similar organizations from one another.¹¹

North's assertion that institutions are analogous to the rules of the game in a competitive team sport is both more informative and more complex than it initially seems to be.¹²

For example, it denies that cultural, or normative, differences are significant after the conditions under which the individual participates in the market are fully understood. It is common to find propositions in this literature that assume that the values of participants in markets are given and constant, that property rights are well-defined, the costs of negotiating an agreement and of acquiring necessary information are low, and that the conditions under which competition for scarce resources is engaged are “perfect.” Under such conditions, neo-classicists assert, results in the marketplace will be optimally efficient, yielding the best product for the lowest price.¹⁴

The difficulty, of course, is that these assumptions are evidently unrealistic. Even casual observation of market relations confirms both that the assumed conditions are rarely found and that truly efficient outcomes are difficult to predict. This criticism parallels the one identified above in political science. That is, the preferences of political actors are no more efficiently transmitted across organizational precincts than are those of participants in markets.¹⁵

The costs of negotiating, concluding, and executing an agreement—transaction costs—are often the result of the involvement of institutions and organizations, such as monarchs, states, churches, communes, guilds, or other controllers of information and capital resources that are not principals to the agreement.¹⁶

North, together with other institutional theorists, originally attempted to bridge the gap between the stringency reflected in neo-classical assumptions and the world as we actually experience it—a world in which it is frequently costly to transact and where both knowledge and competition are far from perfect—by explaining that institutions are the phenomena that set boundaries, or limits, in social exchange. This distinction—that institutions are the evolved “rules of the game”—for a time separated “new” institutional economics from “old” (Veblen-Commons) institutional economics.¹⁸

As this explanation has been extended to additional cases and circumstances—especially within the framework of comparative and historical, or evolutionary, analyses of market and productivity development and differences—North and others have been obliged to accept that institutions create not only boundary effects but that they also affect the cognition of individuals: they change the way individuals understand themselves and the world, or marketplace. Institutions, that is, contextualize transactions in ways that it is unrealistic to assume away or to imagine as merely “given and constant.”²⁰

“History matters” is another much-quoted assertion of Douglass North and even a cursory examination of the recent institutionalist literature reveals that it has stimulated an enormous upsurge of interest in history. Why should this be so? Partly, it is owing to the fact that many institutional and organizational arrangements are evidently inexplicable as the products of purposive creation—they can only be explained by a narrative that tells “how they got that way.”²¹

If we ask where the “rules of the game” that situated peasants and lords on a Russian axis of social status in the nineteenth century came from, a rehearsal of imperial edicts and statutes, a summary of incomes and expenditures, or of demographic characteristics will not explain observed and recorded behavior reflecting status relations. This set of institutions was the result of arrangements that evolved over time in innumerable combinations of purposive action, such as legislation, as well as group and individual behavior in specific organizational contexts that may have been consciously directed at goals entirely different from social status determination or that may have had no evident purpose whatever.²³

In order to explain such institutions, the argument goes, one cannot employ only scientific principles, controlling physical characteristics, or even concepts of asymmetries of power. Nor can one safely assume away changing cultural contexts or unpredicted conjunctures. One has to tell “how they got that way.” This, however, is a more controversial position than it may at first seem. Such explanations have evoked a substantial literature in economics, sociology, and political science that, basically, argues that institutionalists choose from among available historical narratives in ways that simply validate their previously established theoretical positions.²⁴

Understanding the importance of history to institutional studies does seem to offer insight into why institutions can be difficult to change as a consequence of purposive action. When one speaks of the history of either organizations or institutions, I suggest that the most important matter for one to have resolved is where the institutions are. If one is satisfied with the interpretation of increasing numbers of institutionalists that institutions have both rule-setting and cognition effects, then in some sense institutions must be located in the actors, the participants in social intercourse, the organizational participants. Changing the “rules of the game” through an intervention of power or ideology, or reconstructing the organizations through which actors transact, will produce some results, but not necessarily all of the results hoped for and not necessarily without the unintended consequences that follow from new, unpredicted combinations of actors, organizations, and institutions. If organizations are not reconstructed and actors are not changed, but only reeducated or rehabilitated, the likelihood of institutional change with desired and predictable outcomes in the short-run seems remote.

At this point it is helpful to recognize that many organizations, and many organizational actors, during an era of apparent radical transformation, cannot be replaced, at least in the short time that mobilized mass energy is available to revolutionary elites intent upon regime chance.²⁶

Conceptually separating institutions, organizations, and actors helps one to see the difference between continuity arguments based on institutionalism and more general—but still persuasive—views, such as those advanced by Lewin.²⁸

Perspectives on the Revolution

There is a large literature on the Revolution of 1917 that simply starts its narrative in the revolutionary year. This may give the impression that the relevant energies which produced revolutionary outcomes also emerged in that year or shortly before—that is, that the emergent Soviet state and society can be explained by a narrative that begins with the October Revolution. But an attractive byproduct of the experiences of the past decade has been the reconsideration of historical teaching and writing about revolutionary Russia, both in Russia and in the West.²⁹

Kotkin is surely right in observing that analytic fashions which saw the first two generations of the post-revolutionary era almost entirely in the light of totalitarianism are excessively narrow and misleading. Moreover, Kotkin's interpretation of the revolution as a manifestation of twentieth-century modernity has been seconded by other scholars as a means of integrating revolutionary history into the mainstream of turn-of-the-century historiography.³²

William G. Rosenberg was one of the first students of the revolution to show that certain outcomes, such as the very limited success of the mixed state-capitalist market economy of the New Economic Policy (1921–1928), cannot be explained satisfactorily as consequences of 1917.³⁵

A further significant characteristic of Rosenberg's analysis is his emphasis on the ways in which the state as a collection of institutions (his term) and offices was involved in “complex sets of social processes and relations,” especially economic ones, shaped by cultural and other continuities.³⁷

Rosenberg's approach deserves emphasis here for two reasons. First, it is grounded in an extended appreciation of an additional theoretical arena for interpreting the revolution: economic anthropology; second, it addresses, as social history all too rarely does, economic structures and behaviors as such—both before and after 1917.³⁸

The Skocpol Problem and the Institutional Sources of Revolutionary Programs

Consider, now, the Skocpol problem. It is perhaps unnecessary to observe that, among students of the Russian revolution, Skocpol is one of those who have taken most seriously the challenge of setting the revolution into its Old Regime context. That she and scholars with whom she worked did so influentially—within the framework of twentieth-century intellectuality and historical institutional theory—is beyond serious question.⁴⁰

Skocpol's comparative analysis of social revolution in France, China, and Russia yields a complex definition of the phenomenon: “Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below. Social revolutions are set apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation.”⁴²

For all their comparative insight and generality, however, Skocpol's syntheses fail to account for what Braudel referred to as the “plurality of social time.”⁴⁴

Of central concern in this respect are state institutions and organizations themselves. Can Skocpol possibly be right in her assertion that, during the Russian revolution, Old Regime institutions suddenly collapsed or were decisively destroyed?⁴⁶

Let us look more closely at one specific component of the state organizations that, Skocpol claims, the Bolsheviks were forced to reconstruct “from scratch”: the super-ministerial organization called “The Council of Peoples Commissars” (Sovnarkom). What was this body and what were its historical origins? Its historian, T. H. Rigby, notes that, “Apart from its outlandish and challenging name, there seemed on the face of it little to distinguish the new “Soviet” Government from a modern “bourgeois” ministry. It consisted of a Chairman (Lenin) and fourteen other members, all but three of whom were individually responsible for specific departments of government. . . .”⁴⁸

In fact, this was an organization whose legal origins and structure must be traced to 1861 when Emperor Alexander II supplemented the roles of the even longer-lived Committee of Ministers with those of a new “Council of Ministers.”⁴⁹

The decision, made in October 1917, by Lenin and supported by his closest Bolshevik associates to continue this body was neither casual nor provisional. As Rigby observes: “ . . . the Soviet government was heir to a continental bureaucratic tradition which in Russia, no less than in France or Germany, linked decision-making with ample documentation, formal rules and secretarial support staff. In fact models for the machinery and procedures adopted by the Sovnarkom had already been provided by its predecessors in the Tsarist and Provisional Governments.”⁵⁰

Sovnarkom was the same centrist system of political and fiscal management that the Old Regime had used. Contrary to Skocpol's assertion, this was not an organization the Bolsheviks were forced to build “from scratch.” Nor was it an institutional arrangement or cluster of organizations that had emerged out of wartime exigency. It had deep roots in the Russian political and administrative past that had less to do with an emergent modernity than with the accumulation of small successes in a century-long series of trials and errors. The preservation of these centrist institutional characteristics and the organizations within which they were to be found (i.e., the commissariats and the Sovnarkom) established them as the standard for all territorially distributed systems in the Soviet Union, a point to which we return below. This institutional survival is the outcome that much of institutional theory predicts. Pervasive and broadly distributed organizational structures tend to endure and they change but slowly.⁵¹

Given the stress Skocpol places on state roles in States and Social Revolutions and elsewhere, her underinterpretation of the role of state-based organizations across the revolutionary divide is surprising. She lays great emphasis on the size, energy, and egalitarian character of post-revolutionary and, especially, Stalinist administrative bodies.⁵²

Skocpol considers the possibility that the rapidly growing state presence in the 1920s and 1930s was a consequence of the institutional momentum developed after the Great Reforms of the 1860s and rejects it.⁵⁴

In the nineteenth century the entire state apparatus developed with relentless energy. Between 1800 and 1850 the imperial population increased by roughly 67 percent; employment in the civil state bureaucracy rose 300 percent. Between 1850 and 1900, population rose by a further 85 percent; employment in the civil bureaucracy rose more than 500 percent, exceeding 380,000 men and women.⁵⁶

Skocpol concludes that the Stalinist state was much more firmly in control of a broader swath of Soviet society and territory in, say, 1935 than was the Tsarist state in, say, 1900. Undoubtedly this is true just as it is true that Stalinist civil and economic administrations were much larger than their Imperial predecessors—especially if one includes industrial management organizations.⁵⁹

Skocpol does reach back into Russian history for explanations of certain important and enduring revolutionary phenomena. She argues that, “ . . . differences in revolutionary outcomes can in significant part be attributed to the influence of differences in the sociopolitical structures and patterns of economic development of the pre-Revolutionary societies. . . . Old regime structures helped to shape specific variations in the revolutionary outcomes not merely by surviving, but because they set different limits for successful revolutionary efforts for gaining state power and for using that power once consolidated to promote national development.”⁶¹

One could object to many of these generalizations. Had peasant “collective institutions” and “political independence” actually been measurably strengthened at the turn of the century? Were peasants burdened with “heavier outsider demands”? These were and remain controversial issues among social and economic historians. It is not clear that peasant standards of living—at least considered across the whole of European Russia—were significantly worse in 1900 than in 1860 any more than it is certain that taxation levels were higher (when income is taken into account) or that the communes were stronger. Many of these are arguments that Geroid Tanquery Robinson deployed in his 1961 study, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime, upon which Skocpol seems to have drawn.⁶³

Skocpol's interpretation of the state's responsibility for these outcomes apparently rests also upon her reading of Alexander Gerschenkron.⁶⁵

Skocpol's analysis of the sources of fundamentally altered class relations after 1917 seems less an empirically based explanation of how Old Regime “structures helped to shape specific variations in revolutionary outcomes” than a traditional statement of tsarist policy failings, shaped to support her notions of destructive tensions between class structures and political systems. It shares much in common with histories that explain the onset of revolution principally in terms of the failings of the Old Regime, or that simply treat the Old Regime as a black box that, a-priori, accounts for the twentieth-century slide into chaos. As such, this institutionalist analysis fails to take account of additional structural factors that could—and, in the view of some institutional analysts, should—be included.⁶⁶

Structural Components for Strategic Economic Control

Between 1917 and the early 1920s the organizational and institutional structure that the Soviet post-revolutionary regime would finally adopt was far from clear and, during those years, institutional continuities were not as evident as they would later be. Note, nevertheless, that elite weakness in certain circumstances (such as the blundering incompetence and policy incoherence described by Gatrell, Lih, and Yaney⁶⁷

The Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) was one of the first new administrative entities to appear. But it was created in the midst of a revolutionary fog of novel entities such as hundreds of soviets, worker control organizations, and citizen and military committees. Some of these endured in one form or another and others did not. VSNKh's organizational prowess waxed and waned during the 1920s. By the end of the decade, however, it was a huge, powerful, centralized organization that was soon broken into three (and, subsequently, numerous) similarly centralized state industrial management bureaucracies during the forced industrialization of the First Five Year Plan.⁷⁰

Other organizations, not similarly dependent upon infrastructures and developing industrial technologies (although they seemed quite vigorous for months or years), ultimately disappeared or lost their organizational coherence and their long-term influence on policy and social behavior. For example, as I read Heinzen's narrative of the reemergence of the Commissariat of Agriculture, the influx of non-party specialists in the new political environment of the early 1920s stimulated a growth both in size and influence of the organization that were unprecedented in the history of Russian agricultural administration. Heinzen refers to the energy that wrought this outcome as a “politics of expertise.”⁷¹

The Bolsheviks represented themselves and the regime they were creating as sharply discontinuous with the past even though this was contradicted by both logic and the empirical data their own surveys produced. The logic came from the fact that, outside the old elites and their direct subordinates, few citizens had the training—even the literary and ciphering skills—needed to carry on the clerical and managerial roles of state service. This inevitably meant that state agencies relied to some extent on holdovers from the Old Regime.⁷⁵

Apart from the important exception of the Communist Party itself, if any of the novel creations of the revolution can be said to have produced long-lasting and significant consequences that justify claims of the revolutionaries that they were creating a New Regime within a new world, it must be VSNKh. Its impact on the national economy together with its utility to the early Stalinist era as an instrument of social and economic control must surely qualify it as an organization whose institutional structures shaped the world of the twentieth century.

The questions that remain, however, are how novel was it? And what, if anything, did VSNKh owe to Old Regime legacies as opposed to the Bolshevik vision of a new society that demanded new organizations and institutions? Did the Bolsheviks create it ‘from scratch,’ or was it a product of policies, organizational parameters, and the work of political elites that owed significant debts to the Old Regime and that, therefore, pre-dated the Revolution of 1917 and even World War I?

During the 1914–1918 war, as an increasing number of historians now agree, the state attained a new level of involvement in the national economy in the sense that state elites took steps to integrate and manage the national economy in large commercial and manufacturing blocs. The first steps, taken in the spring of 1915, were designed to be implemented by the Ministries of Ways of Communication and Trade and Industry. They focused not on the traditional concerns of a Russian government at war—manpower and finance—but on control over transport and raw materials.⁷⁸

The impulse to create these organizations was doubtless inspired by a desperate need to master a war-time crisis and, in this respect, Russia imitated Germany and other warring states. This is the explanation that Siegelbaum offers and it is plausible.⁸²

Beginning as early as the 1880s, the state either acceded to or encouraged the consolidation of increasingly large firms into syndicates and trusts for the main purpose of manipulating markets.⁸³

It seems indisputable that the existence of pre-war trusts mattered when it came to creating the administrative foundations for a centralized plan apparatus. On the one hand, tsarist era glavki served as the administrative foundation for state supply-demand coordination in early post-Revolutionary days, so much so that the early glavki were sometimes seen by VSNKh as competitors for managerial control of large manufacturing.⁸⁶

In her study of the transfer of economic organizations across the divide, Malle describes the claim by a senior Bolshevik official, Iu. Larin, that he arbitrarily and personally authorized the creation of glavki as a source of “the epic distortion of post-revolutionary records.”⁸⁸

Even without considering the Russian state's special relationship to the national economy, any effort to characterize the origins of the Soviet centralized system of economic control and its associated administrative apparatus raises a critical question: why did the Bolsheviks, whose political values were shaped by an ideology that depicted the state, its officials, and its organizations as tools of coercion and exploitation, choose to employ a strategy of development that required a strong-state foundation?

The increasingly common, but hardly novel, explanation, as we have seen, is that Bolsheviks were pursuing initiatives that combined socialist ideology and wartime exigencies. This “technocratic response” to World War I (in the phrase employed some years ago by Alchon⁹¹

I argue that the “state” with which the Bolsheviks were working was largely the organizational and institutional apparatus that was already in existence before 1914. Associated with that apparatus were institutional sources that gave substance and continuity both to tsarist and Soviet wartime mobilization strategies. Without these, the fate of the wartime mobilization strategy would presumably have been the same in Russia as it was in Germany or Great Britain—the return to peacetime, more decentralized modes of economic operation, and the emergence of post-war political issues that eventually undermined public support for mobilization. This is the outcome that, radicalized, the proponents of the policies of what came to be known as War Communism (1917–1921) attempted to achieve—a decentralization of authority and disaggregation of official control so extreme that urban and industrial organization nearly disintegrated. That this was not the ultimate outcome in Russia, and that War Communism was succeeded during the New Economic Policy (1921–1927) by reconstruction of centrist authority over much of the economy, state territory, and state offices, argues that wartime mobilization worked in conjunction with longer-lived, institutionalized social behavior.

Territorial Administration

There are other aspects of the Russian state organizational and institutional structures that help one to understand the system's energy and endurance. The outcome of the Civil War and the negotiations that in 1922 produced the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were the results of choices by state elites on the order of the choices, say, not to abolish serfdom in 1815 or to do so in 1861. The vast bulk of the imperial territorial structure was divided and unequally distributed across European, Caucasian, and Asiatic Russia. The Siberian, Asiatic, and Caucasian portions were overseen in the nineteenth century by eight enormous military governor-generalships and other purpose-made organizations such as special railroad and civil administration organizations reporting directly to the central government.⁹³

Density in the most sparsely populated provinces of European Russia was slightly greater than that of the most densely populated districts in the east. This meant that Siberia and Central Asia presented very different problems in territorial administration from those of European Russia. There were no large, ethnically Russian or Westernized communities to which regional and local administration could be entrusted. This fact enhanced the role of the tsarist central state administration which, unsurprisingly, chose to operate through the medium of military discipline and the cooptation of local traditional elites. Distances were very great. The east was more than twice the enormous size of European Russia. Any decision to invest in infrastructure, such as railways or electrical networks, necessarily involved the central government at the highest levels owing to closely linked budgetary, organizational, and military-strategic issues.⁹⁶

In the relatively developed portions of European Russia, economic structure, as it emerged over time, also gave the state a unique and controlling role. It was the state's administrative organizations—the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Finances and, later, the Ministry of Ways of Communication and the Ministry of Trade and Industry—that presided at the nexus of labor oversight, provision of finance capital, tariff protection, and the creation both of corporations and of scores of monopolies and trusts, not only in the early twentieth century, but across the entire preceding generation of state-sponsored industrialization.⁹⁷

Each of these components of the economy could have been conceived without these state organizations and their officials. But in fact, in Russia they all engaged (without necessarily cooperating) with one another at the top, policy-development level and at the points where they contacted society under the supervision of a rapidly increasing number of state organizations. As noted above, the increase in agencies responsible for overseeing, licensing, and otherwise controlling economic affairs was particularly great between 1861 and the turn of the century, and the entire state apparatus developed with increasing breadth and momentum across the whole nineteenth century. Owing to the state's voracious appetite for technically and professionally educated graduates, if the revolution needed to tap the resources of educated Russia, it was obliged to turn to the bureaucracy and to accept its centralized, hierarchical institutional habits.

Territorial administration offers but one illustration of the outcome of Lenin's decision to organize his government within the structural and, by default, the rule-making framework of the tsarist ministerial system. Post-Civil War reintegration of non-Russian territories was accomplished on the tsarist political model for practical reasons: it may not have been the most desirable set of rules, but it was the set of rules that worked owing to already existing organizational and institutional arrangements. It worked owing to the continuation of programs for structuring commercial and manufacturing components of the national economy under central state authority. And it worked for other reasons, fundamentally institutional and organizational. These included the processes engaged in the reconstruction of pre-existing technical infrastructures (such as the rail, telegraph, and electrical nets) and the commitment to continue and extend use of state organizations to exploit them; the survival of administrative and public presuppositions about the nature of state rule-making power and responsibility; and the survival of understandings of the hierarchical nature of administrative authority. The latter two constitute the cognitive and contextualizing dimensions of institutionalism mentioned earlier.⁹⁸

The return to centrist institutional arrangements established them as the “rules of the game” for all post-revolutionary, territorially distributed systems, including the Communist Party, GOSPLAN, and the commissariats that would eventually direct industry and commerce. The endurance of this institutional network enforced the processing of budgetary, personnel, and strategic development decisions through the center—an extreme, asymmetrical distribution of authority and information. In this context, War Communism should be understood as a determined effort to displace centrist institutions with a far less hierarchical, less asymmetrical set of rules. Its failure to do so while the state survived is unremarkable in institutionalist perspective—an interpretation that makes Skocpol's analysis seem the more extraordinary.

Finally, keep in mind that with the passage of time Soviet elites adopted many additional programs and practices that depended upon a strong center. For ambitious political leaders who wanted radical and rapid social change, a powerful central executive obviously offered attractive alternatives to endless negotiation with local soviets, workers' trade unions, or even Rabkrin.

Mastering the Narrative Versus the Ambition to Control

Every revolutionary regime presumably needs to create space, a cordon sanitaire, between itself and the Old Regime. That space offers scope for the New Regime to claim and amplify its differences from the Old Regime, an essential step in legitimization of new elites and their agendas. So it is not surprising that a large proportion of the energy one identifies in post-revolutionary Soviet society was invested in message control, the building of a narrative that endowed the revolution with as much creative energy as possible, and that inserted as much space and substantive difference as possible between the Old and New Regimes.

In their study of revolutionary elites' use of images, concepts, and terminology, Figes and Kolonitski emphasize the intense exploitation of new language at this moment not only to interpret, but to create difference between the New and Old Regimes.⁹⁹

In part, the problem of the Bolshevik quest for state power arose because the Revolution happened when it did. This is a point that has been made in different ways by others. As noted above, Kotkin links the meaning of the revolution to the emergence of a new social consciousness during and after World War I, a conjuncture that others have identified as the culmination of “high modernism,” in the phrase of James C. Scott.¹⁰¹

The first half of the twentieth century was the era par excellence of state intervention in modern economic development across the entire industrialized world. Even before 1900 there was a growing perception in Russia, Europe, and North America that planning was the best way to achieve efficient, rapid, humane industrial growth and that the state was needed to manage the planning.¹⁰²

What was special about the Soviets' situation (as compared to European and North American countries where these agendas were also being raised) was their need to do things in a “revolutionary” way coupled with Lenin's serious intent to use any necessary amount of the state structure and personnel they inherited from the Old Regime to achieve revolutionary objectives. While he famously dangled the prospect of a diminished state whose clerking and filing activities could be discharged by a few modestly trained workers, robust state intervention was the post-revolutionary outcome that Lenin actually predicted in State and Revolution.¹⁰³