A legacy of lies and lost souls: the Russian revolution at one hundred tears.

AuthorBoettke, Peter J.
PositionEssay

On November 7, 2017, we will acknowledge the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Russia was still using the Julian calendar at the time, so period references show the date as October 25 and thus the historical designation "October Revolution." Regardless, on November 7, 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks toppled the Provisional Government and set out to implement full socialism. As John Reed reported soon thereafter in Ten Days That Shook the World, Lenin took the podium, stared out into the cheering crowd, and simply said, "Now, we will construct socialism" ([1919] 1985, 117). And indeed he tried.

The Soviet experience with socialism from 1917 to 1992 is one of death and destruction. And it must be understood in this way. Socialism didn't fail because of poor circumstances or because of unfortunate selection of leaders but because it is a system that cannot work. In attempting to abolish private property and the market economy, the socialist experiment condemned itself to failure, and this is true wherever and whenever it is tried. In theory, the abolition of private property in the means of production renders rational economic calculation impossible (Mises [1920] 1975; see also Boettke 1998). In practice, the "abolition" of private property means only that decision rights get transferred to state officials and that decisions are made based not on rational economic calculations but on political criteria (Boettke 1995). Socialism's original aspiration of ushering in a transition from the "Kingdom of Necessity" to the "Kingdom of Freedom" through a burst of productivity due to the rationalization of production is abandoned, and political survival of a new class of elites becomes the objective. Tools of repression and oppression emerge to bring about the "New Freedom."

Soviet history is a record of economic deprivation and political tyranny, as I have described in my books The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Tears, 1918-1928 (1990) and Why Perestroika Failed: The Politics and Economics of Socialist Transformation (1993). Western analysts failed to see this for the longest time because of the ideological and methodological blinders they wore. In a now classic paper by Sovietologist Alain Besancon, the intellectual blind spots are explained:

The Soviet economy is the subject of a considerable volume of scholarly work which occupies numerous study centres in Europe and the United States and which provides materials for a vast literature and various academic journals. But those born in the Soviet Union or those who approach Soviet society through history, literature, travel, or through listening to what the emigres have to say, find that they cannot recognize what the economists describe. There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between this system, conceived through measurements or figures, and the other system, without measurement or figures, which they have come to know through intuition and their own actual experience. It is an astonishing feature of the world of Soviet affairs that a certain kind of economic approach to Soviet reality, no matter how well-informed, honest and sophisticated, is met with such absolute scepticism and total disbelief by those who have a different approach that they do not even want to offer any criticism--it being impossible to know where to begin. (1980, 143) The standard analysis of Soviet economic performance, with its emphasis on growth rates, output figures, and measures of economic efficiency, was incapable of understanding the system and its history. As David Levy and Sandra Peart (2015) note in their discussion of G. Warren Nutter's "Traveler's Tale of the Soviet Economy," the witness of the actual world can question what we learn from the expert's model world. And this misunderstanding of the Soviet economy was played out in economic textbooks well into the late 1980s (Levy...

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