GEORGE FISCHER

Political Monism and Cultural Duality:
A Soviet Model of Modern Society?

When the world marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution not long ago, it made good sense to ask once again: what are the lessons of October?

A major lesson of October, I believe, is that the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s development since 1917 may point to a new model of a fully modern society. In a tentative way, I propose to argue here that the USSR of today does suggest a model of modernity quite different from the Western, “pluralist” model on which we tend to focus when we now speak of modern society.

Specifically, we can see in the Soviet case at least two main elements that the Western model of modernity is said to do without: the element of monism in the political sphere, and the element of duality in the cultural sphere. Just as we are apt to tie modern politics to pluralism (in the sense of a plurality of autonomous social forces), we think of modern society in terms of a single dominant culture—what Raymond Williams in Culture and Society calls “a whole way of life”-and not two or a “dual” culture. That half a century after the Bolshevik Revolution Russia may in fact be a fully modern society, and yet lack a Western type of political pluralism and cultural integration, could indeed be one of the great lessons of October.¹

Generally speaking, modernization involves three main processes: industrialization, the building of a nation-state, and the rise of a new culture. The new culture, less traditional than any in the past, must be more adaptable to change—an endemic and ubiquitous kind of change that science and technology help to set off and then to keep up. A fully modern society is one that has an industrial economy, a viable national state, and a culture that puts stress on new technical modes and skills. When a society has moved to this stage, we can say that it has become “modern.”²

In regard to Russia, where should one draw the hazy but all-important line between the process of becoming modern and actually being modern? I would put the hazy line in the quite recent past. The term “modernity” is not used here to cover the years before or during Soviet industrialization and administrative consolidation, Stalin’s Iron Age of the 1930s. Nor does it cover the difficult years of World War II and the great economic reconstruction that followed. It is not until the 1950s that this generally most advanced of the communist countries began to cross the line. Only then, it seems, did the USSR begin to face the tasks and needs of becoming modern.

Along with a modern stage of development, each type of modern society is characterized by a distinct historical path. Most comments today link Russia with one such path, and the West with another. The way a country industrializes marks the difference between the two paths. In the West, primacy has been given to a private-sector economy. The business entrepreneur dominates the economy. Russia, along with many countries today, has put stress on a public-sector economy. The state dominates the economy. More than that, as has often been said of Russia, the state dominates society. The West alone showed the reverse pattern as it came to be “modern.”³

I. POLITICAL MONISM

If up to 1917 Russia was ruled by a hesitantly modernizing absolute monarchy, its political system in 1967 is geared to heavy emphasis on continuing and quite drastic social change. Much of this “induced” change from above centers on the economy, all of which is directed by the state and its political leaders. But no less intensive care is given by the political system to a vast program of cultural and social transformations, the end result of which (before the close of this century) is to be an advanced stage of the ideal, communist social system. Not only the ruling group, the leaders of the party, but also their established creed, can be said to focus on this change-oriented, and future-oriented, kind of politics. Both the leaders and their creed, in other words, define the society’s task in terms of unceasing statedirected modernization. This shapes the political monism of which I speak.

As an ideal type, a second, non-pluralist model of modernity covers all those social systems in which the state is dominant and where it rules by means of public economic power.

To run a fully modern society well, any kind of monist system will have to meet two basic needs which, in a way, run counter to each other. On the one hand, a monist system must take great care to keep the state dominant. On the other hand, it must give a good deal of leeway to the many complex and specialized elements that make up a modern society.

Hence total control of other spheres, notably the economy, is not essential to monist politics. It would be more accurate to say that in a new model the state has the final say about all economic matters at the apex of the entire system. Below the apex, a monist system need not (and most likely cannot) limit the economic division of labor much more than a pluralist society of the capitalist sort. Thus a good deal of professional leeway within key groups such as managers, scientists, and the military is still possible. Nor does a monist system like the Soviet rule out a degree of organizational leeway in many parts of economic life. To be sure, this administrative type of autonomy stops short of social autonomy under which major social groups are more or less free of state control. Yet we should not equate that fact with a total lack of leeway within major groups and spheres.

In general, it should be clear by now that both the monist and the pluralist models allow for more and more functional specialization of the kind that marks all of life today. Nor does either model rule out the ever greater role of the state as a coordinating and integrating element in any modern society. Most of all, neither model denies that a modern society may indeed carry within it very strong pulls toward social autonomy. These key aspects of potential social development fit both models.

The models go different ways not on the question of such overall development, but on what they mean for a modern society. Thus, proponents of the pluralist model imply not only that the overall development will take place, but also that in its main spheres a modern society must give (or keep up) large amounts of social autonomy. This consequence, and not the development itself, is what an examination of the possibilities of a monist model casts doubt on. I would argue that much functional specialization, much state power, and some pressure toward social autonomy can coexist effectively with little actual social autonomy.

More specifically, the two models clash on the mechanisms, the organizing devices, that are to be found at the core of a modern society. In the pluralist model, the vast complexity and boundless change of modern life can be dealt with by one mechanism alone: pluralism, as a mechanism of large-scale social autonomy. In this model, social autonomy gives a share of real power to a set of autonomous groups, so that they can act more or less on their own within one or more spheres of life. The pluralists maintain that only such division of labor-and division of power-make a modern society adaptable enough to cope with endemic and ubiquitous change.⁴

In contrast to that view, the monist model holds that some mechanisms other than social autonomy can serve to pull together a vastly complex society. We know all too little about how such alternate mechanisms might look or work. But any new model of modernity rests on the assumption that they will emerge.⁵

These last points suggest that the monist model is not unlike the “imperfect” totalitarianism of which Gordon Skilling speaks. As Skilling puts it, the Soviet system today “is not genuine pluralism, nor is it pure totalitarianism; it is rather an imperfect monism in which, of the many elements involved, one—the party—is more powerful than all others but is not omnipotent.”⁶

However, what Skilling terms “imperfect monism” amounts to one form only, a limited form. As has been stressed already, limited monism is central to a monist model of modernity. For limited monism calls for administrative tutelary autonomy. A “pure totalitarianism”—we can call it full monismlacks this tutelary autonomy. Hence full (totalitarian) monism does not fit a modem society.

The monism that does fit modernity covers a wide range of systems. It includes the Soviet Union as it is now, a system of “imperfect” totalitarianism. But limited monism, the reader should note, includes other forms that the Soviet system took in the past-or might yet take-and all sorts of systems that lack most things Soviet. Thus it includes some modern or modernizing systems that are not totalitarian but authoritarian. In quite a few of the new states of Asia and Africa as well, we see authoritarian systems that have a good deal of tutelary autonomy. They too give clear primacy to public power over private. Yet they leave more room for private power than “imperfect” totalitarianism.

Just as monism can take two forms—full and limited—so can a model in which private power plays a big part. Here the distinction lies between a society that mixes social autonomy for its major groups with tutelary autonomy, and one which rests on social autonomy alone.

The distinction draws a line between authoritarian (limited) pluralism—such as Franco Spain—and the democratic (full) pluralism that many American writers associate with the West. I have argued that tutelary autonomy could meet the minimal needs of a highly complex modern society. In so far as that view is valid, only full monism fails to fit modernity at all. For the rest, the main contrast lies between social and tutelary autonomy.⁷ The following figure brings that out.

MONIST AND PLURALIST MODELS OF MODERN SOCIETY

II. CULTURAL DUALITY

When Disraeli wrote of the “two nations” in the England of the midnineteenth century, he had in mind most of all an economic gulf, the gulf between rich and poor. In regard to Russia, Western observers have long been apt to draw a similar line. But the line they draw divides Russia not so much in economic terms, but in moral or cultural terms. For example, an American political scientist juxtaposed an alien, energizing “state” to a passive, exploited “society.” And a British psychiatrist pointed to an unpredictable alternation, in the widespread peasant culture among Russians proper, between submissiveness to authority and sudden, extreme outbursts of rage and violence against it.⁸

This duality has to do with a deep cultural cleavage within the main nationality of the country, the Ruşsians. In 1917, the cleavage set apart rulers from ruled. In yet another way, the cleavage divided a highly educated, “Western” minority of the population from a majority deeply rooted in a particularistic and ascriptive peasant culture.

By itself, such a cleavage is neither unusual nor necessarily harmful to the fuller integration of a national society. From recent research in social science, we learn more and more that a host of diverse kinds of cultural ties tend to persist in the same group (and in the same individual) no matter how far modernization may have gone. Something else makes the cleavage among Russians distinctive. Despite a relatively high level of development in the country’s urban centers, one of the cultures involved—the traditional or peasant culture—seems to have been a good deal more resistant to adapting to the more modern and urban culture than was the case in Western Europe, the initial area of modernization. Prior to 1917, we can see this pattern best when we look at the main transmitters of culture in the society: education, religion, family.

At the turn of the twentieth century, illiteracy was widespread in both rural and urban areas of Russia. True, a sizable network of schools had developed under government, church, and “zemstvo” (rural self-government) auspices. Some 10 percent of the total number of children between the ages of five and fifteen (most of them boys) were attending school. A little over 1 percent of the population went beyond grade school (1.4 million out of about 125 million). Of this number, the urban areas had a much larger share than the rural. While in urban areas 6 percent got an education beyond grade school, in rural areas less than half of one percent did. The same pattern sets apart a minority of the urban population from the peasantry as far as higher education goes.

By 1900, the major cities of Russia featured a network of nine universities and numerous specialized professional and vocational schools. University training was pretty much out of the question for students of lower class origin. Access to higher education was open, however, to lower middle class families (notably from the priesthood, schoolteachers, and lesser civil servants). Along with this significant upward mobility by means of university education, though, the mass of the population had little or no access to the educational system.

Inevitably, this situation gave all the more weight to the social role of religion. For most Russians, this meant the established church of the country, Russian Orthodoxy. Official figures at the time claimed that 70 percent of the population belonged to the Orthodox church. But this count included a lot of dissenting sects and also the many lapsed intellectuals and factory workers who had been born into the faith. Nonetheless, the Orthodox church both reflected and shaped the widespread peasant culture far more than did the other major religions of Russia. To the peasantry, the church preached submission to established authority and also the doctrine of collective responsibility (sobornost’). Throughout the Orthodox church, from top to bottom, longstanding ritual and folk custom held primacy over the intellectual and individualistic theology that played such a modernizing role in Western Europe. In all of these ways, Imperial Russia’s established church and main religion did a lot to reinforce Russia’s anti-modern peasant culture.

At the fringes of the established church, and in some of Russia’s other religions as well, reforming and modernizing currents did make some inroads both among peasants and in the cities. Some of these dissenting groups bore a resemblance to the individualistic and puritan Western sects of early modern times. Although these currents were strikingly numerous and widespread, they remained only deviant cases in the face of the continuing hold on most believers of the Mother Church.

Nowhere in the Russia of 1917 does the cultural cleavage stand out as clearly as in family life. While the urbanized Russian family was becoming “modern,” no such change marked the peasantry or the many city dwellers with closer ties to peasant ways than to the national society. Most importantly, the prevalent Russian family put local over national values, collectivism over individualism, submission to authority and attachment to established custom over striving and innovation. To be sure, a gradually spreading market economy, as well as military service and the recruitment of peasants into the industrial labor force, all made inroads into the peasant culture. But the resilience of this culture, and the uneven gains being made by the city-based national culture, combined to keep up the deep cleavage in education, in religion, and in the organization of the family.

Fifty years after the October Revolution, a cultural duality still stands out. As in 1917, the Russian culture of 1967 is divided between a more modern and urban culture and a peasant culture. In overlapping but different ways, the intelligentsia and the party are actively committed to a modern national culture. That culture itself reflects the vigor and integration brought on by the Soviet form of modernization. Yet though the peasant culture had become less insulated, and an even larger share of the people came to divide their attachment between the two cultures, the persistence of the peasant ways and values is remarkable in light of the country’s giant strides toward modernity. Despite all the inroads of industrialization, education, and urban living, peasant mores continue to loom large not only in the countryside but among a significant portion of the urban population.

Such attachment does not involve conscious or active opposition to the national society. But it does mean that norms and attitudes live on which go against some of the main prerequisites of full national integration. Thus many a Soviet citizen has failed to adopt the standards of work discipline, or the acceptance of occupational and geographic mobility, which matter so much in modern living. Nor is a significant share of the people as open to the impact of formal education and mass communication, although they partake of both, as they would be if the national culture did not have to coexist with a still highly particularistic and generally premodern second culture.

Along the same lines, it should be noted that for its top party posts the Soviet system continues to seek and attract men whose fathers were workers or peasants. This fact bears directly on the far-reaching cultural duality of the USSR. If in the United States men of plebeian origin take on white collar ways on their way up,⁹ a far more limited change takes place among Soviet leaders. On the level of cognitive learning, many shifts can be found as Soviet people move up from lower class origin. In Soviet schooling, one can discern three distinct mechanisms that operate to bring about these shifts. These socializing mechanisms consist of the set but many-sided fare of official doctrine, a wide reading of Russian and also Western classic literature, and expertise in some field of knowledge. On the level of norms and values, though, much of the Soviet leaders’ culture still comes from the lower classes and most of all the peasantry.¹⁰

Within this persisting cultural duality, education is still the main means by which the state teaches the population how to act in the Soviet kind of national society. The educational system is not only vast and attendance in it more or less universal; it has become accepted and even revered as the society’s major path of upward social mobility. As does the Soviet system in general, the schools combine a stress on disciplined and collectivist devotion to country and work with indoctrination and technical training. By now, the evidence suggests, this Stalin-era combination has become quite routinized and thus in part lacking in moral and intellectual appeal. Nor has all of the youth gotten the schooling and jobs they had been led to expect. By and large, though, this does not undercut the role of Soviet education as an imposing method of socializing the population and channeling youth into the openings the state has for them.¹¹

The persistence of peasant culture suggests that religion has retained more of a place in Soviet life than might be expected in the light of the state’s outlook and its resolute actions against both religious institutions and religious beliefs. As of now, the brunt of official opposition is against the numerous local and regional dissenting sects. These had taken advantage of the relative easing of state controls in the wake of de-Stalinization, and evidently found a good manv new adherents among the people. This is true both in the countryside and in the cities. In their outlook, these proselytizing sects range from chiliastic to quietist creeds. But some of the most successful emphasize the virtues of personal discipline, virtue, and the like which one associates with puritan and post-puritan currents in Western religion. The strength and variety of these religious manifestations would seem to reflect an incomplete attachment to the Soviet type of national society, since all of them serve as (and officially are seen as) rivals to both the established creed and the modern national culture.

The family reflects both of the cultural elements in Soviet society. Compared to the Russian family before 1917, that of 1967 is smaller in size and nuclear rather than extended in structure. As a rule it puts a good deal of emphasis on the educational and social mobility of children. And it passes on to them a good deal of the established creed. The role of women has become much more equal than it had been. Soviet families have come to know the high divorce rates, too, characteristic of modern urban life.

At the same time, both the persistence of a peasant culture, and the limits on income, living space, and material comforts, have led to a continued reliance on extended and multi-generational family ties which recall the peasant family of old. For the same reasons, the official emphasis on disciplined devotion to work and civic effort finds less complete acceptance in many Soviet families than the state would like. Nor have the formal ways of urban living, such as conformity to laws, contractual obligations, and the like.

If cultural duality marks the Russia of 1967, as well as 1917, a contrast stands out, too. The modern, more national culture is now in the ascent and on the offensive, much more so than it was before the revolution. In a noteworthy way, the peasant culture still to be found in abundance may not be as contrary to the Soviet form of modernization as to the individualistic and capitalist one in the West. For the Soviet system and the peasant culture share an emphasis on collectivism. And both presume a powerful central authority and a submissiveness to it by the bulk of the population. Whether this compatibility will hold for the near future, when further complexity and affluence may lead to more rationalization and individualism in public and economic life, remains to be seen.¹² Meanwhile, though, the persistence of a local peasant culture next to a modern national culture turns out to be not just dysfunctional for the Soviet type of modernization, but in some ways to help it as well.

Russia’s process of change in the course of the past half century has been vast and at times grandiose. A new mode of social change brought forth a mix of swift industrialization and imposing social innovations with totalitarian rule and a change-oriented—and in part still revolutionary-creed. In the population, one finds a wide range of social wants and strains side by side with much acceptance of the established system. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the country had achieved an unheard of amount of economic strength and of worldwide power and recognition. And yet it lacked the social organization, and the political experience and self-confidence, to move with any speed away from Stalin’s Iron Age.

A host of new as well as old problems thus sustain a good deal of the duality between modern and peasant culture. These problems keep up, too, much of the political monism that marked Imperial Russia and still more so the age of Stalin. The outcome points to a new model of modern society which lacks the pluralism of the first. As long as political monism and cultural duality stay intact, the case of Russia will show that the second model (unlike the first) calls for no full break with the old ways of a non-Western country.