The theory of "modernization
from above", as exemplified in the work of Aleksander Gerschenkron, focuses
on the underlying causes of the economic and political centralization that
has characterized Russia since the Middle Ages. While in Western
Europe, the economy was the collective creation of a multitude of small
entrepreneurs, with varied specializations, methods of work, and financial
backings, in Russia it was the creation of the state, and governmental
priorities, demands, and dictates have ruled it since the time of Peter
the Great. Gerschenkron relates this to the contrasting timing
of modernization processes in the West and East. Modernization started
in the West, as a gradual social process, brought about by spontaneous
changes in individuals' lives in response to changing opportunities, which
slowly gained aggregate momentum, until the entrepreneurial class, the
bourgeoisie, could finally impose its dictates "from below" on the government
itself. In Russia, in contrast, modernization came late, and only
as a response to pressures from abroad, from the growing power of the West.
The need for economic development was therefore perceived primarily by
the state – rather than by any class of the population – as a need for
a modern defence industry and its supportive infrastructures. Russian
modernization thus became a consciously formulated,
governmentally sponsored project, imposed on the country "from above" by
force and against the resistance of the population at large. Conversely,
as soon as the governmental objectives had been accomplished and no need
for modernization remained, the effort was abandoned: indeed, efforts among
groups of the population to emulate Western development were seen as potential
threats to the state's power monopoly and actively repressed. In
18th century France, the court's splendour was designed to reconcile the
nobility with its loss of power; in Prussia, the Junkers were appeased
by increased rights over the peasantry. In Russia, "the problem did
not exist at all. The Russian state was poor but strong." This
was as true of the pre-Petrine boyars as of the mid-nineteenth century
Tsars or the "communist" regime headed by Brezhnev. Russian economic
development therefore proceded in sudden, violent "spurts" of activity
– as under Peter the Great or under Stalin – followed by long periods of
stagnation. During the spurts, development was one-sided and governmental
vigilance never relaxed: sectors of the economy with direct or indirect
military relevance received exclusive attention at the expence of individual
consumption, which was dramatically curtailed; vast enterprises were constructed
in sparcely populated hinterlands (rendering them susceptible to central
control but vulnerable to infrastructural disruption); ideologies proclaiming
development at all cost were fed to the masses. As the spurt ended,
the exhausted population had neither will nor resources to oppose the juggernaut
which had thus uprooted their lives and gathered all the threads of power
in its hands, – and the initiative for further modernization, when the
need again arose, would therefore once again be with the state. In
short, no social process could ever attain the necessary momentum to change
society spontaneously, gradually, from within, and therefore, as Gerschenkron
puts it, "the never-ending cogitations of Marxian historians in Russia
about the class nature of the Petrine State... miss the essential fact
that the State was not the State of this or that class.
It was the State's State... It was not class power relations that
created the State. The obverse was true: it was the State that created
the classes: labor, and even the entrepreneurs." Economic "backwardness"
thus produces a vicious circle of violence, that no force can oppose.