Abstract
The most original and in a sense most basic of the questions which occupied Marxist historians during the period of the first five-year plan was that of socio-economic formations—what defined them, what formations characterised particular societies, how changes occurred from one formation to another. The subject was original in two ways. In the first place it had no precedent in Soviet historiography. The small number of Marxists engaged in historical research in the first decade after 1917 were mainly interested in modern history, the history of bourgeois capitalist society—a formation analysed in sufficient detail by Marx and Engels for it not to confront Marxist historians with basic methodological problems. And for the few whose interests lay in premodern Russian history, Pokrovsky’s views provided a virtually unquestioned framework for study.
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Notes
See E. J. Hobsbawm’s introduction to Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (London, 1964) especially pp. 21-4.
Marx to Engels, 2 June 1853; quoted in George Lichtheim, ‘Marx and “the Asiatic Mode of Production”’, St Antony’s Papers, no. 14 (London, 1963) p. 90.
Karl Marx, ‘Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1962) p. 363.
V. N. Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki o problemakh Kitaya (Moscow, 1969), pp. 84ff. Like the institutes of RANION, the association was eventually absorbed by the Communist Academy, in 1930; ibid., p. 130.
For Weber’s views on Chinese society, see Max Weber, The Religion of China, part I (London, 1968); for an example of his influence on Soviet scholars in the mid-1920s,
see E. Varga, ‘Ekonomicheskie problemy revolyutsii v Kitae’, Planovoe khozyaistvo, no. 12, 1925.
K. Radek, ‘Sotsial’no-politicheskie idei Sun-Yat-Sena’, Pravda, 12 r’4arch 1926.
See Warren Lerner, The Last Internationalist (Stanford, 1970) pp. 134-7.
D. Pepper, ‘Evropeisko-amerikanskii imperializm i kitaiskaya kontr-revolyutsiya’, Pravda, 1 May 1927. Pogany, whose alias had been acquired while he was engaged in Comintern work in the USA, was later implicated in the Bukharinist opposition to the party line, and perished during the Yezhovshchina. Conquest, The Great Terror (London, 1968 ) pp. 431 - 2.
L. I. Madyar, Ekonomika sel’skogo khozyaistva v Kitae (Moscow, 1928 ).
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S. M. Dubrovsky, K voprosu i sushchnosti aziatskogo sposoba proizvodstva, feodalizma, krepostnichestva i torgovogo kapitalizma (Moscow, 1929).
L. Madyar, Ocherki po ekonomike Kitaya (Moscow, 1930 );
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See Karl A. Wittfogel, ‘The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution’, World Politics, vol. 12, no. 4, 1960, pp. 491 - 3.
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L. V. Danilova, ‘Stanovlenie marksistskogo napravleniya v sovetskoi istoriografii’, Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 76, 1965, p. 90.
M. N. Pokrovsky, ‘O russkom feodalizme, proiskhozhdenii i kharaktere absolutizma v Rossii’, BK, no. 2, 1931, pp. 78-9. Printed as an appendix, ‘On Russian Feudalism, and on the Origin and the Nature of Absolute Monarchy in Russia’, in M. N. Pokrovsky, Brief History of Russia, vol. 1, pp. 281 - 95.
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A. Prigozhin, ‘Protiv revizii marksizma-leninizma v istoricheskoi nauke’, PZM, no. 1-2, 1931, p. 182.
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© 1981 John Barber
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Barber, J. (1981). Socio-Economic Formations. In: Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–1932. Studies in Soviet History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05239-4_4
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