This book will irritate many Russian historians, and I believe it has irritated quite a few already. Perhaps inevitably, this attempt to construct a general argument about state intervention in society has led its author to indulge in a fair number of simplifications himself. James Scott makes no claim to specialist knowledge of Russian history, and it is therefore a little unfair to take him to task for inaccuracies and over-generalisations. There are, however, quite a few of these, and I shall highlight only a few, taken from different parts of the book.
In his fourth chapter on city planning, the idea that the eighteenth-century city of St Petersburg can be compared with twentieth-century Brasilia as a planned, high-modernist city (pp.144-5) seems bizarre. One could well argue, also, that Moscow has been subject to a far greater degree of "high modernist" planning in the twentieth century than Peter the Great could ever have envisaged for his 'Window on the West', yet Scott seems to categorise Moscow as the kind of unplanned, diverse city of which Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, would approve.
Scott's remark, in his discussion of the Russian Revolution in chapter five, that the Bolshevik party's working class base on the eve of the revolution was modest and limited to unskilled workers (p.158) is highly contentious and not borne out by recent (and even not-so-recent) research. Similiarly, while it is true that Lenin's conception of the revolutionary process was not -- to a very considerable extent -- borne out in practice, it is absurd to contend, with Arendt, that the Bolsheviks simply "found power lying in the street, and picked it up". What, indeed, is a successful coup d'état if not a vindication of methods of central planning and tight organisational discipline?
When addressing the subject of Soviet collectivisation in his sixth chapter, Scott is quite right to point out (p. 210) that the overriding purpose of collectivisation was to ensure the seizure of grain. In his desire, however, to concentrate on the (ghastly) experience of the peasantry and to paint the Soviet regime in unremittingly dark colours, he never makes it clear that this was not simply a case of an authoritarian state seeking to impose its will on a recalcitrant rural population and to drag peasants into the twentieth century (although this was certainly one motivation), but that the urban population in Soviet cities was facing a genuine food crisis in the late 1920s. Yet I would hate to give the impression that I did not enjoy this book, for it is conceived on a grand scale, ranges widely, and offers many thought-provoking comparisons which those of us bound up in our own more narrow fields of vision would be unlikely ever to draw for ourselves. In particular, we Russianists welcome the way in which Scott integrates his discussions of Russia and the Soviet Union into his general argument, while still taking care not to ignore cultural specificities. Russia has for too long been treated as a place apart, and any attempt to place the Soviet experiment in its world-historical context needs to be applauded. Scott's comparison between Lenin and the French architect Le Corbusier (and, on the other side of the coin, between Rosa Luxemburg/Aleksandra Kollontai and Jane Jacobs) is an intriguing one, and his discussion of the connections that were made between Russian and American agronomists in the 1920s and 1930s, who shared a common vision of massive, mechanised, industrial-style farming, is a fascinating one. I also enjoyed the comparison between the '[M]odular, similarly designed units producing similar products, according to a common formula and work routine. Units can easily be duplicated across the landscape, and the inspectors coming to assess their operations enter legible domains which they can evaluate with a single checklist.' (p. 217).
Finally, I can only wish that more books on Soviet collectivisation included the kind of illustrations which Scott provides. The map depicting the plan for a state farm in Tver oblast' (p.215), and the photographs showing the way in which peasant housing changed as a result of collectivisation say more about the subject than a dozen academic treatises ever could. While I would not recommend this book for use by students of Soviet history, I rather doubt that anyone would contemplate doing this. What this book does offer is an excellent read, a provocative argument and a fascinating excursion through a wide range (both temporally and spatially) of state 'schemes to improve the human condition' and how they failed.
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