16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Soviet History 101, July 25, 2006
This review is from: Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (Paperback)
The other reviewers on Amazon are correct about Malia's thesis, which essentially boils down to the Soviet Union as an ideologically driven country and that Communism doesn't work.
Malia leads the reader to the first period of soviet Communism as an instructive tool. Lenin's inauguration of the great soviet experiment brings War Communism and Russia's exit (as promised to the Germans) from the Great War (World War I). This first attempt at Communism fails with a shortage of crops and a (forced) famine in the Volga River valley. Lenin is forced to retreat from this unpopular policy and opts to bring Russia into the future with the NEP or the New Economic Policy. The NEP sought to modernize the Soviet Union in preparation for the "dialectic" movement into Communism.
There are those who want to claim that Lenin was a) a bad communist b) not a communist or c) a pure Marxist. Malia demonstrates, as well as one can point out in Lenin's own writings, that he is a pure Marxist. Thus Malia establishes a basis for his first thesis early on.
The Soviet Union would run its course by moving between the poles of War Communism (for the greater part of its short history) and market liberalization. Ultimately this paradigm led to perestroika and glasnost in 1986 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Malia in analyzing this phenomenon correctly picks out Ludwig von Mises classic essay on the problems of Economic Calculation in a Socialist Commonwealth. Mises important work of the early 1920's demonstrates that economic actors/agents and their actions are necessary to discover prices. And moreover if property rights are not conveyed, the decision making ability of the state becomes impossible. (There is no way to know what the customers want, let alone need because prices are what conveys surplus or shortage - any neoclassical economist with a government cost-benefit class under their belt would give you the same assessment.) This process leads to capital consumption, misdirected investment and worse yet, a crippling military expansionist state.
Got Breshnev?
Detractors deride this book as too simplistic. Mostly because their fragile vision of Marxism, debunked over and over again by economists, philosophers and history alike, proves once and for all that in reality Communism doesn't work. This reason alarms most social revolutionaries who are infatuated with a utopian future under a scientific veneer.
Yet, to recount the events of the Soviet Union demonstrates, despite claims to the contrary by Sovietologists, that their economic history was deplorable. Anyone can easily demonstrate this with a quick analysis of infant mortality and a decline in life expectancy. Insomuch, Malia correctly points out that the leaders, advisors and western economic fact finders were mislead by Soviet statistics.
Many modern Marxist (if there are any) critiques lay in the fact that the Soviet Union was only a nationalistic experience/experiment and therefore can not prove or disprove Marx central thesis. (It's not universal or global.) I do not think that any amount of evidence, historical or otherwise, will convince these detractors of the errors in their logic. They assume that global socialism can and will work and fatefully ignore or attempt to discredit the history of Malia or the economic reasoning of Hayek or von Mises.
I found Malia's book is accessible and readable, unlike other modern history books. He doesn't get hung up on insignificant details and as other reviews have noted sufficiently deals with possible problems in his own thesis. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in a brief overview of the Soviet Union's short history.
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26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impeccably Reasoned and VERY Aptly Named, June 6, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (Paperback)
This book, along with Richard Pipes' THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, ranks as one of the two most useful and enlightening treatments of the subject. Malia is no novice when it comes to Russian history, having written ALEXANDER HERZEN AND THE BIRTH OF RUSSIAN SOCIALISM many years ago. Unlike many other historians, who tend to euphemize when it comes to the subject of the USSR, Malia has the courage to refer to absurdities as absurdities. Other historians quite often discuss Soviet internal terrorism and irrational economic policies as things that HAD to be done, due to a variety of circumstances--as if these policies were either rational or sensible. Malia's analysis is far more astute; it demonstrates repeatedly that these "circumstances" were the RESULTS of trying to follow an irrational ideology and the fantastic economic policies that it dictated. One simply cannot understand the Soviet experience without emphasizing these points. Similarly, Malia shows that Stalinism was not an aberration, but an inevitable consequence of Lenin's model of government. The only way to keep such a state going was by terror, as Malia shows us. If the N.E.P. had been allowed to continue, the Leninist form of socialism in Russia would eventually have lapsed into Social Democratic reformism instead of the one-party dictatorship that alone could march along Lenin's path. It's no coincidence that either terror or economic collapse (or some mixture of both) have resulted everywhere the Leninist model has been tried; and Malia's most valuable contribution is showing us how and why this is so, and cannot be otherwise. As he pointed out, "socialism leads not to an assault on the specific abuses of 'capitalism' but to an assault on reality..." Of course, idle coffee-house intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky spend their lives trying to escape reality; for them, this is the whole point. Reality is too painful for them because it is a glaring reminder of the fact that they spend their hours reading and writing while others toil.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent polemic, April 21, 2006
This review is from: Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (Paperback)
Although some readers might find the book's polemical style a bit off-putting, _The Soviet Tragedy_ is an excellent overview of both the failure of socialism in twentieth-century Russia and the failure of an earlier generation of Russian scholars to recognize the centrality of ideology to shaping the Bolshevik "experiment." While Malia's rhetorical atacks on the "revisonists" (i.e. social historians) of the 1970s and 1980s are, at times, a bit heated, he is correct in asserting that their own ideological fixation on demonstrating the "legitimacy" of 1917 and the Soviet regime's capacity for reform blinded them to the fundamental impossibility of reengineering society on the basis of Marx's utopian blueprint. An essential book for those already familiar with the broad outlines of 20th century Russian history.
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