Michael Haynes

Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note

IT IS NOW WIDELY ACCEPTED that the cost of the 1941–45 war to the Soviet Union was a population loss of 26–27 million people. This figure derives from demographic data published at the turn of the 1990s. The core data were helpfully reproduced by Ellman & Maksudov in this journal some years ago and it is to their article that most readers in the West will turn. Unfortunately, valuable though their summary is, their presentation is confusing in parts. The purpose of this note is therefore to suggest a need to distinguish more carefully two figures for the number of deaths and to show where Ellman & Maksudov inadvertently confuse them and so end up with a misleading analysis that understates the real impact of the war. There are three main ways in which we can think about war losses. These are:

The European Union and its Periphery: Inclusion and Exclusion

Conventional economic theory suggests that a cluster of strong states such as those that make up the European Union should create powerful equilibrating forces which will help even out the level of economic development. But the pattern of actual development in the European Union, both internally and in the states along its borders, appears to be marked by inequalities between rich and poor states and rich and poor regions. This chapter discusses the evidence for developmental convergence within the European Union and between it and its immediate geographical periphery. It then argues that the ideology of ‘Europeanness’ which underpins the ‘European’ project serves in part to justify the European Union as a relatively exclusive ‘rich man’s club’, keeping its distance from its poorer neighbours. New boundaries are being developed along the borders of the European Union which emphasize protecting this rich man’s club by the control of ‘soft security’ issues concerned with limiting access to the European Union for migrant labour, drugs and crime and what is loosely seen as the threat of fundamentalists and terrorism.

Labour, Exploitation and Capitalism in Russia Before and After 1991

This article explores the relevance of the idea of state capitalism in Russian development. It situates the idea within the framework of capitalist development which it argues is marked by global inequalities, power imbalances and economic and military competition. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was an attempt to overthrow this system but its failure led to a highly intense form of state capitalism which lasted until 1991. The underlying continuities in the different regimes in Russia are then analysed in terms of the process of working class exploitation.

History, markets, hierarchies and institutions

New institutional economies and the work of Coase, Williamson, North and others today occupies a central place in thinking about the nature of economic hierarchies institutions. This paper argues that it cannot offer a guide to history of the real development of markets, hierarchies and institutions. Those writers like MacIntyre and Sennett who focus on focus on social embedding and the potential conflict between pure markets and social cohesion offer a better basis for understanding of the real history of capitalism. But this approach too needs extending if it is to be a guide to the real history of markets, hierarchies and institutions.

Clarifying Excess Deaths and Actual War Deaths in the Soviet Union During World War II: A Reply

THE AIM OF MY NOTE ON COUNTING SOVIET WAR DEATHS between 1941 and 1945 was to show that the debate on the numbers who died as a result of the war is still very much open. The very valuable past discussions of the issue had been hampered by a degree of confusion between the concept of excess deaths and actual deaths. The need is therefore to move towards a more empirical discussion of the distribution of deaths by immediate cause. Once we have a clearer idea of this we can then move to a firmer discussion of the direct or indirect role of war in these deaths. In the process of making this argument I suggested that the answer would be somewhere between a lower bound figure and an upper bound figure set by the total number of deaths. It was certainly not my intention to suggest that the latter figure be taken as the real figure and that we should add 16 million deaths to the conventional estimate. Indeed, the attempt to elaborate a possible typology of causes of death pointed away from just that. Rather, I wanted to suggest that, pending further research, we should treat the issue as much more open than is usually done. The issue of war and its costs is far too important to be left on the sidelines of history or as the subject of partially ghettoised military history. Mark Harrison has done more than most to make us aware of this in his work on the economic history of both the USSR and World War II. I therefore welcome his elegantly simple discussion of the way in which the probabilities of death can interact. But it seems to me to work best if it is understood as an attempt to finesse the indirect approach to analysing war deaths. It does not negate the argument that we need to put more effort into researching the direct approach and that is why I provided a rough typology to show how we might go about this task. The main discussion of war deaths has been undertaken by demographers who have used an excess death concept. ‘War deaths’ are the additional deaths that occurred in the war. As I was at pains to point out, this is an important and quite legitimate concept that demographers need. It compares what happened with a counter-factual of what would have happened had war not occurred. It seeks to measure the difference between them. But historians also want a sense of the totality of change. They need to know not only what we can add to the counter-factual but also how the history that happened changed the counter-factual part that did not happen.

WHETHER BY VISIBLE OR INVISIBLE HAND: THE INTRACTABLE PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN CATCH UP

Can a strong convergence process be set in motion which will give hope that transition countries begin to catch up with the Western world? The collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe in 1989, and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, led everywhere to a re-evaluation of the past and a more optimistic appreciation of the pre-1945 potential of this part of the European economy. Specifically, what has been suggested is that before 1945 the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were already well into the process of modern economic growth and towards convergence with the advanced West, and that the subsequent imposition of centralised planning did long term harm to the regions prospects. Envious comparisons have been made with near neighbours such as Austria or more distant examples such as Spain and Italy. This historical revisionism has been used to support the view that, once they were freed from state control in the 1990s, these new market economies would have bright prospects. Nowhere, however, have these high hopes been borne out. This paper argues that a precondition for the explanation of this failure has to be a recognition that this optimistic view of the past is false, and that these economies have been and continue to be the victims of much longer run inequalities in the world economy.

Social Inequality and the Continuing Russian Mortality Crisis

This paper re-examines the Russian mortality crisis drawing attention to the evidence of the intensification of pre-existing mortality gradients and their relationships to social inequality. The paper notes that social scientists and area specialists have lagged behind health and demographic specialists in drawing attention to the links between social inequality and death in Russia. It suggests that social epidemiological approaches offer a way to link the analysis of death to the economic and social structures of society in Russia.

Provocation: Business schools and economic crisis – a need for a rethink?

This paper reviews the main elements of the development of the financial and economic crisis from 2007/8. It considers the extent to which the teaching of business schools contributed to this in terms of misleading approaches to the issue of managers, leadership, human resource development research methods and so on. It argues that business school teaching has been too much for business rather than about it and that critical management studies has come to share this narrower focus.

Soviet history, Red Globalization and the political economy of global capitalism

The collapse of the USSR and its satellites in 1989–1991 had a peculiar impact on our understanding of these societies and, beyond them, the nature of global capitalism as a whole. When these self-styled socialist societies collapsed an “archival revolution” led to enormous advances in our understanding of “the facts”. But there has been no such advance in our understanding of why these “facts” are as they are, nor which ones matter and why. Indeed in the last quarter of a century there has been, alongside this archive revolution, something of a theoretical counterrevolution or a least a huge regression. This is because the collapse of these societies was taken to confirm not only the victory of “the west” but also the adequacy of its narrative from the cold war. This analysed the USSR and its satellites in terms of an ideologically driven, totalitarian model. The aim of its proponents was to capture the essential nature of the Soviet phenomenon (and related phenomena) as well as to separate them from the ostensibly more benign social, economic and political forms of “the west”. If the cold war was a choice of two alternatives (good vs. evil, west vs. east, market vs. state, democracy vs. dictatorship, capitalism vs. socialism, etc.) then the fact that one side all but collapsed and the other claimed victory inevitability meant that the victors’ dominant ideas have been taken up too. Within these societies the focus on analysing the old regimes as internally driven entities whose dictators and top cliques imposed their ideological choices, and used repression to enforce them, also serves a useful political function. It isolates the successor regimes and their leaders from being tarred with the brush of the past. It allows them to emphasize discontinuity rather than continuity. Totalitarianism was, and is, a theory of absolution – we did what we did because we had no choice. But in the West during the cold war years the various versions of the totalitarian approach never had it all their own way. Even within the mainstream, minority traditions doubted the explanatory adequacy of the totalitarian model. The issue was not that these societies were not brutally repressive – they were. It was the analytical value of this highly politicized, ideologically driven, top down approach to how they worked. These mainstream doubters were pushed also by the fact that to the left of them was a vibrant debate amongst western Marxists about the nature of the USSR and its satellites as well as an underground debate in these societies themselves. The best analysis of this is Marcel van der Linden’s encyclopaedic Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (2007). A measure of the scale of the debate can be gained by glancing at its bibliography which runs to over 30 pages and has a thousand or so references, ranging from short

Global labour, global business, global crisis

This paper contextualises this special issue of the IJMCP on global labour by surveying the state of formation of the global labour force. Drawing on ILO data it distinguishes several groups within the global labour force. It notes problems in measuring the size of these groups and the debates about their nature and draws attention to the contributions of the papers that follow. It then considers how the global crisis that began in 2008 is affecting the global labour force and the light thrown on this by the papers in this issue.