Contenu du sommaire : Cultures économiques et politiques économiques dans l'Empire tsariste et en URSS, 1861 - 1950

Alberto Masoero, Social landscapes and routes of intellectual development. The travelling fellowships of Russian economists in foreign countries during the 1860 'sand 1870 s. The article examines the travels and studies abroad (komandirovki) of some fifteen Russian doctoral students preparing for an academic career in economics and related disciplines in the 1860's and 1870's. Among them are V.A. Lebedev, M.M. Vol'skii, N.I. Ziber, A.I. Chuprov, N.A. Kablukov, and I.I. Ianzhul. The inquiry makes extensive use of the progress reports these future professors sent periodically to Russia while attending courses at various European universities. Other sources employed include memoirs, journal correspondence, and writings published during or immediately after the journey in the West.

Peter Gatrell, Economic culture, economic policy and economic growth in Russia, 1861- 1914. Rapid economic growth in late imperial Russia was associated with the operation of different economic cultures, perceptions and modes of behaviour. The culture of entrepreneurship, which embodied notions of reward for entrepreneurial risk-taking, stood in sharp contrast to a deeply-entrenched bureaucratic culture, which manifested suspicion towards private enterprise. Bureaucratic culture found expression in arbitrary administrative intervention and conservative tutelage (opeka). An explanation for arbitrariness (proizvol) is found in an underdeveloped administrative capacity and in the attendant insecurity of government. Insecurity on the international plane reflected industrial underdevelopment, but the promotion of industry generated fresh tensioas between state and private enterprise. The era of Bunge (Minister of Finances, 1882- 1886) represented a bold attempt to modernize the fiscal system and to create new foundations for private enterprise, but these initiatives were not sustained. Assailed by contending cultures and social forces, bureaucratic economic culture proved resistant to change.

Stefan Plaggenborg, Tax policy and the question of peasant poverty in tsarist Russia, 1881-1905. One of the most controversial debates among historians concerns the question of peasant poverty during industrialization in Russia 1880-1905. It is the central contention of this article that the tax policy initiated by the Russian Ministers of Finance did not ruin the peasant economy, and, indeed, did not result in the impoverishment of the peasant masses. Peasants were not seriouly burdened by either direct or indirect taxation. Whereas peasants were more and more relieved from state taxes, "modern" sectors of economy were levied more heavily: real estate in towns, capital rents, and industry itself. Moreover, the per capita-tax burdens for excise taxes turned out to be significantly higher in urban and industrial areas than in agrarian ones. This result should be regarded in connection with revisionist interpretations on peasant poverty, indicating that the situation of Russia's peasants in general did improve or at least did not worsen during industrialization. Although poverty existed, it was not caused by tax policy.

Alessandro Stanziani, Specialists, bureaucrats and peasants. The agricultural supplies during the First World War, 1914-1917. Is there any difference between the tsarist administration of the economy and a war economy, i.e. between an agrarian bureaucracy and a militarized industrial bureaucracy? In order to answer this question, the author describes the opposition among different branches of the tsarist bureaucracy and, within each branch, the opposition between the administrators and the specialists. In particular, the author analyzes the formation and the evolution of the main administrative organizations in charge of the management of the economy: the General Conference of the Ministry of Agriculture, the economic bureau of the zemstva, towns, cooperatives, etc. In all these cases, the relationship between economic knowledge and administrative practice is discussed. At the same time, the political role of economic knowledge cannot be fully understood without taking the peasantry into consideration. The last paragraph of the paper describes the action of the war in the countryside. Different kinds of exchanges are developed; the organization of the agrarian production also changes: men go to war, and the village is led by women, teenagers and old men. The author tries to show the result of those phenomena on social hierarchies, i.e. on the relations between peasants and landlords, between different social groups and generations of peasants, and finally between peasants and towns.

Andrea Graziosi, At the roots of Soviet industrial relations and practices. Piatakovs Donbass in 1921. Using documents from different Russian archives, the author tries to reconstruct the passage from War Communism to the NEP in the crucial mining and industrial region of the Donbass. The analysis is developed along three main directions: the social and national tensioas arising from the rigid application of militarization policies in the region; the development, in the context of famine and overt confrontation with the work force, of most of the labor policies later applied on a Soviet scale in the 1930's; the political conflicts provoked at the local level by G.L. Piatakov's initiatives, and their repercussions in Moscow in the context of the fierce struggle opposing Trotskii to the majority of the party. Special attention is devoted to Lenin's ambiguous role and to the formation of Stalin's personal following as well as to the making of a Stalinist ideology.

David Shearer, Wheeling and dealing in Soviet industry: Syndicates, trade, and political economy at the end of the 1920s. The story of rapid industrialization and the transition from NEP to a bureaucratically administered economy in the late 1920's and early 1930's is often told as if it was an inevitable process. The history of the syndicated trade movement in Soviet industry shows that this was not so. The rise of the syndicates to their preeminent position during the last years of the 1920's attests to the persistence, not the diminishing strength, of a viable commercial culture within the state-owned industrial sectors of the Soviet economy. The brief but successful story of the syndicates in the last years of the 1920's opened up the intriguing possibility of a middle way, a way to combine commercial organization of the economy with planned indastrial development. This article examines the activities of the syndicates in the late 1920's and their tangled web of relations with the state's industrial producers and chief economic administrations. This paper argues that Stalinist party officials and economic planners did not see the syndicates as a weapon to use against NEP, as we have traditionally believed, but as a danger to their own plans. The Stalinists' campaign in 1929 and 1930 to abolish the syndicates testified to the threat the syndicates posed to the building of a centralized industrial state. Destruction of industry's nascent commercial culture and the construction of a centralized, bureaucratic economy was not the inevitable consequence of rapid industrialization, but the result of the Stalinists' political will to build a powerful state.

Heinrich Schwendemann, German-Soviet economic relations at the time of the Hitler- Stalin pact, 1939-1941. In this article, which included a short summary of the author's monograph about the same subject, the economic cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union, utterly neglected by scholarship in the past, is ranged in the two states' political relations between 1939 and 1941. By analyzing the economic cooperation and taking a new methodological approach about the communication structures between Berlin and Moscow, the author comes to new conclusions not only about the scale of economic cooperation but also about the motives and strategies of the German and Soviet sides. It can be given as a plausible explanation of the question why Stalin fell victim to his disastrous misjudgement of Hitler's intentions till the last hours before the German attack on June 22, 194 1 .

Marta Craveri, Oleg Khlevniuk, The crisis of the economic system of MVD, late 1940s- 1950s. On the basis of documents from the Ministry of Internal Security, the Sovnarkom and the Party Central Committee, the authors analyze the problems plaguing the final years of the economic empire administered by the Soviet security forces. They also analyze the various attempts at reforming the utilization of forced labor carried out after the death of Stalin. Special attention is paid to the crucial years between 1953 and 1956.

Jacques Sapir, Economie culture, technological culture, organizational culture: Elements allowing to interpret Russian and Soviet economic history. The problem of economic culture constitutes one of the inevitable transit points of all reflection on the economic future of post-Soviet Russia. Whenever behavior does not comply with expectations it is usual to ascribe the source of these regrettable dysfunctions to economic culture — and more specifically to discrepancies dubbed archaisms The notion of economic culture acts in this case simultaneously as a saturating assumption and as a normative model : cultures that do not enhance the value of the market are being labelled simply as archaic. Yet, the notion of economic culture might be extremely useful to understand the differences and the specificities of each eonomic path. This notion connects History with Economy and — when correctly defined — provides a most pertinent analytical instrument.