Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (141 page)

One reason why the Soviet leaders were, in the end, anxious to get out of Afghanistan was their fear that the guerrilla warfare might spread into the nearby Muslim areas of Soviet Asia. Soviet state theory had no clearer answer to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism than Marxism had had. The Bolsheviks had attached little weight to Islam as a whole. ‘The putrescent tissue of Islam’, Trotsky thought, ‘will vanish at the first puff.’ It was Islam which had to fear change, from ‘the Eastern Woman, who is to be the great centre of future revolutions’.
⁵³
Stalin and still more Khrushchev and Brezhnev sought to run Islam as they ran the Orthodox Church, through pliable state clerics. At the 1970 Tashkent Muslim Conference, the Mufti Ahmed Habibullak Bozgoviev praised Soviet leaders who, though infidels, shaped their social policies according to ‘laws that were dictated by God and expounded by his Prophet’. Another delegate said: ‘We admire the genius of the Prophet who preached the social principles of socialism.’
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In the 1970s and 1980s, growth of pilgrimages, cults of sheiks (saints), living and dead, Sufism and excited crowd movements testified to the Muslim revival within Soviet territory, with the Muslim leaders trying, sometimes desperately, to make Muslim practice, including public prayers, Ramadan and other fasts, fit in with Soviet rules, to ‘legitimize Islam’ in terms of Communist society. They sought to encourage Muslims, especially young people, to join Soviet social organizations ‘as Muslims’.
⁵⁵
But Muslim clerics working for the Shah had done exactly the same.

The Islamic revival was part of the wider problem of the Soviet
empire, the great unresolved anomaly of the late twentieth century. In the preface to the 1921 edition of his
Imperialism
, Lenin admitted that it was written ‘with an eye to the Tsarist censorship’, which allowed it to be published in spring 1916 provided that, while attacking all the other empires, it left Tsarist imperialism alone. Hence, said Lenin, ‘I was forced to take as an example … Japan! The careful reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan.’
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Lenin’s theory of imperialism, therefore, contained no attack on its Russian variety, a fact which he and still more his successors found mightily convenient when they came to power and decided to keep as many of the Tsarist possessions as they could. Greater Russian imperialism therefore continued, with the Tsarist provinces and territories transformed into internal satellites christened ‘socialist republics’. In the 1950s Khrushchev introduced a cosmetic process of ‘decolonization’ by issuing decrees (29 August 1957, 22 June 1959) enlarging the powers of cabinets in the federated republics and judicial and administrative independence. But some of his colleagues did not like even these timid measures, and they were reversed after his fall. The 1977 constitution kept a formal federal system in Article 70 and even the dreamlike ‘right of secession’ in Article 72. But in every other respect it was a monolithic document making the aim centralization, unity and the emergence of the ‘Soviet people’ as a new historic community, embracing and eventually superseding the fifty-three principal national communities of the USSR.
⁵⁷

Hence in essential respects Soviet imperial policy resembled France’s: a union in which the ‘colonies’ would gradually acquire the cultural and economic advantages of equality with the Greater Russians in return for relinquishing their national aspirations. The policy, like France’s, was based on fake elections and administrative
diktat.
Much more so indeed, since imperial policy was enacted by the party which had a monopoly of all political power, speech and writing, something the French imperialists had never possessed, or even sought. Under the 1977 constitution the principal instruments of integration were the armed forces and the party, with Slavs (chiefly Greater Russians) forming 95 per cent of all general officers and the Supreme Soviet. Slavs dominated all the key state bodies and, through the party, controlled the selection of political, administrative and technical cadres at all levels in the non-Russian republics.
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As late as the 1980s, language was used as the dissolvent of national cohesion, the number of schools teaching in Russian rising fast and knowledge of Russian being essential for social advancement. Even when a complete national system of education existed, Russian was made obligatory from start to finish.
⁵⁹

Where national education systems were incomplete, a change to Russian at some stage became mandatory. As a result, national groups whose languages were in decline from the 1950s included the Baltic peoples, the Belorussians, the Moldavians, the 1.8 million Germans and the Jews. Even in the Ukraine, there were accusations that Russian was taking over from Ukrainian in higher education. Teaching in national languages as a proportion of the total was in decline throughout Soviet Russia.
⁶⁰

As we have seen, however, French assimilationist imperialism failed, not least for demographic reasons. One of the lessons of the twentieth century is that high birth-rates in the subject peoples are a mortal enemy of colonialism. Until the coming of Bolshevism, Russia had one of the world’s most dynamic populations. The total ‘demographic deficit’ caused by the First World War, the Civil War and Lenin’s famine, Stalin’s famine and the Great Purges, and the Second World War amounted to 60 million over the whole period, partly offset by the 20 million gained by the acquisition of the Baltic States, Bessarabia, Karelia, Soviet Poland, Bukovina and other territories.
⁶¹
There was some demographic dynamism 1945–58 and the annual growth-rate 1959–70 was 1.34 per cent, high by European standards, though falling. In the 1970s it seems to have averaged less than 1 per cent. Soviet demographers expected the 1970 census to produce a figure of over 250 million, with a projection of 350 million by the end of the century. In fact the 1970 total fell 10 million short and the 1979 figure produced only 262,436,000, meaning a population of not much over 300 million in 2000
AD
. What the 1970 census revealed for the first time was a dual birth-rate: low in Slavic and Baltic Russia, high in the eastern USSR, Central Asia and the Caucasus. In the 1960s alone the Muslim population leapt from 24 to 35 million, adding another 14 million in the 1970s, giving a total of about 50 million by the beginning of the 1980s. By this point it was clear that at the turn of the century Central Asia and Caucasia would contribute about 100 million, that is a third, of the total.
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Even by 1979, the 137 million Great Russians, a markedly ageing population compared to the non-Slavs, felt demographically on the defensive, their growth rate well under 1 per cent, against 2.5 to 3.5 per cent for Soviet Muslims. It was significant, too, that among Muslims knowledge of Russian was declining.
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Soviet Russia was not the only country worried by demographic trends. Total world population had been 1,262 million in 1900; by 1930 it had passed the 2-billion-mark; it was 2,515 million by 1950, passed the 3-billion-mark by 1960 and the 4-billion-mark by 1975. By 1987 it was over 5 billion, and was increasing at the
rate of 80 million a year or 150 a minute. One calculation put the estimated world population in the year 2000 at 6,130 million, a five-fold increase during the century.
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How were these additional billions to be fed? Modern developing societies go through a cycle known as the ‘demographic transition’. In the first phase, scientific medicine and public health reduce infant mortality and infectious diseases, thus cutting the death-rate, while the birth-rate remains high at its old replacement rate. So population rises fast. In the second phase, rising living standards cause the birth-rate to fall. The rate of population increase slows down and eventually comes into balance. Between the first and second phases, however, population jumps alarmingly and may produce violent political consequences. In Europe the ‘transition’ began with the Industrial Revolution, 1760–1870, and was virtually complete by the 1970s, by which time the birth-rate had fallen below the critical 20-per-thousand mark even in Russia (1964), Yugoslavia (1967) and Portugal and Spain (1969). The European demographic transition spans and helps to explain the whole cycle of colonization and decolonization. Japan followed a similar pattern somewhat later than the European average. In the 1920s its birth-rate was still 34-per-thousand and the death-rate was falling precipitously, from 30-per-thousand at the beginning of the decade to 18 at the end. Hence Japan’s growing desperation. But even in the inter-war period the second phase was beginning, since in the later 1930s the birth-rate dipped below the 30-mark for the first time. Despite an immediately post-war upturn (a universal phenomenon) it continued to fall thereafter, moving below the 20-mark in the second half of the 1950s.
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Japan’s population problem, once so threatening, was therefore ‘solved’ by the 1960s.

The conclusions to be drawn from the theory of the demographic transition were twofold. First, there was no need to panic even when the first phase produced its maximum effects in Asia, Latin America and Africa. But second, there was a real need to try to improve industrial growth-rates in the developing countries in order to reach the second phase there as rapidly as possible. Birth-control programmes and techniques were helpful but not decisive since effective use of contraception was a symptom, rather than a cause, of the decelerating birth-rate, which was the consequence of economic betterment. The great thing was to push up living standards: this was the real answer to those who opposed growth policies on environmental grounds.

It is true that a rising
GNP
does not necessarily bring down the birth-rate immediately or, when it does so, at a uniform rate. But there were encouraging signs in the 1970s that China was entering
the second phase of the transition, though death-rates had still a good deal to fall before they stabilized. In 1979, the US Census Bureau estimated the population of China at 1,010 million and calculated that it had undergone a sharp drop in the rate of increase; this largely accounted for the deceleration in the world growth-rate, which fell from an average of 2.1 per cent a year in the late 1960s and 1.9 per cent in the early 1970s to 1.7 per cent in the late 1970s. By the early 1980s the Asian growth-rate as a whole was under 1.9 per cent, not much more than the world average. The Latin-American growth-rate had slowed to 2.4 per cent. The only area where the growth rate had actually increased, from 2.5 to 2.9 per cent (1979 figures), was Africa, which was exactly what demographers had expected.
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The most important news during the 1980s, perhaps, was that the population of China appeared virtually to have stabilized. A nationwide census in July 1982 gave a total population of 1,008,175,288; and a UN estimate three years later reported 1,059,521,000, though a figure of 1,072,200,000 was also published in the late 1980s. The news from India caused rather more concern: the 1981 census reported a population of 685,184,692; a 1985 UN estimate showed a rise to approximately 750,900,000, though another estimate put the total at not much over 748 million. These figures too indicated deceleration, though at a slower rate than in China.
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Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the areas of highest population increase remained Central America and, above all, Africa, though in most of the latter accurate figures were increasingly difficult to obtain. Calculations made in the early 1960s indicated that the point at which higher living standards began to affect the birth-rate was when
per capita
incomes passed the barrier of $400 (at 1964 value). By the early 1990s, and allowing for inflation which raised the figure to about $2,000, few Central American and virtually no black African states had broken through this barrier. The experience of the 1970s and 1980s appeared, in general, to confirm the theory of population growth and deceleration. In short, the ‘population explosion’ was not an explosion at all but a curve linked to economic development: it could be contained by sensible growth policies.

How could such policies be promoted? The problem was not technical. Scientific farming was practised on a prodigious scale in the advanced countries in the years after 1945; knowledge, and its dissemination, increased steadily. The capitalist, market-orientated agricultural systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina and Western Europe produced huge and increasing surpluses in the 1970s and still more in the 1980s. These areas alone could feed the entire world, if necessary, and at a price. The problem,
rather, was political, and especially the adoption of collectivist systems of agriculture, with their lack of financial incentives to farmers, their gross inefficiency, and not least their neglect of market factors and the need for an efficient distribution system. Lenin, like Marx, had been a victim of the ‘physical fallacy’: the belief that only those who made goods or grew food were ‘honest’ workers; all middlemen were parasites. Lenin had denounced them as ‘bagmen’, ‘thieves’, ‘plunderers’, ‘economic bandits’ and the like. Such attitudes persisted in the Soviet system and were exported to Eastern Europe, and to wherever in Asia, Africa and Latin America the collectivist, Soviet-style system was implemented.

The result was calamitous as a rule. In India, though Soviet influence was strong, serious efforts were made to give peasant-farmers incentives to modernize, and both funds and technical instruction were made available on a large scale. As a result, India was able to feed itself in the 1980s and even to achieve an overall, if modest, surplus for export. In China investment and the promotion of some market practices, combined with a refusal to echo Lenin’s contempt for the middleman – the Chinese are particularly gifted at running distribution systems, both at home and as expatriates – enabled China, too, to feed itself in the 1980s. In most other collectivist areas, however, the picture was dismal.