David Lane: Leninism: A Sociological Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £4.50.
David Lane is Britain's foremost academic writer on contemporary Russia; his Politics and Society in the USSR is a standard student text. In this book he tries to step out of the descriptive style of his earlier works, to provide an ambitious account of Leninism as a sociology of development. To achieve this he reviews the historic context of the October Revolution, the role of the Bolsheviks in power, (particularly explanations of the rise of Stalin), and finally attempts a 'general theory' of the revolutionary process, using the 'complementary' approaches of Talcott Parsons and Karl Marx (all in 138 pages).
The book owes more to the card index than to literary imagination — nearly every sentence is referenced or includes a quote. It reads as if it had been explicitly designed to put off the lay-reader. This is partly a result of the writer's commitment to 'ethical neutrality', which in practice means giving everyone an equal mention. As for sources, [illegible] read Lenin thoroughly, but other theorists of socialist development — Trotsky, Stalin, Kollontai, Kautsky — are discussed at second hand.
This weakens the authority of the text particularly in the first half of the book where — on the basis of a discussion of the state, the party, imperialism and soviets — Lane derives a 'political sociology' of Leninism. The result is pathetic. It amounts to the following; the focus of revolution has moved from West to East; in the under-developed world the 'class struggle has a national form'; social sciences are in fact class sciences: and the party has to play a 'crucial and dominant role in the liberation of the masses'.
When Lane does seem to have a clear perspective is in the ensuing discussion of whether Leninism caused the degeneration of the Soviet revolution. This is the most successful section of the book and provides a clear summary of contemporary and modern accounts. His purpose here is to establish four types of explanation of the 'Stalinist phenomenon' which can be summarised as follows:
(1) The revolution failed because of the under-development of the productive forces (Kautsky, Kolakowski).
(2) The revolution matured as it did because of the limitation of the country's cultural development (Solzhenitsyn, Tucker).
(3) Stalin's personality accounts for the degree of distortion from the socialist path (Khrushchev, Medvedev).
(4) The revolution degenerated because of the structural isolation of its economy in the capitalist world system (Trotsky, Mandel, Bettelheim).
Of these, Lane initially appears to favour the second explanation; but as it transpires, this is only a backcloth to his central project, namely, a synthesis of the four theories by combining, 'the strengths of historical materialism with the paradigm of Talcott Parsons...' (p.110). Those who know something of Parsons (he was an exponent of conservative American sociology, usually labelled 'functionalism') will recognise this as daring to say the least.