In yesterday’s issue of Kommersant, Sergei Minaev, a regular contributor to the newspaper’s weekly analytical supplement Власть (Vlast’), published a noteworthy piece on the propensity of Russian citizens and statesmen to measure what happens in their country by the yardstick of foreign standards. Titled, “Half a Century in Pursuit,” the article is a brief history of Soviet-era efforts to “catch and surpass” Western rivals in everything from economic production to Olympic medals. Minaev argues that it was only during the tenure of First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964) that rhetoric concerning the need to best the West came to focus increasingly on beating the United States. He concludes his article by noting that, “For post-Soviet Russia’s citizens and politicians, the legacy of the Khrushchev period has been a habit of both appropriately and inappropriately comparing Russia with America.”

On the whole, I agree with the article’s implicit argument regarding the importance of the West to Russians’ self-perceptions. Indeed, as I noted some time back in a lengthy post “In Defense of Russian Backwardness,” the conscious comparison of national standing vis-a-vis the Western world is an aspect of Russia’s cultural tradition that is essential to understanding the nation’s past and present. Still, I think the short piece gives short-shrift to some relevant history.

Specifically, the claim that the Khrushchev era was the period in which comparisons with America came to dominate Party rhetoric strikes me as mistaken. While it is true that earlier “the Bolsheviks were no less concerned with catching up with and overtaking Germany, France, or Great Britain,” it is not accurate that prior to the 1950s the United States was seen as “merely one of a number of capitalist countries that were used as examples” for promoting industrial, economic, and other policies.

The United States occupied a special place in the eyes of Bolshevik leaders from the very outset of the Soviet regime. As they set out to construct their imagined “new world” based on advanced technology, heavy industry, and efficient production methods, prominent party figures and lesser functionaries continually looked to real, existing capitalism in the United States for methods and practices that they could adapt to the quest of building socialism.

As Alan Ball notes in his 2003 study Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia:

“Time and again, [Soviet leaders] distinguished American from European capitalist lands antiquated by remnants of musty tradition. The stifling hand of the feudal past did not grip the New World as it did the old, they contended, and thus the United States possessed vigor unmatched in Europe. …Apart from specific products, Bolsheviks perceived American assembly-line techniques in enormous factories as best suited for industrializing their own country. ‘In the scale of its economy, in the methods of production (mass production, standardizations, and so forth),” remarked Anastas Mikoyan, commissar of trade in 1930, ‘America is the most appropriate for us.’”¹

If the article misfires in locating the origins of Russia’s obsession with the “American model” in the 1950s, it does make the convincing case that at no time was this attitude on more conspicuous display than during Nikita Khrushchev’s tenure as First Secretary; a fact attested to as well by the following newsreel footage courtesy (once again) YouTube:

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1. Alan Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia, New York: Rowman & Littlefield (2003), 24. [↩]