The Soviet economic system has been the subject of such bitter controversy that we must try to look at it today as calmly as we can if we want to get a fairly accurate picture. Russia is not, and has not been in the past quarter century, the economic and social utopia pictured by some pro-Soviet writers in the United States. On the other hand, it has not been the unrelieved hell, compounded of brutality and inefficiency, painted by anti-Soviet writers. It has been a vast, churned up, yeasty mixture of good and bad, of achievement and failure, of aspirations for the better things of life and attempts to attain them by violent short cuts. Those short cuts involved much cruelty toward individuals who for one reason or another stood in the way or opposed certain practices. Often the result was loss or wastage of lives, talents, and material—but also remarkable success in achieving the industrialization of a relatively backward nation.

The first thing that strikes Americans when they look at Russia is that it is not what we call a capitalistic country. Now what do we mean by capitalism? We usually mean an economic system under which private individuals can accumulate money or capital and can invest this capital in enterprises controlled either by an individual or by a group of individuals formed into a corporation. The investment is at private risk and for private gain. Capitalism means also the opportunity for the individual to create his own private business and to sell his products freely for whatever the market will bring. Many of these opportunities have not existed in Russia since 1917.
The end of Russian capitalism

But we must again look back at Russia’s history and remember that, before 1917, ownership of private property by individuals was far less widespread than in the United States or the countries of western Europe. Russia had only a small middle class, wedged in between the monarchy and aristocracy at the top, and the vast masses of poor peasants and underprivileged factory workers at the bottom.

In Western countries the presence of a middle class, constantly replenished from the ranks of workers and peasants, served to cushion the shock of revolutionary movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because Russia had only a new and weak middle class in 1917 it could not make an orderly change from absolutist monarchy to a political system similar to that of Britain, the United States, or republican France.

When capitalism was suppressed by the Soviet government in 1917, therefore, it was not the far-reaching and fundamental change in the country’s economic system that a similar change would be in the United States. The relatively few members of the aristocracy and the rising middle class were deprived of all property that could be used in productive enterprise. Manyof them were driven into exile, executed, or imprisoned. For the individuals involved, these things were tragic. We would be glossing over human cruelty to forget this.