The Thinking Reed

As a result society experienced on the one hand, many centuries of stagnation and, on the other, the suppression of all freedom of thought. The historical good fortune of the European peoples, a long-lasting condition of ‘dual power’ (in the period when the modern nations were being formed), the rivalry of church and state (poorly developed, alas, in Russia), was unknown in the East. This situation created in the West the possibility for the development of political and social alternatives, ideological conflict, innovation. Where that was not the case, hyperconservatism triumphed.

Fully comprehensible, therefore, are the conclusions of V. Lukin: that in the twentieth century the state has become an object of deification most often in countries which have

very rich historical traditions of mutual relations between the state and its subjects, traditions connected with the retention of numerous survivals of what Marx called ‘the Asiatic mode of production’.125

Again we move from ancient times to the problems of the present day. This actuality of historical investigations is especially evident in the books of Cheshkov, who, writing as both sociologist and historian, comes in the course of his research upon the coincidence between the basic features of the Asiatic mode of production and the contemporary statocracy. Studying medieval Vietnam, he arrived at the conclusion that its economic system could be called ‘state feudalism’:

Its economic basis was the state’s monopoly of land, a monopoly which made the state a real, and not merely a juridical, landowner. This monopoly was realized in the existence of a substantial state revenue, in the organization of basic irrigation works by the state, in the predominance of a conditional form of feudal landownership, and the direct merging of the economically dominant class with the state as a whole — a ‘state-class’. In consequence of this, the state appears not merely as a superstructural phenomenon but also as a participant, a subject in the relations of production.126

Such a ‘state of feudalism’ was, in essentials, closer not to Western feudalism (really it was something quite different) but to contemporary statocracy, whether in Algeria, China, Vietnam or the Soviet Union. One and the same phenomenon, the ‘state class’ or ‘class-apparatus’, appears in different forms in different epochs. In Cheshkov’s works the discussions of present-day statocracy and of the Asiatic mode of production resemble each other closely. In fifteenth-century Vietnam Cheshkov reveals the existence of ‘a stratum of nomenklatura officials’ who possessed immense political and economic power.127 In medieval Vietnam there was not only separation of the executive from the supervisory organs, something new for the Russian bureaucracy (it developed here only in the Soviet period) but there also appeared important political institutions that were absolutely similar to Soviet ones:

The central apparatus included also several (to use modern terminology) ideological institutions. Among them the most important was the Academy of Scholars (Khan lyam v 'en), the Department for Compiling the State’s History (Kyok ty vien or Shui kwan), the Imperial School (Tkhay ty vien or Kuok ty zhyam), the Department of Edicts (Doung kak) and a number of others.128

How reminiscent this is of the Soviet statocracy, with its Higher Party School and its departments for compiling the Party’s history! ‘Very important also’, Cheshkov continues,