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Russia and Asia: Problems of Contemporary Area Studies and International Relations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Karl A. Wittfogel
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Extract

The educated American of the middle nineteenth century who took an inventory of his knowledge of the world found himself much more poorly informed on Asia than on Europe. The reason for this is manifest. America's relations with Asia were fragmented and peripheral, trade alone being a major concern. Interaction with Europe proceeded on an entirely different plane: For the New World, Europe was an inexhaustible source of population increase and personal contacts, of monies for economic growth, and of technological, artistic, and educational inspiration.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , July 1950 , pp. 445 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1950

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References

1 A student of contemporary Russia, who, however tentatively, grants the validity of this claim, is methodologically bound to ask whether knowledge of the basic features of Oriental society is imperative for the analysis of the U.S.S.R. The question has an institutional as well as a genetic aspect; and each requires a separate answer.

Soviet society as an institutional phenomenon may, of course, be approached exclusively on the basis of Western experience and with purely Western criteria. But it soon becomes apparent that the traditional Western concepts are inadequate. They have to be modified or replaced by categories which take into account the peculiarities of a functional (managerial) state and the autocratic rule of the masters of such a state. Investigation of these phenomena may be greatly aided by comparison with related conditions; and in this respect the institutions of Asia are infinitely more suggestive than those of Western antiquity, feudalism, or absolutism.

Thus knowledge of Oriental society is an effective supplementary, though not a necessary, research tool for the analysis of the character of Soviet society. For the study of the genesis of this society it is essential. Whether or not we assume that until 1917 the Tsarist bureaucracy maintained a quasi- (or “semi-”) Oriental hegemony over Russian society, the impact of Asia upon Russia's political, economic, and social development is too fully documented to be disregarded by serious scholarship; and the quality and dimension of the Asiatic impact can obviously be determined only by an analyst familiar with the institutional conditions that prevail in the centers and along the marginal and submarginal periphery of Oriental society.

As indicated above, the genetic analysis of the Soviet Union has fateful implications for the entire non-Soviet part of the globe. Did the Russian apparatchik society originate under circumstances similar to those of the West? Or was the growth of this society strongly—and perhaps decisively—encouraged by a peculiar “Asiatic” background that existed in Russia, but that was entirely, or almost entirely, absent in the property-based countries of the modern industrial world? This question cannot even be properly posed, and still less can it be properly answered, without a full knowledge of the character, the morphological shades, and the historical influence of Oriental society.