B. Pyadyshev's The Military-Industrial Complex of the USA is a short, densely footnoted account of how the American arms establishment acquired its grip on Washington — the committee system, the procurement scandals, the propaganda apparatus, the doctrines from containment to the Guam Doctrine — and it is built, almost entirely, out of American sources. Its hundred and seven notes cite C. Wright Mills, Arthur Schlesinger, Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Maxwell Taylor, Herman Kahn, Ralph Lapp, Hanson Baldwin, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, the Pentagon Papers, the Congressional Record, Senator Proxmire's Report from Wasteland, Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power, Melvin Laird's own budget testimony, and — more than any other single authority — Adam Yarmolinsky's The Military Establishment, which the book itself introduces as the work of a "one-time US Assistant Secretary of Defense" and calls "perhaps the most circumstantial analysis of the MIC in US literature." It is a serious piece of work. Its thesis about the United States is broadly correct. And the argument it exists to make — that the military-industrial complex is the chief obstacle to détente — is one that quietly contradicts the theory the book claims to be applying, and that requires, in order to stand up, the erasure of every armed institution east of the Elbe.
Start with the date, because for once it is not the usual problem. Progress titles in this series habitually arrive years late — Bogdanov's The US War Machine and Politics carries 1986 over a 1983 Russian text; Nikitin's The Ultras in the USA carries 1981 over a text from the middle 1970s. This one does not. The Russian imprint code reads 1977, and the text behind it closes in 1976. The 25th Congress of the CPSU, held in February 1976, is quoted in the introduction, cited in the conclusion and named as the book's political frame; the latest dated source anywhere in the notes is U.S. News & World Report of 12 April 1976. Gerald Ford appears three times. Jimmy Carter, who won the presidency in November 1976 and took office in January 1977, does not appear at all. Soviet books about America date themselves by which president they know about, and this one knows about Ford. A one-year lag between Moscow and the English edition is, for Progress, near-simultaneous publication.
That matters for what follows, because it means several of the silences a reader might expect to find damning are not findings at all. Afghanistan does not occur in this book, and cannot: the Soviet invasion was three years away. Neither does the Strategic Defense Initiative, nor "Star Wars", nor Reagan — all of them anachronisms for a text finished in 1976. Where nil returns do count, they count for different reasons, and I set them out below.
Progress titles were commissioned, and the commission here is legible in the front matter. The publisher's own blurb states the argument in one sentence: "With the swing away from the cold war and towards detente, and the ever broader acceptance of the principles of peaceful coexistence, the MIC appears as the chief adversary of the new tendencies in international affairs." The introduction rehearses the Peace Programme of the 24th Congress, the Basic Principles of Mutual Relations signed in Moscow in May 1972, the Helsinki Final Act of summer 1975, and Brezhnev's Helsinki speech. The word detente occurs twenty-six times, peaceful coexistence twenty-one.
The intended reader is not primarily a Soviet one. The book's climactic statement of its own thesis — the passage that opens the conclusion, on the complex commanding "the economic life of whole cities and regions" and intervening "in intellectual and academic life through research grants, 'think tank' projects and selective subsidies to universities" — is a quotation, and it is quoted not from a Soviet authority but from the New Program of the Communist Party U.S.A. (New York, 1970). The 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties is cited three times. This is a book addressed outward, to the Western communist parties and to the broad constituency of détente in Western Europe and North America, and its job is to supply them with a theory of who is blocking it.
That job determines the book's shape. If the obstacle to détente is a faction — identifiable, based in particular corporations and particular congressional districts, opposed by those other sections of the American ruling class in whom Pyadyshev detects a growing demand for "a more realistic approach to world developments" — then détente is a policy that can succeed by strengthening the sensible Americans against the dangerous ones. Nothing is then required of Soviet policy except patience. This is diplomacy written in the vocabulary of class analysis, and the vocabulary does not survive the contact.
It has to be said plainly, and it is the reason the criticism that follows lands at all. On the United States, Pyadyshev is often exact and occasionally excellent.
He is scrupulous where the companion volumes in this series are not. Bogdanov, writing nine years later on the same subject, records only that Eisenhower "considered it necessary in his farewell speech" to issue a warning. Pyadyshev gives the reader the thing itself: "The term 'military-industrial complex' was first used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech on January 17, 1961" — the date is right — followed by the substantial paragraph from the address, and, some pages later, a second passage from the same speech on the domination of the nation's scholars by "Federal Employment, project allocations and the power of money". A Soviet author under no obligation to credit an American Republican president with the founding insight of his own book credits him, quotes him at length, and gets the date right. Then he criticises him, and the criticism is a real one rather than a reflex: Eisenhower, he writes, "clearly takes a limited class approach of the bourgeois leader"; "he does not regard the accelerated conjunction of the immense military establishment and the vast arms industry as something organic to the socio-economic system of capitalism which rules the USA." Whether or not one accepts the conclusion, that is a legitimate objection to the liberal version of the argument, and it is stated without sneering.
He is good on the electoral geography. The book's account of the congressional committee system is the one that later American scholarship on defence procurement would confirm: "For decades, the Dixiecrats have controlled national defence matters in the Congress." He notes that at the end of the Second World War 40 per cent of Army officers and 44 per cent of Navy officers were Southerners, and that the traffic ran in both directions — "their membership of these committees helped further to concentrate military installations in the Southern states, and this made the military commanders and the Southerners who headed the committees join hands." He identifies states where Pentagon contracts supply over 15 per cent of personal incomes. This is worth flagging because the companion introduction to Bogdanov's volume credits that author with grasping the complex as "a coalition with an electoral geography, not a conspiracy of arms manufacturers." The credit stands, but it should now be shared and re-dated: the insight was already standard equipment in Soviet Americanist writing by 1976. It is a feature of the genre, not of one unusually sophisticated author.
He is good on waste, with the receipts. The General Electric spares bought by the Navy at $82 against $15 elsewhere; the Manned Orbiting Laboratory abandoned after $1,300 million; the Lockheed near-bankruptcy of the early 1970s and the demand for public money to save the C-5A; Litton Industries taking a contract it lacked the plant to fulfil, its chairman having advised the president on government reorganisation before joining the administration in 1973; Proxmire's defeated amendment to cap the military budget at $66,000 million. He traces the budget from $800 million in 1929 through Truman's $14,400 million of 1949 — which he correctly renders as 5.4 per cent of national product — to $47,000 million in 1965, rising to $78,000 million by 1968 under the pressure of Vietnam. Not every figure survives checking: he puts the 1939 budget at "about $6,000 million", which is out by roughly a factor of four, American military spending in that fiscal year having been nearer $1,300 million. The $6,000 million figure belongs to 1941. It is the only substantial numerical error I found, and it runs in the direction that weakens his own case, since a smaller prewar base would have made his curve steeper.
And he is very good indeed on the peace dividend that never came. Having quoted Johnson's 1966 budget message promising progress at home while fighting abroad, and having recorded that in 1968 the Committee for Economic Development and the US Chamber of Commerce published plans for spending the money on housing and cities once the war ended, he delivers the verdict in a single sentence: "Since the end of the war in Vietnam, no one in Washington has recalled the dividends of peace." That was true in 1976 and has remained true through every subsequent American drawdown.
One further point of credit, and it is a real difference from Bogdanov. Pyadyshev sees the American antiwar movement, and takes it seriously. He describes the burned call-up papers and the "combat medals hurled to the ground near the White House by young soldiers sent by the Pentagon to fight in Indochina"; he records that in May 1971 "thousands of soldiers were hurled against the participants of the anti-war movement who thronged the streets of Washington and other American cities"; he notes the movement's connection to the Black movement and the pressure it put on Johnson in March 1968. He even reports, without hostility, that "many Americans are sincerely convinced that the greatest threat to the USA stems from its own MIC." Bogdanov's book, nine years later, has no interest in movements at all. Pyadyshev does. It is the best thing in the book, and it makes what is missing more conspicuous rather than less.
The trouble is not that Pyadyshev is a vulgar economic determinist. He is less of one than Bogdanov, whose account collapses into the claim that "the banks and the shareholders of the military corporations demand investment profitability." Pyadyshev's formulation is two-tiered and better: the complex "has as its political basis the imperialist programme of the US ruling class, and as its material basis, the programme for militarising the US economy and the arms drive with its fabulous profits." Politics first, economics as material base. That is a defensible Marxist structure.
The trouble is that the structure is abandoned the moment the book needs a conclusion. If the complex is "organic to the socio-economic system of capitalism" — Pyadyshev's own charge against Eisenhower's liberalism — then it is not a faction, and it cannot be defeated by the ascendancy of more realistic men within the same ruling class. It is the system's normal form. But the book's whole purpose requires it to be a faction: "the chief adversary of the new tendencies", an obstacle that "anti-MIC groupings" who "have also been establishing positions in influential spheres of the US ruling class" might yet remove. He wants systemic militarism when he is arguing against American liberals and factional militarism when he is arguing for Soviet foreign policy, and he never notices that the two arguments cancel.
This is not a technicality. It is the intellectual signature of détente-era Soviet writing about the West, and it is why the book cannot say anything useful about what détente actually was. Détente was not a contest between American hawks and American doves with Moscow cheering the doves. It was a bargain between two states, each of which was arming heavily throughout it, and the terms of that bargain — recognition of postwar borders, non-interference, the subordination of movements in each bloc to the diplomatic requirements of its patron — were exactly what the book's own audience in the Western communist parties was being asked to accept. A theory that locates all militarism in one bloc cannot describe an agreement between two.
Four claims, all of them about Eastern Europe and Korea, and all four packed into a single stretch of one section — "Illusions of Empire", the opening section of Chapter Four, "The MIC and Foreign Policy". They are worth taking in order, because they escalate.
Korea. "The war against the Korean People's Democratic Republic was started on June 25, 1950." On 25 June 1950 the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th parallel in force, with Stalin's authorisation, given in April 1950 after repeated requests from Kim Il Sung, and with Soviet operational planning assistance — as the Soviet archival material released after 1991 and published through the Cold War International History Project establishes. Bogdanov commits the same falsification nine years later; the recurrence in two separate authors, in different institutions, a decade apart, establishes it as a fixture of the genre rather than one man's lapse. It is worth noting which version is cruder. Bogdanov at least felt the need to insert it as a bracketed authorial gloss on an American source he was quoting, over his own initials. Pyadyshev simply states it, in the passive, as though nobody in particular had done it.
Czechoslovakia. Having described the Berlin crisis of 1948, Pyadyshev continues: "The following year, reactionary circles in Czechoslovakia tried to stage a bourgeois coup with the aid of Western circles." This is wrong twice over. The events were in February 1948, not 1949; and they were not an attempted bourgeois coup but a successful communist one. The non-communist ministers resigned; the Communist Party, holding the Interior Ministry and its police, mobilised armed workers' militias and action committees to purge the state apparatus; Jan Masaryk was found dead beneath a window of the Foreign Ministry on 10 March. Bogdanov's version of this — that the events "ended with the complete victory of the democratic forces" — is at least chronologically accurate. Pyadyshev has moved the date to cover the inversion.
East Berlin, June 1953. This is the one that costs the book most, and it should be quoted in full: "On June 17, 1953, the Berlin provocation was mounted against the German Democratic Republic in the hope of sparking off a tide of revolt across Democratic Germany and so separating it from the other socialist countries. This proved to be a great miscalculation: the working people of the GDR rallied round the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and gave a crushing rebuff to the mutineers."
What happened on 16 and 17 June 1953 was a strike by East Berlin construction workers on the Stalinallee against raised work norms, which spread within a day into a general strike and rising across the industrial cities of the GDR, and which was suppressed by Soviet tanks. The "working people of the GDR" were not the ones administering the rebuff; they were the ones receiving it. A book whose entire method consists of asking which material interests drive which state policies, and which devotes chapters to the American army's deployment against domestic protest, describes a workers' rising against a workers' state as a foreign provocation, and describes the army that crushed it not at all.
Hungary. "In October 1956, a counter-revolutionary uprising was provoked in Hungary with the help of the forces of international reaction, in an effort to wrest Hungary from the ranks of the socialist community and to undermine its unity. The Hungarian people beat back all these encroachments." No Soviet divisions, no Imre Nagy, no workers' councils, no executions.
And one silence that is genuinely a finding, because the events were eight years old and the book is about the obstacles to détente: Czechoslovakia occurs exactly once in this volume, in the sentence misdating 1948. The invasion of August 1968 is not mentioned. In a study of how the militarisation of a superpower distorts its foreign policy, published nine years after the Warsaw Pact invaded a member state, this is not an oversight.
Now the part that can be settled by counting, and where the comparison with Bogdanov's volume becomes worth the trouble.
The following do not occur anywhere in The Military-Industrial Complex of the USA: "Warsaw Pact"; "Warsaw Treaty"; "Soviet military"; "Soviet arms"; any figure for Soviet military expenditure; any figure for the Soviet defence burden as a share of national income or national product; the Soviet defence industry; a Soviet general.
Pyadyshev possesses the correct analytical instrument and uses it well. He reports that spokesmen for the complex want military outlays raised to "10–12 per cent of the gross national product (from 1960 to 1969, the figure averaged 8.9 per cent)". He tracks the arms manufacturers' margins — profits "20–30 per cent higher than those of corporations turning out civilian products". He reaches back to give Truman's 1949 budget as "5.4 per cent of the national product". He knows, in other words, that the share of national product absorbed by the military is the measure that matters, and that the political weight of an arms sector is proportional to it. He applies the measure to one country. Bogdanov, in 1986, does exactly the same thing with the same instrument and the same result: 5–13 per cent of GNP and over a quarter of federal expenditure for the United States, and no Soviet figure at all. Two books, ten years apart, by different authors in different institutions, with an identical hole in the identical place. That is not evasion by an individual; it is a rule of the genre, and naming it as a rule is the point of reading them together.
But it is worth being exact, because the silence is not uniform across these books — it is a gradient, and where a volume sits on it tells you something. Bogdanov at least concedes, once, in his final pages, that a challenge from the American side "only means the Soviet Union will have to answer in kind—by building its own weapons systems." The Soviet arms programme appears in his book as a reflex: an effect with no cause, but an effect that is at least named. Pyadyshev grants less. The nearest this book comes to admitting that the USSR manufactures weapons is a passing reference in the conclusion to "the defence capability of the whole socialist community" — a capability with no producer, no ministry, no budget, no constituency and no cost. There is no Red Army in these pages, no Soviet Army, no Soviet general, no Soviet ministry of defence; the words do not appear. Soviet armaments exist here only as an abstract noun in the possessive.
That is the distinctive thing about this volume, and it is worth separating from the genre pattern. That two Soviet books on American militarism, a decade apart, both apply the burden metric westward and never eastward is a fact about the genre — a third companion volume in this series shows the same shape, and other introductions in the series have now confirmed it independently. What is particular to Pyadyshev is how far the erasure extends. Bogdanov omits a comparison. Pyadyshev omits the institution.
And then, in the same conclusion, the sentence that makes the whole structure visible: "The Soviet Union has no territorial claims on any country whatsoever, has threatened no one and has no intention of attacking anyone."
That sentence had been answered forty years before it was written, and by a reader of the same tradition. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), in the chapter "Foreign Policy and the Army", Trotsky sets down the doctrine of the day: "The present official formula of foreign policy, widely advertised not only by the Soviet diplomacy, which is permitted to speak in the customary language of its profession, but by the Communist International, which is supposed to speak the language of revolution, reads: 'We don't want an inch of foreign land, but we will not surrender an inch of our own.'" His objection is not that the formula is aggressive but that it is conservative — that "retreating step-by-step before the consequences of its own mistakes, the bureaucracy has arrived at the idea of insuring the inviolability of the Soviet Union" by folding it into the European and Asian status quo, a policy he holds to be in absolute conflict with the workers' state's "continual obligation to come to the help of the liberative movements in other countries". Pyadyshev's 1976 sentence is that formula with the negatives multiplied, and his book is that policy's theoretical apparatus: a defence of the status quo written as an attack on militarism.
The same chapter supplies the answer to the book's central silence. Trotsky's subject in it is the restoration of the officer ranks in the Red Army in 1935 — lieutenant to marshal, eighteen years after their revolutionary abolition — and his verdict is precisely the analysis Pyadyshev applies to the Pentagon and refuses to apply at home: "The source of bureaucratism, with its routine and swank, is not the special needs of military affairs, but the political needs of the ruling stratum. In the army, these needs only receive their most finished expression." A Soviet military-industrial interest, with its own castes, its own claim on the best plant and the best engineers, and its own reasons for inflating threats, had been described in print in 1936. Pyadyshev's method could have found it in 1976. His commission would not permit it.
On June 1953, the reply is contemporaneous and specific. The Fourth International printed two treatments of the East German rising within months of it: George Clarke's "The June Days in Review" (vol. XIV no. 2, whole no. 121) and an editorial, "The East German Uprising" (vol. XIV no. 3, whole no. 122). Both carry printed issue dates earlier than the events they describe — March–April and May–June 1953 respectively — and both plainly went to press later; the editorial quotes a German socialist paper of 7 July 1953. Cite them by whole number and by content, not by the date on the cover.
Their content is the direct refutation of Pyadyshev's sentence, and it was written before the dust settled. Clarke: "The movement of June 16–17 was overwhelmingly working class in nature and took the classic forms of strike actions and demonstrations." And, against exactly the reading the Soviet account would adopt: "There was no demand for any change in the forms of property ownership, or anything which could have been construed as a desire for a return to capitalism." The editorial is blunter: "This political uprising of the German workers laid bare the irreconcilable conflict between the working masses and the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy." Note what that editorial says about the bureaucracy in the same passage — that it "consumes and wastes a lion's share of the national income". The metric Pyadyshev applies only to Washington had already been turned eastward by the people he was writing against, and turned eastward in 1953.
On Czechoslovakia the reply is earlier still. The Fourth International's issue vol. IX no. 2 (whole no. 84) carried an analysis of Czechoslovakia written the previous September, prefaced by an editorial note on what had happened in the meantime: "The recent events leading to complete Stalinist domination of the Czech government have put an end to the 'idyllic' conditions in this 'democratic' island among the buffer states of the USSR." That is February 1948, described as what it was, by people with no stake in Washington's version either.
All of that, though, is the tradition answering across decades. The sharper fact is that the specific arguments this book declines to make were being made in English, in print, in the very months it was being translated.
Take the missing number first. On 7 March 1977 — while the Progress edition was in production — Intercontinental Press carried David Frankel's "Pentagon's Real Reason for Stepping Up the Arms Race" (vol. 15, no. 8), which reported the CIA's estimate "that the Kremlin has been spending from 11 to 13 percent of the Soviet gross national product on military programs. In comparison, the Pentagon eats up about 6 percent of the much larger U.S. gross national product." The two figures are not strictly commensurable with Pyadyshev's — his 8.9 per cent is an average across 1960–69, before the post-Vietnam drawdown, and Frankel is relaying a CIA number rather than an independent estimate. But that is the point. The metric Pyadyshev possessed and applied only to Washington was, in the same season, being applied to both capitals in a journal any interested English reader could buy. And Frankel does not use it to make Moscow look bloodthirsty. His argument is that the comparison then current — that the USSR was outspending the Pentagon by a third — was misleading, because Soviet productivity was lower and so "it is more expensive for the Soviet economy to produce weapons." Which cuts the same way: a larger share of a smaller product, buying less. That is a burden, and it was a burden the Soviet population carried.
Second, the concept itself. Three years earlier, in "Detente: Why Both Sides See It as Good Business" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 12, no. 18, 13 May 1974), Dick Roberts had refuted Pyadyshev's central category head-on: "The truth of the matter is that a 'military-industrial complex' apart from and in disagreement with the major sectors of U.S. capital does not exist. The biggest U.S. corporations, like General Electric, make military equipment." He observes that the lesser bomber and missile firms are owned by the same financial interests as everything else, and that the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank "in fact, holds 8.7 percent of the common stock of Boeing." If that is right, there is no faction to isolate and no sensible wing to strengthen, and the entire political architecture of Pyadyshev's book falls.
What makes the piece land is its target. Roberts was arguing against the Daily World, the paper of the Communist Party USA, for describing Senator Jackson as a representative of the military-industrial complex. Pyadyshev's own conclusion, three years later, takes its climactic statement of thesis from the New Program of the Communist Party U.S.A. The argument this book exists to supply to the Western parties was already being contested inside the American left, on the ground the book had chosen, before the book was written. Roberts also noticed the asymmetry Moscow itself observed in practice: listing five top American military contractors then trading with the USSR — Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Litton, Tenneco — he remarks that Moscow lets no notion of a military-industrial complex affect its positions "except where propaganda is concerned." (A word is dropped in the scan at that point; I quote only the clean clause.)
Third, and most awkwardly for the book, the category was turned eastward in these years — by a Soviet Marxist. Intercontinental Press of 5 May 1975 (vol. 13, no. 17) printed Roy Medvedev's "What Lies Ahead for Us? On A.I. Solzhenitsyn's Letter", which contains a section headed, in Medvedev's own text, "The Military-Industrial Complex and the Threat of War". Medvedev writes that détente is hampered by "the pressure from the military-industrial complexes in the USA as well as in the USSR", that "the influence of the Soviet military and military-industrial circles on the adoption of fundamental political decisions has grown since Stalin's death", and — the sentence Pyadyshev's whole conclusion is built to prevent — that the bulk of Soviet divisions west of the border "serve not so much to shield us from possible aggression from Western countries as to guarantee that Soviet influence will be maintained in the East European countries." Medvedev was a dissident historian, not a Fourth Internationalist, and Intercontinental Press is only the venue; but he was a Marxist, he was Soviet, he was writing in 1974–75, and he used Pyadyshev's own central concept symmetrically. The thought was available. It was available in Russian, to a Russian. It was not unthinkable — it was unpublishable, and the difference between those two things is the subject of this introduction.
For the long view, Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986) supplies the category this book belongs to. Listing what emerged from the war, Mandel names "the outbreak of the Cold War essentially as a test of strength between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the resulting 'campist' ideology among broad layers of the international labour movement" (ch. 16, "The Outcome"). Campism is the disease Pyadyshev's book is written to spread: the conviction that because one bloc's militarism is real — and Pyadyshev demonstrates at length that it was — the other bloc's must be defensive by definition. The demonstration is honest. The inference is the thing to refuse.
Read it as the best short Soviet statement of a case that was, on its own subject, substantially true. The American military-industrial complex existed, Eisenhower named it, the procurement scandals were real, the Southern committee barons were real, the peace dividend was never paid, and a competent reader of the Congressional Record and the American press could establish all of it — which is what Pyadyshev did. On the United States between 1947 and 1975 this is a useful and largely reliable book, and its treatment of the American antiwar movement is more generous and more curious than what the same publishing house was producing a decade later.
Read it also for the shape of the hole. Every one of the hundred and seven footnotes is a small monument to something the author's own state did not permit: a Senate committee that publishes its hearings, a Government Printing Office, a senator who writes a book called Report from Wasteland, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense who publishes a critical study of the establishment he served, a leaked Pentagon archive printed in a newspaper. Pyadyshev could write this book about America precisely because America produced the documents. He could not write it about the Soviet Union, and the twin proofs of that are on facing pages — the careful percentage of American GNP on one, and on the other, a country that "has threatened no one and has no intention of attacking anyone."