The Theory of Population: Essays in Marxist Research, edited by Professor D. I. Valentey and issued by Progress Publishers in Herbert C. Creighton's translation, is a collective work — some thirty named contributors — produced under the Centre for Population Studies of the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University. It is not a polemic and it is not a primer. It is the flagship statement of a discipline that the Soviet Union had, until quite recently, refused to let exist under its own name, and which it was now busy building an institutional apparatus to house. Read the credits and the intention is plain: this is Soviet demography announcing that it has become a science, with its own chairs, its own specialities, its own five-year forecasting brief. The Foreword says as much, presenting "the results of a major project in population studies" and noting the recent "institution of the scientific specialities of population economics and demography" as "an outcome of the active theoretical work of Soviet demographers."
Establish first when the book was actually written, because the spine misleads in the usual direction. The English edition is dated 1978, but the argument is anchored a few years earlier. Its most recent political landmark is the 25th Congress of the CPSU of February 1976, quoted approvingly on the fruits of the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–75); its statistical series run to 1970 and 1971; more than once the text pauses to say that some Soviet population figure has "not yet been reached (at the time of writing)." This is a mid-1970s Russian text in a 1978 export jacket — a document of what Brezhnev-era social science called "developed socialist society," at the confident, becalmed height of that period, before the economy's troubles had become undeniable and while the regime still expected its planners to forecast the population of the year 2000 with precision. What the book is for follows from that. It is at once a domestic charter for a young discipline and an export demonstration that Marxism-Leninism has a rigorous, modern answer to the population anxieties then sweeping the West — the "population bomb," the Club of Rome, the family-planning campaigns being pressed on the decolonising world. The Malthusian revival of the late 1960s is the book's real antagonist, and much of its best writing is aimed there.
At the centre of the volume sits a genuine and defensible idea, and it is worth stating exactly, because the book states it well and because the anti-Stalinist tradition has no quarrel with it. There is no natural law of population — no eternal ratio between mouths and food written into the human condition. Every form of society generates its own population dynamics out of its own mode of production. Valentey's Introduction puts Marx's formula at the head of the whole enterprise: "...In fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone." From this the rest is drawn. "The economic law of population of capitalism, as the law of relative surplus population, was discovered by Marx." The "overpopulation" that Malthus took for a fact of nature is, on this account, a fact of capitalism: an industrial reserve army of the unemployed, manufactured by accumulation itself and needed by it to hold wages down. The book is careful on the point that matters most, insisting that Marx "never spoke of the industrial reserve army of labour under capitalism as absolute overpopulation" — that "labour power was only surplus in bourgeois society," relative to capital's need for it, and not surplus to the earth's capacity to feed it. From which the political conclusion is that "Every historical social formation has its own specific population laws, proper to it," and that under socialism the "surplus" population simply ceases to exist, because the mechanism that produced it has been abolished.
This is the strong core of the book, and I will return to defend it, because a reader told that everything here is worthless would be learning nothing and would be wrong. The critique of Malthus is real Marxism, competently done. It is the reflexive move that fails — the moment when this confident science of numbers is asked to turn its instruments on the society that built it.
A demography is a discipline that counts people: the born, the living, the migrating, and the dead. The test of a demography is not whether it can count strangers but whether it can count its own. And the century this book surveys had handed Soviet demographers the largest demographic catastrophes in the modern history of their own country to explain: the famine of 1932–33, in which several million people starved in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Volga in the course of forced collectivisation; the Terror of 1937–38, with its executions and its camps; and the losses of the Second World War, whose true scale the state itself had spent years concealing. A serious science of Soviet population would have these deaths at its centre. It is the one subject it cannot avoid, because the deaths are in the numbers — they are exactly the discontinuities a population curve is built to register.
They are not here. Search the book for the famine of 1932–33 and it is simply absent. The word "famine" occurs, but only in safe places: famines in the ancient world and under slavery, "pushed into the background" by the growth of agriculture; and the "inevitable threat of world famine" conjured by Paul Ehrlich and the neo-Malthusians, which the book rightly derides. Of the Soviet famine within living memory of the book's own authors — nothing. "Collectivisation" as a demographic event does not appear at all. The year 1937 occurs exactly once in 130,000 words, and it is the imprint date of a book about Japan. The Terror is not a demographic fact in this demography.
The censuses tell the same story by their gaps. The book is proud of Soviet census-taking; it discusses the census of 1926 and returns often to those of 1959 and 1970, from which most of its Soviet data are drawn. Between 1926 and 1959 the Soviet Union took two censuses — in January 1937 and in January 1939. Neither is mentioned. In a treatise whose fourth-largest theme is the methodology of the census, the two interwar Soviet censuses have vanished, and the reader who did not already know why would never guess that anything was missing. This is not an oversight. The 1937 census is the single most sensitive document in the entire history of Soviet statistics, and its absence from a 1976 Soviet demography is a decision, not an accident.
The most revealing passage is the one place the book does confront mass death: the chapter "Wars and Population," by E. A. Arab-Ogly. It is a capable chapter, and it gives the official war figure without flinching: "As a result of World War II more than twenty million persons were killed or died in the USSR, i.e., 10 per cent of the population." It even gestures at a hidden magnitude, observing that if there had been no war the Soviet population "would now have reached some 350 million" — a counterfactual shortfall of extraordinary size, presented as the pure demographic cost of the war and of nothing else. And then, in a sentence that ought to stop any careful reader cold, the chapter turns to accuse others of the very silence it is keeping. Indirect war losses, it says, "considerably exceed war casualties proper... although they are passed over in silence in the official statistics." Reactionary Western ideologists, it goes on, "try to gloss over the figures of direct war casualties and pass over in silence the indirect war losses."
Here the book indicts itself in its own words. The charge — that a state passes over its dead in silence, glossing the figures to reconcile its people to its policies — is exact. It is simply pointed in the wrong direction. It is the Soviet state, not the capitalist one, that had passed the famine dead over in total silence, that had concealed and then serially revised its own war losses, and that had destroyed a census rather than publish a count it disliked. The "350 million" counterfactual is where this shows most sharply, because a demographer capable of computing the population the USSR "would now have reached" without the war has the tools to compute what it would have reached without the famine and the Terror too — and to notice that a large part of the interwar deficit had nothing to do with any war. The arithmetic is one step away. The book does not take it, and could not have taken it and been published.
The historical record here is not in serious dispute, and it can be stated plainly. A census was taken across the Soviet Union on the night of 6 January 1937 — the first since 1926, and one Stalin had personally promised would demonstrate the flourishing of socialist society. It did the opposite. The count came in at roughly 162 million, some millions below the figure the leadership had publicly projected — a deficit that reflected, among other things, the famine deaths of 1932–33 that the state had never acknowledged. The results were suppressed. In September 1937 the census was officially condemned as "defective" and its returns were, for practical purposes, destroyed. The men who had run it were arrested: Olimpiy Kvitkin, who directed the census itself, was shot; Ivan Kraval, head of the Central Administration of National-Economic Accounting under which it was conducted, was shot; other senior statisticians were arrested and a number of them killed. A fresh census was ordered and taken in January 1939, and this one, conducted under the shadow of what had happened to its predecessor, duly produced a larger and politically acceptable total. That is the sequel a Soviet demographer of the 1970s inherited: a professional discipline that had, within living memory, seen its leaders shot for producing an honest count, and had watched the honest count replaced by a compliant one.
Set that record beside the confident chapters of this book on census methodology, and the silence acquires its full weight. The discipline these authors were building was, quite literally, rebuilt on the graves of the demographers who had tried to practise it two decades earlier. Their caution is not simple dishonesty. It is memory. But the effect, for the reader, is a science of population with a blind spot shaped precisely like its own worst catastrophe.
It is worth adding that this is not one book's private evasion but a structural feature of the whole enterprise, visible wherever a Soviet social science of the period is asked to look at its own society. The companion volume in this series, Gennady Osipov's Sociology: Problems of Theory and Method (Progress, 1969) — sociology being another discipline the Stalin years had abolished as a bourgeois pseudo-science and the Khrushchev thaw had readmitted — carries an identical hole in exactly the same place. There too the 1937 census and the fate of its statisticians form the silence at the centre; there too a science built to describe Soviet society is forbidden the one concept — a privileged ruling stratum — that would let it read the society's real divisions. Two neighbouring disciplines, revived in the same years by men who knew what had happened to their predecessors, arrive independently at the same self-censorship. That the pattern replicates across volumes is the strongest evidence that its cause is not the timidity of individual authors but the boundary the state drew around what a Soviet human science was permitted to count.
The answer to this book was written before the book's own catastrophe had fully unfolded, and it was written by the man the Soviet state was most determined its demographers should never cite. In The Revolution Betrayed, completed in 1936, Trotsky devoted a chapter — "Social Relations in the Soviet Union" — to the census then being prepared, the very count that would be taken on 6 January 1937 and then destroyed. He printed the official list of social categories the census would use — "worker; clerical worker; collective farmer; individual farmer; individual craftsman; member of the liberal professions; minister of religion; other non-laboring elements" — and quoted the official commentary explaining that no finer categories were needed "only because there are no classes in the Soviet Union." His verdict was that the list "is constructed with the direct intention of concealing the privileged upper strata, and the more deprived lower depths." He was describing a census as a political instrument built to make certain facts uncountable — and he was doing so months before the state discovered that even this carefully designed count would tell it something it could not bear to hear, and had it destroyed.
That is the demography this book cannot perform. Trotsky's account of Soviet society — the bureaucracy as a privileged stratum consuming a disproportionate share of the national product, the USSR as a degenerated workers' state in which socialised property coexisted with grossly unequal distribution — is precisely the account that would let a demographer read the interwar population deficit for what it largely was. A theory that can name a ruling stratum can ask what that stratum did to the peasantry in 1932–33, and can look for the answer in the numbers. A theory forbidden to name it is left counting war casualties and calling the rest of the shortfall an act of war. In the same book Trotsky observed how "everywhere and all the time in the press, in speeches, in statistics... it painstakingly conceals the real relations." He was writing about statistics as concealment forty years before the volume in your hands demonstrated the point without meaning to.
None of this requires the reader to accept Trotsky's politics whole. It requires only the narrower observation that his framework can account for the century's Soviet demographic history and this book's cannot — and that the reason is not scientific but political. The doctrine of the historically specific law of population is entirely sound. It was the historically specific law of population of the Soviet Union itself that could not be written.
It would be a poor service to leave the impression that the volume is only an evasion, because on its stated antagonist it is often good, and the reader who wants a Marxist demolition of Malthus will find a competent one here. B. Y. Smulevich's chapters on "The Evolution of Malthusianism" and the sociological theories of population are a genuine intellectual history of the doctrine, tracing it from Malthus's Essay — with its famous claim that population "goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio" while subsistence grows only arithmetically — through its twentieth-century mutations. The book's central objection to Malthus is the right one and is well made: his was a claim about human nature dressed as arithmetic, a law he asserted held "in every age and in every state in which man has existed or does now exist," and it is exactly this trans-historical pretension that Marxism dismantles. The volume is also acute on how readily Malthusianism inverts itself to suit circumstances — how the same anxiety about "overpopulation" that "motivated" fascist demands for living space could reappear, in the postwar League of Nations and after, as a worry about under-population and falling demand. Its treatment of the "vicious circle of poverty" theories then being applied to the decolonising world — the argument that poor countries are poor because they breed, which conveniently relocates the cause of their poverty from imperialism to their own fertility — is the sharpest political writing in the book, and it has dated well. On the substantive point, the chapter on food resources is right to say flatly that Malthus's "pessimistic thesis... has long been refuted by the course of historical development itself," and to show it with the postwar record of cereal output outrunning population growth.
There is real scholarship, too, in the technical chapters: the work of B. T. Urlanis and others on war losses and on the reconstruction of mortality is serious demography, and the sober handling of sex-age pyramids and the long demographic echo of the two world wars is the work of people who knew their craft. The framework — population as a social relation, not a natural quantity; the size and density of a population as conditioned by the mode of production rather than determining it — is Marx correctly understood, and it remains a better starting point for thinking about the world's population than the neo-Malthusianism the book was written to answer. The tragedy of the volume is not that its method is false. It is that a sound method was permitted to operate everywhere except on the one population whose history most needed it, and that the discipline had learned, in the hardest possible school, exactly which counts it must never make.
Read it, then, for two things at once. Read it as the best case Soviet Marxism could make against Malthus, which is a stronger case than its Western critics usually allowed. And read it as an involuntary document of what a science becomes when it may not count its own dead — a demography with a silence at its centre shaped precisely like the graves it was forbidden to number. The book accuses others of passing the dead over in silence. It is the more honest for having written the sentence, and the more damning.