R. Faramazyan finished this book at the precise moment its argument was overtaken by events. Disarmament and the Economy carries the date 1981 and means it: unlike most Progress translations, which lag their Russian originals by years, this one quotes Leonid Brezhnev's report to the 26th Congress of the CPSU, held in February and March 1981, as current news, and its statistical tables run to the 1980/81 US defence budget. There is no earlier edition hiding behind the spine. The text is exactly as old as it looks — and that is the problem, because the world it was written to describe, a world of deepening détente in which "the 1970s were marked by a turn from the cold war to international detente," had already begun to come apart under the author's pen.
By the time the book reached print, the Soviet Union had been at war in Afghanistan for a year; Ronald Reagan had entered the White House committed to a rearmament programme that would dwarf anything Faramazyan tabulates; and NATO's December 1979 decision to station cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe — itself a response to the Soviet SS-20 deployments that had begun in 1976 — had opened the Euromissile crisis that would dominate the decade. Faramazyan writes on the cusp, registering the danger without quite naming it: "Thunderclouds gathered on the international horizon by the beginning of the eighties," and "political detente is still to be supplemented by military detente." What he could not say, because his brief did not permit it, was that both superpowers were now committing themselves to the largest peacetime arms build-up in history, and that the burden he analyses so carefully for one of them fell just as heavily on the other.
The author was not a propagandist but a professional economist. Rachik Faramazyan worked at the Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) of the USSR Academy of Sciences — the Soviet Union's premier think-tank on the capitalist world — and the book wears its scholarship openly. He draws on the SIPRI yearbooks, on US government statistics, on the work of American defence economists such as Murray Weidenbaum and Kenneth Boulding, on The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report. This is a real analytical apparatus, and much of what it produces is sound. The honest task of an introduction is to say where.
The core of Disarmament and the Economy is a critique of military spending as economic waste, and on that ground it is largely correct and remains citable. Faramazyan's central proposition — that arms expenditure is a deduction from, not an addition to, a society's real wealth — is orthodox economics, not Soviet dogma. "Military expenses," he writes, "are a wasteful and unproductive use of material and manpower resources"; the arms race "depletes a country's domestic resources and reduces the possibilities for boosting its economic potential." He grounds the point in Marx's observation that the soldier "belongs to the incidental expenses of production, in the same way as a large part of the unproductive labourers who produce nothing themselves." Whatever one makes of the labour theory of value, the practical claim is unimpeachable: a tank consumed in deterrence is not a machine tool, a lathe, or a hospital bed.
From this Faramazyan builds a catalogue of the arms economy's distortions that any disarmament economist of the period could have signed. He argues that military research and development starves civilian industry of its best scientists and engineers, and he lets an American economist make the case for him, quoting Boulding: "There is much evidence to suggest that civilian industry is deprived of able research scientists and engineers because of the 'internal brain drain' into the war industry." He is properly sceptical of the "spin-off" mythology — the claim that military R&D pays for itself in civilian by-products — and marshals US Department of Commerce and NASA sources to puncture it, conceding that "we do not deny the existence of spin-off" while showing that its scale was routinely exaggerated to justify the budgets. He documents the "revolving door" between the Pentagon and the arms contractors, the role of military procurement in state-monopoly management of demand, and the inflationary effect of deficit-financed rearmament, in which "prices increase 1.5–2 times quicker than in the civilian sector."
On the military-industrial complex itself the book is unusually concrete for a work of Soviet economics. Faramazyan defines it soberly, without the usual demonology, as "an alliance of military-industrial monopolies, the military and the state bureaucracy," and traces the institutional machinery by which it perpetuates itself: the "revolving doors" through which Pentagon officials pass into the arms firms and retired generals onto their boards; the concentration of NATO's military production and research in the United States; the export of small arms, submachine guns and tear-gas grenades to the police forces of client dictatorships, itemised from a Nation investigation. He is right that the complex has a material stake in the arms race, and right — quoting Lenin's phrase that war is for the arms suppliers a "rain of gold" — that its profits are a private appropriation of a public loss. None of this depends on the reader accepting the Soviet frame; it is the same military-industrial complex that a departing President Eisenhower had warned Americans about in 1961, described by an economist who had read the American literature closely.
The book's treatment of conversion is its most useful section, precisely because it argues against defeatism. The claim it sets out to demolish is that disarmament would wreck the economies that undertook it — throw arms workers onto the street, collapse demand, invite recession. Faramazyan answers with the labour-intensity point that later became a staple of the nuclear-freeze movement: because civilian production is "relatively less capital-intensive and more labour-intensive," each billion dollars switched from military to civilian use creates more jobs, not fewer. He cites the British Labour Party's Defence Study Group on the concrete reconversion of the Tornado programme to machine tools, medical equipment and civil aircraft — an argument that anticipates the Lucas Aerospace workers' alternative plan of the same years. And his closing chapters on the developing world make the strongest version of the "peace dividend" case: that disarmament would free resources for exactly the tasks the arms race defers. He quotes Fidel Castro's 1979 UN calculation that annual world military spending "could be used for building 600,000 schools for 400 million children, or 60 million modern apartments," and notes the UN's own finding that a cut of "only one per cent" in the developed nations' military budgets would close the gap in agricultural aid to the poorest countries. These figures are real, they were sourced from UN documents, and the moral arithmetic behind them has not dated.
It is worth adding that this analysis was not the property of the Eastern bloc. The anti-Stalinist left had reached the same conclusions independently and earlier. Ernest Mandel, writing for the American Socialist Workers Party, had already made the "permanent arms economy" a central category of his analysis of post-war capitalism — "Workers Under Neo-capitalism," International Socialist Review, vol. 29 no. 6 (whole no. 189), November–December 1968 — treating chronic military spending as one of the props that had stabilised Western capitalism since 1945 while storing up inflation and waste. On the economics of militarism, Faramazyan and his sharpest critics were, for once, largely on the same page. Which makes the book's silence all the more conspicuous.
For a book whose entire method is to weigh the cost of arms against the alternative uses of the resources they consume, Disarmament and the Economy performs that operation on one half of the world only. The arms burden is measured, in scrupulous detail, for the United States, for the NATO allies, for Japan, for China — Faramazyan notes that China "spends over 40 per cent of her state budget on military aims" — and even for the newly independent states, whose military spending he rightly calls "a heavy burden for the still weak and underdeveloped economies of many of these countries." The one economy that is never placed on the scale is the one the author lived in.
This is not an oversight; it is structural, and the book states its own governing premise plainly. Militarism, for Faramazyan, is not a universal temptation of great powers but a disease specific to a mode of production: "the roots of militarism and the arms race were embedded in the economic and class character of capitalism." He quotes Lenin to seal the point — "Modern militarism is the result of capitalism" — and the logic follows inexorably. If militarism is capitalism, then socialism cannot, by definition, be militarist, and Soviet military spending cannot be a burden of the same kind. It can only be defensive, reactive, reluctant: "the socialist countries were compelled in the post-war years to strengthen their defensive capabilities," and "it is due to the capitalist countries that the arms race continued for so many years." The category that organises the whole book has been built so that it can never point homeward.
When the Soviet figures do appear, they appear to be dismissed. In a single sentence Faramazyan disposes of the question that his 200 pages on Western spending have taught the reader to take seriously: "In 1970, the USSR allocated 17,900 million roubles for defence as compared with 17,000 million in 1981. In recent years, Soviet military spending is being reduced not only in absolute, but also in relative terms: its share in the nation's budget has decreased from 11.5 per cent in 1970 to 5.7 per cent in 1981." A superpower matching the United States weapon for weapon across three decades is asked to be understood as spending less on arms in 1981 than in 1970, and shrinking. Western estimates that told a different story are waved off as propaganda: the arms lobby, he says, "widely publishes exceedingly overestimated figures on the Soviet military budget," estimates "so obviously biased that even bourgeois politicians have to admit this."
The single line of the official Soviet defence budget was known even at the time to be a fiction — a residual accounting figure that omitted weapons procurement, military R&D, and much else, all of which were distributed across other headings. The true weight of Soviet military spending on the Soviet economy is genuinely contested and always will be, because the state that could have counted it chose not to; but the range of serious Western estimates ran from roughly 12 to 17 per cent of GNP, and by some later reckonings higher still, against the two-per-cent-or-so that Faramazyan's rouble figure implies. In the perestroika years Soviet officials themselves began to concede numbers several times the published one. Whatever the exact figure, the guns-versus-butter distortion that Faramazyan diagnoses so acutely in the American economy — the internal brain drain, the starving of civilian sectors, the diversion of the best engineers and the scarcest materials — was hollowing out his own economy at least as severely, and arguably more so, because the Soviet economy was so much smaller and poorer than the one it was straining to match. The instrument the book forged for measuring waste was the one instrument it could not turn around.
The pattern holds even where the Soviet economy does enter the argument. In the chapter on conversion, the USSR appears — but only as the triumphant exemplar of how painless disarmament can be. Faramazyan argues that "public ownership of the means of production and a centralised planned economy create conditions for a more efficient conversion of the military economy to civilian uses," and offers the post-war reconversion as proof: tank plants turned to tractors, artillery plants to excavators, "8.5 million men" demobilised by the beginning of 1948 and retrained without mass unemployment. It is a genuine historical episode and it makes his feasibility case well. But notice what the framing does. The Soviet military economy is something that was converted, once, in 1946, and the story is closed; it is never a thing that exists, in 1981, at a scale that would itself need converting. The demobilisation of a wartime army becomes evidence that socialism disarms gracefully, while the standing peacetime arms economy of the other superpower — the one running in parallel to the American build-up the book measures so carefully — is simply not in the picture.
There is a smaller silence that tells the same story. The book that names the Trident, the MX, the cruise missile and the neutron bomb — and devotes pages to the militarism of the Pentagon's propaganda machine — never once names the SS-20, the Soviet intermediate-range missile whose deployment from 1976 was the proximate cause of the Euromissile crisis it is living through. It surfaces only as a symmetrical abstraction, in the USSR's own proposal for "a moratorium on the stationing in Europe of medium-range nuclear missiles by the NATO countries and the USSR" — the Western systems and the Soviet ones balanced in a single clause, the specific weapon that started the sequence left unnamed. And in passing the book supplies a textbook instance of a habit this series has documented across the Soviet foreign-policy literature: it derives the doctrine of "peaceful coexistence" from Lenin — "a principle which Lenin had originally suggested and proved to be inescapable" — without once quoting Lenin saying it, sourcing the actual words instead to Brezhnev's speech to the 25th Congress.
The objection to Faramazyan is not that he criticised the arms race. It is that he exempted his own state from a critique that his own tradition had long since applied to it. For the charge that Soviet military spending was a real burden on Soviet workers, borne for the sake of the ruling stratum, is not a Cold War invention of the West. It is Trotsky's, made from within the revolutionary-socialist tradition, forty-five years before Faramazyan wrote.
In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the chapter "Foreign Policy and the Army" analyses Soviet defence spending in exactly the terms Faramazyan reserves for the capitalist states — as a deduction extracted from a poor society at the expense of its people. Trotsky's Soviet Union has to maintain an expensive standing army rather than a cheaper militia precisely because it is poor: "The Soviet Union must pay dear for its defense, because it is not sufficiently rich for the cheaper militia system." He adds, in a formulation that indicts the whole apparatus: "It is exactly because of its poverty that the Soviet society has hung around its neck the very costly bureaucracy." The burden, he saw, would be met "at the expense of the rest of the population" — the same population whose living standards Faramazyan promises disarmament will raise, in every economy but this one. And Trotsky read the restoration of ranks, titles and a privileged officer corps in the mid-1930s as a military expression of the bureaucracy's consolidation of its own position, not of the workers' state's defensive needs. The Revolution Betrayed, ch. 8, is the direct answer to Disarmament and the Economy, ch. 1: the arms burden falls on both social systems, because in both a privileged stratum spends the producers' surplus on arms and calls it necessity.
That reply had been renewed in Faramazyan's own decade. Mandel's analysis of the "permanent arms economy" treated militarised spending as a structural feature to be criticised wherever it appeared, and the Fourth International's press through the 1970s and early 1980s insisted on the symmetry that Progress could not print: that the arms race had two engines, that the SS-20 and the cruise missile were answers to each other, and that the working people of the East paid for their bombs as surely as the working people of the West paid for theirs. Faramazyan's economics could have carried him to that conclusion. His premise — that militarism is a property of capitalism alone — forbade it.
Strip away the exemption, and a genuinely useful book remains. On the waste and irrationality of the Western arms economy, on the falsity of the claim that disarmament must mean depression, on the feasibility of conversion, and on the developmental catastrophe of a world that spends on weapons what it will not spend on schools and food, Faramazyan is a serious and honest guide, and his figures — drawn from UN, SIPRI and American sources — can be cited with confidence. He was right that the arms race was "a purposeless waste of material and spiritual wealth." He was right that disarmament would have been a dividend for the whole of humanity. He was wrong only in the direction every writer under that discipline was required to be wrong: he could see the burden crushing every economy on earth except the one that was crushing his own. The tragedy of the book is that its author had built, with real skill, the exact instrument needed to measure that burden — and was not permitted to point it at home.