The title is a promise the book does not keep, and that is the first thing worth saying about it. War Is Their Business sounds like a pamphlet: a moral indictment of arms manufacturers, aimed at a reader who wants to be angry rather than informed. What Georgi Tsagolov actually wrote is a densely footnoted study of American corporate finance — more than two hundred notes across two hundred and ninety pages, a full historiographical survey of the American literature on the subject, and an explicit, repeated refusal of the conspiracy theory the title invites. Somewhere between the manuscript and the jacket, a serious book acquired a shouting cover. Progress Publishers did this often, and it has cost this volume readers it deserved.
Start with the date, because the spine lies by about a year. The latest event named anywhere in the text is the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983, which appears as "the latest indication" of Washington's resort to force. The most recent Soviet authority quoted is Konstantin Chernenko — at the February 1984 plenum of the Central Committee, and in his speech to the Kuibyshev District constituency, which was delivered in March 1984. An unemployment figure is offered for "early 1984". Nothing later than the spring of 1984 appears. The years that run ahead of that — 1986, 1987, 1989, and a NATO procurement programme extending to 1993 — are all forward projections of budgets and contracts, not citations. So this is a manuscript closed around the middle of 1984 and published in English in 1985: an Andropov-to-Chernenko book, written in the coldest stretch of the second Cold War, before Gorbachev, before Geneva, before anything had begun to move. Gorbachev's name does not occur in it.
Of the author the book tells us almost nothing. There is no institutional affiliation on the copyright page; the jacket copy survives in the scan only as a column of upside-down and largely illegible text. What can be established comes from inside the notes. In a footnote on the coalition structure of American finance capital, Tsagolov cites, in the third person, a book of his own — published by Mysl in Moscow in 1968, on the new groups of United States high finance. (The title word is mangled in the scan and I will not guess at it.) That single self-citation is more informative than a biography would be. It tells us he had been a specialist in American corporate ownership for sixteen years before he wrote this, and it explains the book's centre of gravity: this is not a work about strategy, doctrine or weapons, but about who owns the firms. He also cites, in the same register of professional colleagues, S. M. Menshikov's Millionaires and Managers and B. D. Pyadyshev's The US Military-Industrial Complex — the Voenizdat original of 1974 — both of which Progress published in English and both of which are companion volumes in this series. These people were reading each other.
The comparison that matters is with Radomir Bogdanov's The US War Machine and Politics, published by Progress a year later and introduced elsewhere in this series. Bogdanov wrote an institutional history of the American national security state out of American scholarly monographs and primary documents: John Lewis Gaddis, Samuel Huntington, Desmond Ball on nuclear targeting, the Pentagon Papers as printed by the Government Printing Office, five separate GPO citations, Senate hearings. Tsagolov's source base is quite different, and the difference is measurable. Across those notes there is exactly one Government Printing Office citation, no Congressional hearings cited directly, and no Congressional Record. What there is instead is the American business press: Fortune thirteen times, Time eleven, Business Week ten, Newsweek six, the New York Times six, with the Washington Post, Aviation Week and Space Technology, the Financial Times, Le Monde diplomatique and The Nation behind them. Where he needs a documentary fact — the growth of retired officers on contractor payrolls from 768 in 1959 to 2,072 in 1969, with 210 at Lockheed and 169 at Boeing — he takes it not from the Senate survey itself but from Adam Yarmolinsky's The Military Establishment.
This is a weaker evidentiary base than Bogdanov's for questions of strategy, and Tsagolov largely does not ask those questions. For his actual subject it is close to the right base. If you want to know who controls Hewlett-Packard's stock, what proportion of aerospace deliveries nine firms account for, or why Northrop sank two hundred million dollars of its own money into a bomber before anyone had promised to buy it, Fortune and Business Week are where that was reported in 1983, and he reads them attentively. The register did change with the sourcing — but downward in formality, not in seriousness.
Because the serious thing about this book is that it argues. Consider the strongest objection to the whole military-industrial complex thesis, then and now: military spending was five to eight per cent of American GNP, and military output less than that, so how can so small a sector command national policy? Tsagolov states the objection in the sceptic's own words — "Hence the conclusion that the influence of the military-industrial complex is negligible: the tail cannot wag the dog" — and then answers it, at length, in two ways. First, that the sector's weight is political rather than proportional, because war preparation aligns with the strategic interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole and so recruits allies far beyond itself. Second, and more interestingly, that the complex borrows the weight of others: "the complex uses its ramified connections among finance and industrial monopolies", so that its leverage is that of the banking groups it is embedded in, not of its own payroll. Whether or not one accepts the answer, posing the objection at full strength and then meeting it is what analysis looks like. Bogdanov never posed it.
The same seriousness shows in the chapter on profits, which is the place a lesser book would have collapsed into the till. Tsagolov's finding is a differentiated one: "there is no single profit rate universal for the war industry." Prime contractors reap what he calls superprofits because they receive government progress payments as free working capital, use government-owned plant to make civilian goods on the side, and face a single buyer in what American economists call a bilateral monopoly. Subcontractors, denied all of this, earn ordinary commercial returns. He quotes Richard Kaufman's finding that "no large prime contractor has ever lost money on a contract with the Defense Department", and concludes that fifty firms holding sixty per cent of contracts take around eighty per cent of the industry's profits. That is a real political-economic argument with a distribution in it, and it is markedly better than Bogdanov's habit — noted in the companion introduction — of collapsing his own careful institutional account into a sentence about banks and shareholders demanding investment profitability.
Most striking of all, Tsagolov explicitly disowns the reading his title advertises. Opening the last section of his final chapter he writes: "It is very difficult to say precisely how the military-industrial complex influences US imperialist foreign policy today. It is hard to determine the degree to which distinctive goals of the military-industrial complex shape Washington's political moves." (The printed text misspells "imperialist"; I have corrected it silently, here and nowhere else.) He adds that "The term ' American reactionaries' is much broader than the military-industrial complex", instances the fact that some arms executives actively promoted East–West trade during détente, and had earlier written that "One cannot blame the military-industrial complex alone for militarism and the arms race." His considered formulation, given in the conclusion, is that the term is a misnomer he keeps only because it is familiar; what actually exists is a "military-state-monopoly group" fusing contractors with the militarist wing of the state apparatus. Whatever else that is, it is not a theory of a cabal of arms manufacturers.
He is good, too, on Eisenhower, where most Soviet writers were merely pious. Tsagolov gives the farewell address of 17 January 1961 its due as "perhaps the most often quoted statement by a US President", and then declines to be impressed: he notes that the phrase was not Eisenhower's own but his speechwriter Malcolm Moos's, and reads the speech as a retiring president shifting onto an abstraction the blame for policies his own administration had pursued. That is a sharper handling of Eisenhower than one finds in a good deal of Western commentary. And the small details are often the best things in the book — as when, describing the Armed Services Committees, he records that congressional staff ask the Pentagon to supply both the questions and the answers in advance, with the result that "confusion sometimes results when committee members read out both the questions and the answers by mistake."
There is real research here. A reader who wants an account of American defence contracting in the early 1980s — the ownership structures, the revolving door, the RAND Corporation, the Committee on the Present Danger, the arms export trade, the "foot in the door" technique of underbidding a programme to get it started — will find a competent and well-referenced one, and will not often be misled on matters of American fact.
Two small errors first, because they illuminate the method. Twice the book calls the Hewlett-Packard co-founder who served as Nixon's deputy defense secretary and co-founded the Committee on the Present Danger James Packard. His name was David Packard. It is not a scanning artefact — the error is consistent across both passages, and the surrounding shareholding figures are exact. Second, Tsagolov states that American unemployment left "more than 12 million people jobless in early 1984—a record over the past 40 years." Twelve million was indeed the postwar record, and it was reached in late 1982; by early 1984 the figure had fallen by roughly a quarter. He has taken a 1982 number and moved the date forward to make his manuscript current. Both slips are what happens when a book is built from press cuttings and then hurried into print.
The large failure is the one this series keeps finding, and Tsagolov commits it in a more revealing form than Bogdanov did. The following words appear nowhere in these 65,000: Afghanistan. SS-20. Strategic Defense Initiative. Star Wars. Warsaw Pact — though "the Warsaw Treaty countries" are named once, in the conclusion, purely as authors of peace declarations, never as an alliance that fields weapons. No figure is given anywhere for Soviet military spending, in roubles, dollars, or as a share of anything. The GNP metric, which Tsagolov deploys against the United States and then comparatively against Britain, France, Japan and West Germany, is never once turned eastward.
That the nil returns match Bogdanov's exactly — and match a third Progress title on the same subject, Nuclear Strategy and Common Sense — settles a question but is no longer, by itself, an interesting one. Three authors, three institutional milieux, three methods, the same holes: this is not one man's evasion but the shape of a genre, and the finding can be recorded and set aside. What is worth attention is the difference between the three books, because it runs the other way from what one would expect. The most popular in register is not the least honest.
But Tsagolov goes further than silence, and it is here that his book indicts itself. He knows the counter-argument, because he quotes it — twice, at length, in his own text. He reproduces, from The Age of Uncertainty, Galbraith's account of a double symbiosis — first between the American services and their contractors, then between the two superpowers, each of whose innovations creates the incentive for the other's — so that "Both countries are caught in a squirrel wheel, a trap." He then quotes Richard Barnet's The Giants: Russia and America: "Military bureaucracies are developing in the Soviet Union that are mirror images of American bureaucracies. Their expansion risks the further militarization of policy." He sets out both cases with real fidelity, and he identifies correctly what is at stake in them — that Galbraith's version rests on a thesis of convergence between the two systems, which a Soviet Marxist could not accept. But having seen the stake, he does not argue the point. He disposes of it in a single sentence:
Typically, both Galbraith and Barnet are reluctant to deal at length with the "Soviet military-industrial complex." The reason is clear: in the Soviet Union or other socialist countries there are no classes, social strata or professional groups interested in war or war preparations.
That is not an omission but a refutation by definition. No evidence is offered, and none could be, because the claim is not empirical — it is a deduction from the premise that the USSR has no antagonistic social groups at all. And it is made by a man whose entire professional competence lay in identifying exactly such groups: the coalition structures, the interlocking directorates, the personnel flows between ministry and industry. He possessed a method for finding a military-industrial complex, applied it with skill on one side of the world, and was obliged to declare the object non-existent on the other. Bogdanov's version of this failure was to look away. Tsagolov's was to look straight at it and deny what he saw. Read the sentence twice and the book's real subject becomes visible: not the American arms industry, but the boundary of what a Soviet economist could publish.
One divergence from Bogdanov deserves credit. Bogdanov's book does not contain the phrase "peace movement"; Tsagolov's does, and he takes the movement seriously as an actor rather than an audience. He records the demonstration of over a million people in New York on 12 June 1982, and the march on Washington of 27 August 1983, and he notes that the resurgence of American antiwar feeling blunted the electoral targeting operations of the New Right. He is interested in mass movements in a way the diplomat Bogdanov simply was not. He is interested, of course, only in Western ones.
The answer to this book did not have to wait for the archives. It was in English, in journals Tsagolov's readers could not obtain, decades before he wrote.
The Fourth International was analysing the American permanent arms economy twelve years before Eisenhower's farewell address gave it a name. An unsigned editorial review in Fourth International vol. X no. 3 (whole no. 93), March 1949, titled "The Military Welfare State", set out the thesis in a sentence: reviewing Truman's cabinet and his budget, it concluded that "The physical composition of the executive power is symbolic of the unbroken unity of the government, the military and finance capital." That is Tsagolov's "military-state-monopoly group", including his own refinement about finance capital, in 1949. The same review noted that "military expenditure strengthens the big trustified industries like steel, chemicals and oil while it weakens the competitive consumer goods industries and places intolerable burdens on the people" — which is, in one clause, the argument of Tsagolov's sixth chapter. Arne Swabeck's "Inflation and the Arms Economy", written in March 1952 and printed in vol. XIII no. 3 (whole no. 116), worked the same ground statistically, showing personal consumption falling from 75.9 per cent of gross national product in 1929 to 66.1 per cent in the first year of the Korean War while corporate profits after tax rose 28.9 per cent. Michel Pablo's "Capitalist Economy and the Atlantic Pact" in vol. XII no. 3 (whole no. 110) belongs to the same effort.
By the mid-1970s the analysis had matured. Dick Fidler's review article "America's Permanent War Economy", in Intercontinental Press vol. 13 no. 20, 26 May 1975, took Melman's The Permanent War Economy — a book Tsagolov also cites — and set it in a Marxist frame, arguing that armaments production is "a vital means by which the state guarantees monopoly profits through increasing public expenditure at cost of expanding the public debt and undermining the stability of the currency", financed by taxation and inflation and therefore constituting a redistribution of national income toward the trusts. There is no substantive disagreement between that and Tsagolov's chapter on the tax burden of militarism. They are the same analysis.
The difference is what happens next, and the decisive text is three weeks earlier in the same journal. Intercontinental Press vol. 13 no. 17, 5 May 1975, printed Roy Medvedev's reply to Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to Soviet Leaders" under the title "What Lies Ahead for Us?". One of its sections is headed "The Military-Industrial Complex and the Threat of War", and it reads:
Also clearly hampering detente is the pressure from the military-industrial complexes in the USA as well as in the USSR. The influence of the Soviet military and military-industrial circles on the adoption of fundamental political decisions has grown since Stalin's death, but it would not do either to underestimate or to exaggerate this factor.
Medvedev goes on to observe that "the bulk of Soviet divisions stationed to the west of our borders 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." He was a Soviet Marxist historian writing in Russian, in Moscow, ten years before Tsagolov's book — not a Cold Warrior, not an émigré, a socialist who thought the Soviet Union worth saving. The social stratum Tsagolov declared could not exist had already been named, weighed and rationed for exaggeration by a compatriot. (I have searched the whole run of 763 Intercontinental Press issues from 1968 to its close in August 1986: Medvedev's is the only article in the entire archive that puts "Soviet" and "military-industrial" in the same breath. The idea was not common currency on the Western left either. It was, however, available.)
Nor was the Fourth International reflexively hostile to Soviet figures. Intercontinental Press of 2 March 1981 ran a detailed demolition of Reagan's claim that Moscow had outspent Washington for a decade, showing that the CIA had produced the result by retrospectively recomputing Soviet expenditure at American dollar prices, and that on the older and more accurate method "the Soviet Union spends only 60 to 70 percent of what the Pentagon spends." Then, in the statement of the Bureau of the United Secretariat printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 21 no. 12 on 27 June 1983 — discussed at greater length in the introduction to Bogdanov — it did the thing Tsagolov's book is constructed to make impossible, and applied the metric to both sides: "While declared American arms spending is 7 percent of the GNP and estimated USSR spending 15 percent of the GNP, the American GNP is double the Soviet GNP", from which follows both that "Imperialism is still the principal warmonger" and that "Soviet military expenditure is a great burden on the Soviet Union, to the point of worsening economic and food supply problems." Tsagolov was writing in the months that statement appeared. He had the first half of it and was denied the second.
The theoretical completion came only afterwards, and it is worth being exact about the date rather than enlisting it as though it were contemporaneous commentary: Ernest Mandel, "The significance of Gorbachov", International Marxist Review vol. 2 no. 4, Winter 1987 — two and a half years after this translation, and written into a world Tsagolov's manuscript had not yet entered. Mandel names three goals the Soviet bureaucracy had pursued since Khrushchev and could no longer fund simultaneously: high investment, rising living standards, and "continuing the arms race with American imperialism". Gorbachev's disarmament initiatives, he argues, were sincere in a way earlier ones were not, precisely "because the bureaucracy really needs to put a stop to the nuclear arms race in order to reduce the share of the Soviet Union's available resources devoted to non-productive ends." There is the Soviet social stratum with a determinate material interest in the level of arms spending, identified and located. Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War, published the year after Tsagolov's translation, sets out the long history in its final chapter, "The Legacy", where he credits Eisenhower with aptly coining the phrase.
And then the verdict arrived from the only source Tsagolov would have had to respect. In June 1990 International Viewpoint reported a congress of the new independent Soviet workers' movement at which a resolution, drawn up with Shield — a trade union of Red Army officers — "attacked the military-industrial complex as one of the main sources of poverty in Soviet society, and called for the right to strike to be extended to workers in military enterprises." Two years later the same journal described Chelyabinsk, where "as much as 90% of the industry in and around Chelyabinsk is to some extent related to military purposes" — an electoral and regional geography of arms production of exactly the kind Bogdanov correctly identified in America. By 1995 International Viewpoint was describing the Russian complex as "a powerful lobby" which "draws its strength from its links with the state apparatus", which is a fair paraphrase of Tsagolov's own definition of the American one. Within five years of his death sentence on the concept, Soviet workers, Soviet officers and Soviet journalists were all using it about themselves.
Read it for the American research, which is genuine, and for the argument, which is better than its title and better than its reputation. On contracting, ownership, superprofits, the revolving door and the political sociology of the defence coalition, Tsagolov is a competent guide who read the American business press closely, refused the vulgar version of his own thesis, and left an honest record of the limits of his own certainty about how much the complex actually determines.
And read it against its companions for what it shows about the relation between a book's audience and its honesty. One might expect the popular title to be the crude one — that a book called War Is Their Business, written from magazines rather than from government documents, would trade analysis for assertion and name villains where the scholarly volume named institutions. The opposite is the case. Tsagolov's sourcing is thinner than Bogdanov's and his subject narrower, but his argument is more careful at precisely the points where popular writing usually fails: he states the strongest objection to his own thesis and answers it, he differentiates profit rates instead of invoking profit, and he says in plain words that he cannot measure how far the complex actually drives American policy. Bogdanov, with the better archive, reached more often for the cash register. The gradient across these three books does not run from scholarly to vulgar. It runs from one kind of constraint to another, and the constraint that mattered was never the register.
Read it, finally, as the sharpest specimen this series has yet produced of a particular kind of intellectual injury. Bogdanov's book fails by leaving things out. Tsagolov's fails in the open, on the page, in a sentence where he sets out Galbraith's and Barnet's mirror thesis with scrupulous accuracy and then abolishes it by decree. He had the method. He had, in his own bibliography, the American authors who had turned that method on their own state and published the results. What he did not have was a Fortune, a Proxmire, a Yarmolinsky, or an Armed Services Committee of his own — and the absence of those is the whole explanation of why this book could be written about Washington and not about Moscow. Every American footnote in it is a measure of what his own country would not let him cite.