Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
Their actual relations can be more or less consistent with this. I'm not a Sovietologist but my impression (from, for example, Gorky's My Childhood) is that the social, including the family relations, characteristic of the Russian peasantry (the vast majority of the population in 1917) were very far from what would be required for the development of full rationality, that their likely usual result would be an adult personality characterized by primitive defences against psychotic anxiety i.e. a more or less paranoid, extremely hostile, sadistic personality. These particular internal social relations would then explain the coming to dominance within them of a paranoid, hostile, sadistically murderous mentality. It is in this way that "internal relations" might help to explain the last 80 or so years of Russian history including the disastrous consequences of the collapse, important features of which were the product of advice from "economists" of the Hayekian sort having no knowledge either of the psychological factors I've just pointed to (they are explicitly denied any role in explanations framed in accordance with the "logic of the situation"), of the "internal relations" which produce them (the approach treats social relations as "external"), or of the truth contained in the passage from Keynes that Brad recently quoted.