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154 ANDREA GRAZIOSI"harnessing of all the military and financial power of the country" by statesthat wanted to become "independent political powers," which, for Hintze,had been the nucleus of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century state-building.From this standpoint, Piatakov's experience as organizer of Soviet industrializationwas a further step forward along this path, marked by the directhandling of industry and of industrialization by the state.This extremization of the relationship between state and economy hadmultiple roots—for example: Marxist economic theory; the traditionaleconomic interventionism of the tsarist state, which in this area had already"reached and overtaken" Germany in order to compensate for an even moreserious backwardness and to satisfy an equally great ambition for power;the Great War, which everywhere had reinforced state intervention in thesocial and economic fields at the expense of society; the accentuation of thisprocess in the former Russian Empire, due to the Civil War; the psychologicalcharacteristics of the new Soviet elite, with its international ambition, itsaspirations to modernity, its sense of urgency, and its feeling of being surrounded;and, lastly, the fact that this elite found itself at the head of a statethat was weak, backward, and isolated in such a volatile arena as Europewas in the first half of the twentieth century.But these (and other) factors did not operate in a linear, predeterminedway, and through the life and activities of Piatakov we can see some of thestages of the process which, in the USSR of the 1930s, brought about thebirth of the first state economic system founded on industry that historyremembers.As in the previous sections, we will begin here with 1917, withPiatakov's experience at the Gosbank. Together with other young intellectuals,such as Osinskii, who were close to him, Piatakov discovered hisadministrative talents and a taste and capacity for command. And like them,he fell for the first time into the "trap" consisting of the apparent possibilityof directing the economy through decrees, a possibility made very credibleby the institutional and social void left by war and revolution.These decrees were inspired by what was for these young men "the lastword" on the subject of economic theory, Hilferding's version of Marxism.The aim, expounded by Piatakov in a series of articles that appeared inPravda and were much appreciated by Lenin, was to transform the bankingsystem, reduced to a single central bank, into an organ of government andgeneral accounting of the nationalized economy.Here again we find that, in reality, the final goal of such a policy couldonly be a step back. The new guise taken on by this policy, aiming at involution,is worth noting since it was to reappear several times over the followingyears and is typical of the way in which some intellectuals reacted to