Russia Before Putin by Edward Tesler PhD

Author:Edward Tesler, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: History Publishing Company, LLC
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

To a degree

Due to all these changes, my experience consisted of two very dissimilar parts. In Siberia and Donbass, it was engineering; in Kiev, it moved into economics: labor, of course, is the backbone of economy.

Engineering is an exciting domain of exact numbers and straight, verifiable facts. Economics, in comparison, always was to me foggy and plain boring. The only bright spot was The Misery of Philosophy by Friedrich Engels, which I found in my teenage years. It was a polemic with The Philosophy of Misery written by French socialist and anarchist Proudhon, the very one who coined the catchphrase “Property is theft”. I loved Engels’ sarcastic style, beginning with the title. But even if that polemic might create some rudimentary interest in economics, the obligatory political economy studies in the institute promptly killed it. The ultimate economic wisdom was already delivered by Marx and Lenin; all an economist could, and was allowed to, do was to re-shuffle phrases from their writings. Of course, economics was about numbers, too; and Western scientists married it to mathematics thus creating econometrics. But after Stalin rejected it as “a false bourgeois science”, nobody dared to even mention it.

Strange as it was, cardinal changes came from Khrushchev; more precisely, from his obsession with uprooting Moscow bureaucracy and improving the cultural level of provinces. He created Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences, where, under the progressive leadership of Academician Lavrentyev and far away from Moscow’s watchful eye, suffocated sciences got a breath of fresh air. The school of Academician Abel Aganbegyan rediscovered real economics. Hardly might Khrushchev foresee that it was the first small step to dismantle the mighty Soviet Union: Aganbegyan became later the architect of the famous Gorbachev’s perestroika, or restructuring of the Soviet economy.

The idea behind it was great. Let the “means of production” remain officially in state’s ownership – as long as the managing power is delegated to workers’ collectives. They would elect directors and other managers; output would be dictated not by “Potemkin villages” of five-year plans but by customers’ demands expressed, market-like, via profitable contracts with other enterprises. Workers’ collectives, after paying taxes, would be free to use the profits as they deem fit: on new equipment, on houses or kindergartens for workers’ families, whatever. That would be as close to market economy as possible; no wonder official American position was “what is good for Gorbachev is good for America”. That view became even stronger when he introduced glasnost, or openness, which was mistaken for democracy

Much later, when asked to write a monograph on Soviet planned economy, I tried to explain that Gorbachev’s goal was to save the system, not to dismantle it: that’s why he “corrected” Aganbegyan’s ideas. Directors elected by workers had to be recommended and approved by the government same as any other candidates in Soviet-style elections; and, while governmental and military orders were renamed to “social contracts”, they carried the same dictatorial force as five-year plans. Nobody believed me. The monograph was published and forgotten; so is now Gorbachev.

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