The Gorbachev Regime: Consolidation to Reform by Peter Juviler & Hiroshi Kimura

Author:Peter Juviler & Hiroshi Kimura [Juviler, Peter & Kimura, Hiroshi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Europe, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Political Ideologies, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9780202362694
Google: 1-ZxngEACAAJ
Goodreads: 9752070
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-01-15T09:41:19+00:00

Shortcomings in the Soviet Economic System

Much of Gorbachev’s critique of the Soviet economic system showed a debt to expert analysis already developed by the early 1960’s. Arguments for reform proliferated then, supported by the rapid blossoming of mathematical economics and by Khrushchev’s encouragement of economic experiments, though reform efforts under Khrushchev such as the regional economic councils failed. Recognition of the structural problems of the Soviet economic system was almost as fully developed as it is today. Then as now the critics drew attention to excessive centralization of planning, pricing and allocation of production inputs; the predominance of command methods in administering the lower levels of organization; the lack of rational standards for decisions on economic policy; autocratic styles of management neglecting the human factor, and so on. Urgent calls for systematic reform came from economists like Nemchinov, Novzhilov, Venzher, Birman, Malyshev, Fedorenko and Lisitsyn.2 Academician Novozhilov led the arguments for reform. Along with his critique, he submitted a general model of a new mechanism to replace the old one. Nemchinov died in 1964, before the 1965 attempt at reform by Premier Alexei Kosygin, who served under Brezhnev. His penetrating analysis of defects in the Soviet economic system and proposals for reform left an influential legacy.

Andropov’s brief term in office following Brezhnev brought a spurt in reformist thinking, typified by the 1983 Novosibirsk economic report to a closed seminar, said to be written by Tatiana Zaslavskaia, an economic sociologist and one of the leading influences on Gorbachev. The report points out that the centralized Soviet economy grew out of the unusual drive for heavy industrialization in the 1930׳s. Since the completion of that drive, the structure of industry has changed extensively, the citizens’ level of education has risen, and the old system has become obsolete and an obstacle to economic development. It cramps individual initiative, sustains a superfluous middle level of administrators who will not be removed without “social conflict,” and breeds a dispirited labor force lacking in discipline and incentive.3

The shortcomings of the Soviet economy described in the Novosibirsk report and elsewhere can be found in analyses by Western researchers of the Soviet “command economy,” as they called it. The diagnoses of Soviet and Western economists almost completely converged.4

Gorbachev’s diagnosis of the current situation and his prescriptions for its remedy follow the points of argument in the Novosibirsk report. Furthermore, he followed the logic of the reformists of the 1960׳ s in his program for all-out economic reconstruction.5 In fact, he quoted from Nemchinov’s essay, published in 1964, on the fossilization of the Soviet economic system and its eventual collapse therefrom, to the June 1987 Central Committee plenum.6

Gorbachev’s serious view of the economic situation can be appreciated from his measured and partially acquiescent response to Nikolai Shmelev’s merciless impeachment of the economy in an article that had Moscow buzzing in June 1987.

Shmelev depicted an economy both overcentralized and out of control under conflicting bureaucratic interests, an economy of the producer’s monopoly in a situation of goods scarcity, an economy

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