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On 7/29/17 5:54 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
I also have high regard for anything written by Moshe Lewin, who
started off as a blast furnace operator in a Polish factory during WWII
and then became a major figure in academic Sovietology. I read his
Russia — USSR — Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate and
recommend it highly.
I cite Moshe Lewin:
https://louisproyect.org/2009/09/14/joseph-stalin-nostalgia/
Stalin’s rule was marked mostly by a lack of planning. Despite the
announcement of 5-year plans, the economy had more in common with
bureaucratic fiat than scientific planning. All this is discussed in
chapter 5 entitled “The Disappearance of Planning in the Plan” in Moshe
Lewin’s “Russia USSR Russia”.
The Soviet government announced the first five year plan in 1928. Stalin
loyalists, like Krzhizanovksy and Strumlin, who headed Gosplan, the
minister of planning, worried about the excess rigidity of this plan.
They noted that the success of the plan was based on 4 factors: 1) five
good consecutive crops, 2) more external trade and help than in 1928, 3)
a “sharp improvement” in overall economic indicators, and 4) a smaller
ration than before of military expenditures in the state’s total
expenditures.
How could anybody predict five consecutive good crops in the USSR? The
plan assumed the most optimistic conditions and nobody had a contingency
plan to allow for failure of any of the necessary conditions.
Bazarov, another Stalin loyalist in Gosplan, pointed to another area of
risk: the lack of political cadres. He warned the Gosplan presidium in
1929, “If you plan simultaneously a series of undertakings on such a
gigantic scale without knowing in advance the organizational forms,
without having cadres and without knowing what they should be taught,
then you get a chaos guaranteed in advance; difficulties will arise
which will not only slow down the execution of the five-year plan, which
will take seven if not ten years to achieve, but results even worse may
occur; here such a blatantly squandering of means could happen which
would discredit the whole idea of industrialization.”
Strumlin admitted that the planners preferred to “stand for higher
tempos rather than sit in prison for lower ones.” Strumlin and
Krzhizanovksy had been expressing doubts about the plan for some time
and Stalin removed these acolytes from Gosplan in 1930.
In order for the planners, who were operating under terrible political
pressure, to make sense of the plan, they had to play all kinds of
games. They had to falsify productivity and yield goals in order to
allow the input and output portions of the plan to balance. V.V.
Kuibyshev, another high-level planner and one of Stalin’s proteges,
confessed in a letter to his wife how he had finessed the industrial
plan he had developing. “Here is what worried me yesterday and today; I
am unable to tie up the balance, and as I cannot go for contracting the
capital outlays–contracting the tempo–there will be no other way but to
take upon myself an almost unmanageable task in the realm of lowering
costs.”
Eventually Kuibyshev swallowed any doubts he may have had and began
cooking the books in such a way as to make the five-year plan, risky as
it was, totally unrealizable.
Real life proved how senseless the plan was. Kuibyshev had recklessly
predicted that costs would go down, meanwhile they went up: although the
plan allocated 22 billion rubles for industry, transportation and
building, the Soviets spent 41.6 billion. The money in circulation,
which planners limited to a growth of only 1.25 billion rubles,
consequently grew to 5.7 billion in 1933.
Now we get to the real problem for those who speak about “planning”
during this period. As madcap and as utopian as the original plan was,
Stalin tossed it into the garbage can immediately after the planners
submitted it to him. He commanded new goals in 1929-30 that disregarded
any economic criteria. For example, instead of a goal of producing 10
million tons of pig iron in 1933, the Soviets now targeted 17 million.
All this scientific “planning” was taking place when a bloody war
against the Kulaks was turning the Russian countryside into chaos.
Molotov declared that to talk about a 5-year plan during this period was
“nonsense.”
Stalin told Gosplan to forget about coming up with a new plan that made
sense. The main driving force now was speed. The slogan “tempos decide
everything” became policy. The overwhelming majority of Gosplan,
hand-picked by Stalin, viewed the new policy with shock. Molotov said
this was too bad, and cleaned house in the old Gosplan with “all of its
old-fashioned planners” as he delicately put it.
When Stalin turned the whole nation into a work camp in order to meet
these unrealistic goals, he expanded the police force in order that they
may function as work gang bosses. Scientific planning declined and
command mechanisms took their place. As the command mechanisms grew, so
grew the administrative apparatus to implement them. The more
bottlenecks that showed up, the greater the need for bureaucrats to step
in and pull levers. This is the explanation of the monstrous
bureaucratic apparatus in the former Soviet Union, not scientific planning.
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