The Thinking Reed

But the central figure among them was undoubtedly G. Lisichkin. We are not concerned here with how original his ideas were, but with something else. In the sixties he probably did more than anyone else to spread the new economic theory. In particular, his articles in Novy Mir were devoted to agriculture, the sickest branch of the Soviet economy. He not only criticized the situation which had been created and showed the causes of the trouble; he put forward concrete solutions. Above all, it was necessary to reject excessive centralization and directive planning. All that had nothing to do with socialist economics. Directive planning, wrote Lisichkin, had been ‘invented’ long before its present furious defenders were born. In Russia in 1914-16 plans had also been sent down to uyezd level for the production and sale of corn at prices fixed by the state.14 In fact, by laying down fixed purchase prices for the various products of agriculture, the state was already planning production. Besides this, the state exerted planning influence on enterprises by means of taxes. Any planning that went further than that could only do harm. Directive planning hindered economic development.

The salvation of agriculture required organizational reform. Increased capital investment was ‘not the decisive condition for increasing agricultural production’.15 Retention of the existing system of capital investment resulted in losses rather than profits, and investments were distributed inefficiently. The way forward lay through increased autonomy for enterprises and self-management by labour-collectives. ‘The mechanism of self-management’, Latsis declared, summing up the results of experiments carried out during the period of reform, ‘will work without a hitch.’16 In the seventies this formula became almost a commonplace with East European socialists, but it was first uttered at this time. For Lisichkin the collective farm was a higher form of organization than the state farm, because it retained elements of independence and self-management and production was more closely related to the market. Lisichkin set out his views systematically in two books — Plan i rynok [Plan and Market], 1966, and Chto cheloveku nado? [What Does a Man Need?], 1974. It is significant that his articles for Novy Mir were bolder and livelier than his books. Nevertheless, the books had the advantage of enabling the theoretician to expound his ideas in greater detail.

Economic thought now developed dynamically in the Soviet Union and — most importantly — became for the first time for many years part of worldwide economic thought. It was not accidental that Lisichkin’s book Plan i rynok — which was not without defects and also included many ‘reticences’ due to the censors — was published in Prague, in Czech, on the eve of the ‘Prague spring’. An American economist who studied the problems of Soviet-type economies wrote later that in the USSR in the sixties ‘a real revolution in economics as a science had taken place.’17

The new economists came to the common conclusion that the chronic misfortunes of the Soviet economy — production of goods which found no buyers, shortages of many other goods, low quality, inefficiency of agriculture, and so on — prevented a move towards an intensive model of economic development and made the whole system rickety. All these shortcomings could be laid at the door of bureaucratic centralism. It was necessary to devise a programme for transforming this, because the difficulties that arose in the Soviet economy were due to the existing type of organization and could not be eliminated so long as that obtained. In its turn, the reform programme presupposed the granting to different groups in society of a high degree of social autonomy in relation to the ruling statocracy, and so — democratization. The reforms certainly affected people’s attitude to work, and even their psychology. Lisichkin referred to the celebrated ‘Shchekino experiment’, when an enterprise was given greater independence than usual in the sphere of wages policy, and so on. This decision ‘radically altered the logic of the conduct of the leaders of the enterprise and also the logic of the interest in their work taken by the whole production-collective.’18 Finally, consistent implementation of these reforms would have meant, sooner or later, the social decomposition of the statocracy itself and its elimination as a special corporation of the class type. The experience of the 1968 reforms in Czechoslovakia, where a similar programme was openly formulated and partly carried out, leaves no doubt of that.