Searching for Economic Reforms: Soviet Economists on the Road to Perestroika

​Abstract
Is Soviet-type socialism reformable? The debate has been going on for decades. Russia and China, Hungary and Poland - these and many other countries demonstrate that there are different paths of exit from orthodox Soviet socialism (communism). The question of the comparative efficiency of one model or another will remain open until the process of transformation finds its logical conclusion.

The complexity of the post-communist development of Russia strengthens the argument of supporters of the Chinese model for market reform. Consequently the question arises: why did the Soviet Union not implement gradual, careful transformation? There is no simple answer. Perestroika and the rapid collapse of the communist regime in the USSR were results of a complex combination of economic, political, intellectual and psychological problems. They came into existence by the mid-1980s and would require their own special analysis. The aim of this article is much more modest: to illuminate and analyse the process of forming the intellectual basis for the reforms that M.S. Gorbachev tried to implement. This process led in the end to the collapse of the communist system.

Strictly speaking, the debate on the reform ("improvement") of the Soviet economic system has been going on since the early months of the Soviet era. The most fruitful periods in this respect were, of course, the 1920s and 1960s. Nonetheless, we begin our analysis with the economic debates of late 1950s and early 1960s. At the time Soviet economists were dealing with the problems of an already mature economic system. The political climate in the country gave rise to quite sincere polemics for a period of time. Of course, censorial limitations existed, but the mistakes of that period were for the most part sincere. Therefore, the narrow mindedness of some of the conclusions of economist-reformers reflected the actual level of understanding of the USSR's economic problems, which was specific to Soviet economics. This fact explains the many problems and contradictions involved in the practical implementation of Soviet economic reform in both the 1960s and 1980s.

Using terminology popular in Soviet science, we can define the subject of this article as the debate on improving the economic (or management --these terms are used interchangably in this paper) mechanism of the USSR. The problems of the economic mechanism became the subject of one of the last chapters written on socialist economic theory. The conceptual process can be followed in the stormy debates that took place before the economic reforms of 1965. Since the late 1960s there has been a formal confirmation of this chapter within the framework of the political economy of socialism.

This article consists of two sections. The first section characterizes the main threads of the economic debates that led to the reform of 1965. This was the last great attempt to transform the national economy within the framework of the Soviet regime. The second section considers the orthodox and reformist views concerning the type of transformation that was needed for the Soviet economy. These economic debates eventually led to the formation of an ideology that became the basis for the economic policy referred to as perestroika. Overcoming of this ideology became one of the most important factors in the design of Russia's economic policy in the early years of its post-communist development, 1992-1993.



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