Here we can ‘sympathize’ with Khrushchev. He had encountered enough problems with the de-Stalinization he had launched. Reviewing the show trials would have been too much for him. After all, he never envisaged the possibility of open factions and debates within the party.
19
KOSYGIN AND ANDROPOV
ALEXEI KOSYGIN
Alexei Kosygin was never a central political player and not a flamboyant one either. Moreover, he never wished to be in the ‘race’ for the post of general-secretary. Nevertheless, his remarkable administrative skills made him indispensable. It was known in top circles that the economy rested on his shoulders – and that nobody else possessed such broad ones.
The career of this phenomenal administrator reads like a history of Soviet government, from junior jobs to the highest posts, and contains some genuinely heroic chapters during the war. Among the latter, as has already been mentioned, were evacuating industry from territory about to be overrun by the Germans and breaking the Leningrad blockade by organizing the construction of a supply route and pipeline on the bottom of Lake Lagoda. But he was also sometime Finance Minister, head of Gosplan, Deputy Prime Minister, Prime Minister, and Politburo member; and admired and envied by general-secretaries because he knew better than anyone else how to make the administrative machinery work. The people around him really did work! But he was also known in government circles for having challenged Brezhnev over the right of the general-secretary to represent the country abroad – a function which he believed should fall to the Prime Minister, as in every other country. This was actually implemented for a period until Brezhnev, who could not have been very fond of such a figure, put an end to it. Kosygin was also known for the interesting economic reform he launched, which was scuttled by the conservatives, who continued to hold it against him.
The book edited by his son-in-law, Gvishiani, offers a glimpse of Kosygin’s thinking.[1] Dedicated to the system, he was also well aware of the need to reform it; and around 1964 everything still seemed possible. He believed in semi-public companies and cooperatives. He was conscious of the West’s superiority and the need to learn from it. He believed in initiating gradual changes, setting in train a transition from a ‘state-administered economy’ to a system in which ‘the state restricts itself to guiding enterprises’. He was in favour of a multiplicity of forms of property and management – something he tried to explain to Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, but to no avail. Khrushchev had fully nationalized the producers’ cooperatives and Gvishiani was present on an occasion when Kosygin tried to convince Brezhnev to elaborate a genuine economic strategy and discuss it at a Politburo meeting. As was his wont, Brezhnev used delaying tactics, which amounted to burying the idea. Kosygin emerged from such conversations completely demoralized: ‘He warned against a blind faith in our power and the danger of incompetent policies.’ He was strongly opposed to harebrained schemes for ‘reversing the course of Siberia’s rivers’, and was against the interventions in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He said out loud that massive military expenditure or the aid to ‘friendly countries’ was beyond the USSR’s means. However, the Politburo refused to tackle these real problems and ‘instead busied itself with all sorts of nonsense’.
Under Brezhnev, many important questions, including foreign policy, were dealt with on the Staraia Ploshchad. But it was difficult to find anyone there with a good intellectual education. The role of grey figures like Suslov and Kirilenko was ‘considerable’, says Gvishiani, who was present at numerous meetings or commissions of the Central Committee when nobody spoke. They all just sat there obediently in silence, until a document appeared stating: ‘The Politburo (or Secretariat) considers that…’
No one would dream of attributing a role in some ‘intellectual effervescence’ or ‘renaissance’ to an austere, non-flamboyant person like Kosygin. However, something like that actually did occur with the economic reforms of the mid-1960s (in fact, from the late 1950s). The cautious Kosygin, who had never uttered the least heterodoxy in public, promoted, supported and protected a real renaissance in economic thinking and publishing. A genuine economic literature, accompanied by a wealth of data, was published, including utterly subversive texts parading under innocuous titles. This brought about an explosion of creativity in the social sciences, which coincided with the economic debates by challenging various ‘sacred cows’ and their political implications. All this occurred under the prime minister’s protection.
The debate took apart, bit by bit, all key aspects of the economic system. In 1964, academician V. Nemchinov published a powerful indictment in Kommunist of the whole system of material and technical supply, demonstrating that it was the main obstacle to economic development. Many well-known economists participated – Novozhilov, Kantorovich and Yefimov among them – as well as a group of mathematical economists. They all attacked Gossnab directly, showing that it was merely an outgrowth of an administrative planning system that handled the economy in terms of physical units and fixed prices arbitrarily. The capital required for investment was offered cost-free – hence the enormous pressure from ministries, enterprises and local government for ever more investment, but without any constraints on them to use it productively.
This in itself was a barrier to an expanded reproduction of capital at a higher technological level. Over-investment lay behind falling growth rates and had a further inevitable consequence: permanent shortages. In such conditions, planning ultimately amounted to perpetuating a routine.
The lively debates of the 1960s extended to numerous publications. Even though many authors avoided drawing direct political conclusions from their analyses, they were implicit. Everyone knew that there was a political ‘owner’ in charge of the economy and the system, and that there was no way to keep the genie in the bottle. A letter to the Central Committee from three dissidents – A. D. Sakharov, V. F. Turchin and Roy Medvedev – reached Le Monde, which published it in its edition of 12–13 April 1970. It warned of the dangers looming on the horizon if political reforms were too long delayed. The production situation was critical, as was the plight of citizens; and the country was doomed to become a second-rank state. At least one book – V. P. Shkredov’s Ekonomika i Pravo (The Economy and Law), published in 1967 – engaged in a powerful, head-on critique of the state and its ideological underpinnings, which was all the more remarkable in that it defended a Marxist perspective. According to Shkredov, the state – a politico-juridical institution that claimed ownership of the economy – was forgetting that the politico-juridical aspect (however important in economic life) came second to the actual state of the country’s socioeconomic development. Consequently, the owner’s claim to impose its vision on the economy, to plan and run it directly as it wished, would inflict great damage if the level of economic and technological development did not yet (if ever) allow for administrative planning. The relations of production were not to be confused with legal forms like ownership. That would be Proudhonism, not Marxism. An usurper state, hiding behind its right not to conform to economic reality, could only breed bureaucratization and constituted a major obstacle to economic development. Shkredov stressed that basic property forms had not changed for long stretches of history, whereas forms of production – as Marx had shown – had evolved in stages into developed capitalism.
1
T. I. Fetisov, sost.,