Russia: Borrowing from the Capitalists

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Lost: 500,000 Days. It was by no means only economists who poured through the breach that Liberman had opened. The manager of a giant construction complex even went so far as to use the phrase "supply and demand" in pleading for a freewheeling open market for consumer goods, admitting that it would necessitate major reliance on that old capitalist technique of market research by firms. A director of Odessa's Red October Plant wrote to Pravda that the machine-tool industry in the Black Sea area was working at less than three-fourths the capacity called for in the plan. The reason, he complained acidly, was the "host of directives" from the planners, which caused "insurmountable barriers and innumerable hindrances." Leningrad managers complained that they lost 500,000 man-days of work during 1964 running back and forth to Moscow to get decisions from central planners.

Liberman himself passed on a foundry's complaint that it lost $11,100 worth of metal because its plan would not permit an additional outlay of $2,500 for salvage workers. In another instance, the plan specifies that workers at the Victory Candy Factory (1964 quota: 5,460 tons) at Vilna, in Lithuania, wear sanitary white smocks and caps at all times. Though they handle each piece of candy at least four times, nowhere are they asked to wash their hands. So absurd have planning's excesses grown that even some of the planners themselves were converted to the reformers' cause. One regional planner complained angrily that his bosses had amended his 1962 Voronezh sovnarkhoz plan 133 times within nine months.

Great Dangers. To the entrenched planners and old-line ideologues, such prerevolutionary criticisms were a screaming red flag, and soon outraged rebuttals began to fill the columns of the press. "If we give up centralized planning of salaries, work production, production costs, investments," complained the prestigious Academy of Sciences' Kirill Plotnikov, "we give up regulation by the state of the most important parts of the economy—in fact, of economic planning. This path is full of great dangers."

"The aim of socialist production is not to make a profit!" objected one critic. "Lenin put forward the principle of organization against laissez-faire and petit bourgeois negligence,'' said another, "against opportunism and anarchy, liquidatorism, dumping." Amen, cried Academician Fedorenko: "We must never forget that unique economic 'planification' which is centralized is one of the great victories of the socialist regime. We must not weaken but improve central planning."

A Strange Utopia. For support, many of those who resist the Liberman philosophy are allying themselves with Russia's computer specialists, who argue that central planning can be saved by the use of modern machines.