Russia: Borrowing from the Capitalists

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Liberman admits as much. "It is clear that, at first, shortcomings will turn up in the course of practical application; that people will surely rail at the system and its authors, and that people will say it must be abolished and thrown out immediately," he told a group of fellow economists. "I foresee all this, but if we economists work together in a united front, go through the painful period of the introduction of the new system together and do not panic, we will be performing a good service in building the technical base of Communism."

Ad Men? Technical base for Communism or not, there is no escaping the fact that having in effect posted a suggestion box, the Kremlin has found Pandora's name on it. Last month a Moscow economist proposed that the profit motive even be extended to agriculture, Russia's perennially insoluble problem. Last week in Trud, a trade official named Lazukov suggested that Russians should learn to advertise capitalist-style, with TV commercials, trailers in movie houses, and professional Madison Avenue men. Izvestia recently lamented that while the U.S. has 50 university-level business-management schools, Russia has none. Though the Russians insist none of this has anything to do with capitalism —at least in "essence"—the fact remains that Peking, which once complained that Russia was fast turning into "capitalism without capitalists," is now taunting Moscow for its "capitalism with capitalists."

Liberman is of course right in insisting that he is not ushering in "capitalism"—that dirty word the Communists have never really understood for all their ranting against it. But the current search for incentives to get the Russian economy moving again is nonetheless an eloquent testimony to the failure of one of Communism's cardinal creeds: that the profit motive is wrong and evil, and unnecessary in running a society. People, insists Marxism, can be made to work like soldiers—or saints—solely for the good of the state. The great debate, whatever comes of it, has demonstrated that this is simply not so; that given a chance, man does not want to live by slogan alone.

100 Flowers? Western experts differ widely on how far Russian economic reform can go, and what it means. "I think this is a permanent reform," says Pennsylvania's Herbert Levine, "except for a major outside political event. I don't expect that there will be an easy retrenchment to a central economy." But Stanford's Roger Freeman insists that it is "only a period—like China's 100-flowers period. It may appear to open up the Soviet Union, but eventually it must die."