The struggle around the rehabilitation of Stalin was still only warming up. As early as the beginning of 1965 some extreme Stalinists among the statocrats (Trapeznikov, Yepishev, Pospelov) started to campaign for the rehabilitation of their ‘friend and teacher’. The intelligentsia answered with such means as were available to them — samizdat. ‘It was precisely in these months’, Roy Medvedev recalls,
that a whole variety of manuscripts and materials began to circulate among the intelligentsia, protesting in one form or another against the rehabilitation of Stalin (e.g., the letter of Ernst Henri to Ilya Ehrenburg, a pamphlet by Gregory Pomerants, etc.).7
When rumours got around that the Stalinists might win the day at the Twenty-Third Party Congress the intelligentsia began to write collective letters:
One letter in particular made a major impression — it was signed by twenty-five leading members of the Soviet intelligentsia, including Academicians Peter Kapitsa, Leonty Artsimovich, Mikhail Leontovich, Andrei Sakharov, Igor Tamm, Ivan Maisky; the writers Valentin Katayev, Viktor Nekrasov, Konstantin Paustovsky, Kornei Chukovsky, Vladimir Tendryakov; the theatre people Maya Plisetskaya, Oleg Yefremov, P.D. Korin, V.N. Nemensky, Mikhail Romm, Innokenty Smoktunovsky and A.G. Tovstonogov. The first twenty-five signatories were soon joined by others, including Academicians A. Khlmogorov, A. Alikhanov, Mikhail Knunyants, Boris Astaurov, P. Zdradovsky; the writers Ilya Ehrenburg, Vladimir Dudintsev; the artists G. Chukhrai, Vanno Muradeli, Igor Ilinsky.8
Neither at the Twenty-Third Congress nor subsequently was Stalin rehabilitated, although in 1969 everything was made ready for this to happen. The Stalinists’ failure can be explained by a number of factors, among which not the least must be considered the interests of the statocracy themselves, for whom Brezhnev’s regime, with its conservative stability, was very much more convenient than direct reaction in the form of a return to Stalinism — that is, to a time when even members of the ruling class did not feel safe. But the intelligentsia, too, made a definite contribution to the victory over the Stalinists in the 1960s. Their letter left an impression.
In this uncertain situation a polemic flared up about the economic reforms. A group of progressive economists backed these measures, which were attempts to effect a definite change in the economic structure and thereby to democratize the economy. It was now that economic questions entered the realm of public opinion for the first time and became a subject for reflection by the intelligentsia: not only economists and sociologists but the intelligentsia as a whole. N. Petrakov, one of the participants in the discussion, wrote later that at the end of the 1960s interest in economic problems markedly increased. The economist, as such, somehow imperceptibly ‘acquired an importance which the physicist and the lyric poet might envy.’9
The new economists and writers about economics — Liberman, Birman, Volin, Lisichkin, Kantorovich, Latsis, Petrakov, Volkov and many others — were working in the same direction as O. Šik in Czechoslovakia, R. Nyers and J. Kornai in Hungary, or W. Brus in Poland. It was really a case of the appearance of a single East European school of Marxist economics, on the theory of the planned market.10 Novy Mir opened its pages to the new theoreticians. Its economic articles were for several years the most interesting things being printed.
The economists around Novy Mir even worked out a sort of division of labour among themselves. A. Birman spoke as a theoretician, providing a very general foundation for the theory of the socialist market and defending the reforms introduced after 1965. ‘The objective possibility of voluntarism is inherent in the system itself,’ he wrote, ‘in the very process of planning, we must not fear to say that.’11 It was therefore necessary to make use of market relations, creating a real, objective basis for planning. The remedy for bureaucratic voluntarism was democratization, control from below, the ending of overcentralized authority, and the granting of extensive rights to the enterprises. And finally, freedom of thought on economic matters must be allowed.12
P. Volin and O. Latsis spoke as propagandists for the market economy. Coming down from the height of pure theory, they directed the reader’s attention to concrete facts, speaking in a lively and interesting way about new ideas and the absurdity of the existing economic system. Malicious mockery of the system of ‘indices’ employed for the guidance of production became the theme of many articles:
It costs a lot — never mind, so long as the quantity is increased… It’s worse in quality — no worries, so long as it [i.e. production] is greater. The consumers don’t need all this — that doesn’t matter, the main thing is to manufacture the stuff and send it off, what happens after that is no concern of yours. They want different goods, not the old sort — shut your eyes to that, the old ones are quicker and easier to make.13
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.