Stalin's economy. Secrets of success. Stalin's model - the economics of socialization of surplus product

Chapter IV “NEW MAN” 1. Individual and organizationHaving come to a pessimistic conclusion about the “postponed” revolution, about the absence of a subject of revolutionary change in the modern world, about the lack of the will to decisive action among the exploited majority, left radicals

Socialization of the total surplus product is an integral economic task of the proletarian revolution and socialism.

TO ASSESS the significance of the economic system created under the leadership of J.V. Stalin, we must first of all clearly answer the question: what is the integral economic task of both the proletarian revolution and socialism as the first phase of the communist socio-economic formation?

They will say: in the destruction of private property, in the socialization of the means of production.

This is correct, but it is rather a path to achieving a goal, a tool for achieving a goal, but not yet a goal in itself. The goal of socialist transformations in the economy is

it is not so much the socialization of the means of production as such, but SOCIALIZATION OF SURPLUS PRODUCT produced with their help.

Modern Marxist theorists would make their lives much easier if they firmly established this simple thing and always put it at the forefront: the integral economic task of the proletarian revolution and socialism is

SOCIALIZATION OF THE TOTAL SURPLUS PRODUCT produced by the socialized production apparatus.

After all, if you think about it, no one, as they say, needs the means of production themselves. What is the purpose of owning land if it is not inhabited by forced peasants who would cultivate it, pay quitrents and work their backs in corvee labor? Why do we need owned factories and factories if they are not filled with hired workers who produce products that are in demand in the market and make a profit? The whole fuss, so to speak, with the ownership of the means of production is burning not because of them themselves, but because of the surplus product that is produced from them and comes at the disposal of their owner.

And therefore, the slogan of public ownership of the means of production, when read more carefully, means:

We want the total surplus product produced in social production to go directly to society, the people, and not to private individuals, and to be fairly distributed among all of us, to serve entirely and exclusively the common good.

I want to emphasize in every possible way that it is in no way possible to get stuck on the slogan of social property as such, because if it is not equipped with a mechanism for socializing the total surplus product, then it is as if it does not exist; since the goal for which the means of production were socialized has not been achieved.

Over the course of a number of years, this idea in my speeches was presented somewhat differently, namely: any form of ownership has an integral structural, so to speak, partner, in the absence of which it is practically unviable - this

METHOD OF ACCUMULATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF TOTAL SURPLUS PRODUCT, OR SOCIAL NET INCOME.

The principle of income generation and income distribution is one of the most important components of the economic basis of society; it is a powerful and extremely complex unit of objective social relations. In any society where labor, to one degree or another, is not yet of an end in itself, alienated in nature, there is value, and there the division of the product of labor into necessary and surplus is controlled by value, or commodity-money, or market relations. And to the extent that this entire structural connection of relations regarding the accumulation and distribution of net income can also be called this: it is a specific historical MODIFICATION OF THE LAW OF VALUE (or the relationship of value) corresponding to a given method of production.

A method of production reaches socio-economic maturity and turns into a SYSTEM, when the corresponding form of ownership begins to function confidently and uninterruptedly in tandem with an adequate set of relations for the consolidation and distribution of net income. Or, which is the same thing, paired with a principle of income generation that is adequate to it, or, which is again the same thing, paired with a modification of value that is adequate to the given method of production.

The principle of income generation is not something established by government decree. This is a fragment of objective, material economic reality, and it must crystallize in the thickness of this reality precisely objectively, just as the law of the average rate of profit once crystallized, which is precisely the mechanism of income generation adequate to the capitalist socio-economic formation. This requires time, considerable time at that, plus a whole historical layer of humankind’s economic experience.

And this is the most grandiose social engineering discovery that we made in the economy in the Stalin era, this was the discovery of an adequate socialist public ownership of the means of production of the principle of accumulation and distribution of the total surplus product. The socialist principle of income generation, which is organic to it, was added to socialist public property, or - which is the same thing - a modification of the law of value that is organic to socialism.

In other words, the defining task of the socialist phase was solved in its main features: to socialize not only the means of production, but also the total surplus product. Moreover, this was done in historically, one might say, lightning-fast time.

From this point of view, which, in fact, is the only one that corresponds to historical truth, a whole heap of pseudo-problems that prevent Marxist science and our country from developing at the pace required by the modern extreme situation immediately disappears.

Was socialism built in the USSR? Well, of course, he was, if he managed to solve his objective-historical formation task.

What form must a socialist system have in order for it to be recognized as fundamentally successful? If fundamentally, then it is the same as under Stalin, and this especially applies to the economic sphere. At the superstructure level, there were shortcomings - however, quite removable. But as for the economy, we must clearly understand that none of the proposed and proposed models, except the Stalinist one, solves the problem of socialization of the surplus product. And therefore, in economic terms, Stalinist socialism is, unambiguously, SOCIALISM AS SUCH; i.e., the only springboard from which the construction of a communist society can be successfully resumed and continued. It is there, to these socio-structural boundaries, that we will have to return upon the final liberation of the country from its current actual occupation by transnational capital.

Another pseudo-problem:

This is socialism and commodity-money relations.

And I should have stopped chewing this bast a long time ago. Value relations are a concrete historical phenomenon; for each method of production they take their own special form, or modification. Between their complete extinction under communism and the form in which they exist under the capitalist system lies their socialist modification. A distinctive feature of the socialist modification of value is precisely the provision of a smooth, gradual self-destruction of the entire range of phenomena associated with value and marketability. The socialist modification of value is as organic to a socialized economy as the law of the average rate of profit is to a bourgeois economy, or the law of extracting maximum profit is to the economy of modern imperialism. Not taking into account the requirements of the law of value in a socialist national economy is the same as “fighting” against the objectively inherent laws of profit accumulation in a private capitalist economy, and the results will be just as disastrous.

Socialism and commodity-money relations. The misleading nature of NEP apologetics.LET'S NOW SEE how, specifically, the socialist modification of value should look and actually looked like in our country.

To avoid the confusion that “economists” of a certain persuasion have artificially layered here for decades, we need to at least briefly touch on the issue of the division of labor and product into necessary and surplus. We will, apparently, have to postpone the issue of labor “for later”, and we will talk more closely about the product.

Excess or surplus product is an entirely social phenomenon. It arises only when and to the extent that the worker begins, spontaneously or consciously, to apply in his work the results of the labor experience of other people, including other generations. Having arisen, the surplus product provokes, so to speak, a certain part of society to try to take it away from the worker and appropriate it. This is carried out through the establishment of private property, first - in ancient times - on the worker himself, then on those conditions or factors of productive activity, without which the worker cannot create a surplus product - land, material and technical means of production, etc.

However, the whole injustice of exploitation does not lie in the fact that the surplus product is generally alienated from the direct producer. The surplus product cannot and should not belong to the direct producer at the place of production. It is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. The whole trouble and injustice is that, having been withdrawn, the surplus product in its overwhelming volume is used not as the property of the entire society, but as a kind of booty, a trophy of the class of private owners.From here you can once again see how important and fundamental the formulation of the goals and objectives of the socialist revolution is precisely as the task of socializing the total surplus product.

After all, you can socialize (i.e., nationalize) the means of production - and be at a complete deadlock as to how to form and distribute the surplus product in this nationalized economy. It was in this situation that the Russian Bolsheviks found themselves on the eve of the introduction of the NEP. Actually, the NEP was the answer to the question, what to do if a modification of commodity-money relations adequate to the new system has not yet been found and has not objectively taken shape? What to do - return to the previous modification, pre-revolutionary, no matter how risky it may be in socio-political terms, otherwise you won’t move at all. To return, but at the same time to devote all efforts to ensure that the new, social method of appropriating the means of production is, as quickly as possible, equipped with a new, also social principle of accumulation and distribution of net income. And this was accomplished under Stalin, I repeat, in historically record time, already somewhere in the mid-30s.

And here the completely misleading nature of another mythology of our current pseudo-communists is also clearly visible: it is as if the NEP represented exactly the model of the economic system that a socialist society requires. Under the NEP, the existing socialist property was forced to function in tandem with the old, privately owned, alien principle of income generation. The country's economy, therefore, did not have a holistic, systemic nature at all; it was an auxiliary, artificial structure that should have been dismantled at the first opportunity. And Stalin dismantled it, as soon as our socialist modification of the law of value began to pulsate under this temporary equipment. To call today for a return to the NEP - to this purely opportunistic, internally unbalanced structure fraught with all sorts of socio-political dangers - means either completely not understanding the essence of systemic connections in the economy, or deliberately harming our cause.

There is a version about some phenomenal, supposedly, economic efficiency of the NEP. By and large, this version does not correspond to reality.

In December 1925 The XIV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) took place, setting a course for socialist industrialization. This was absolutely not a NEP decision. Therefore, it makes sense to talk about the NEP as such until the turn of 1925/26.

By this time, the NEP had in general fulfilled its specific tasks - and these tasks were purely restorative. Industry reached the level of 75.5% of the pre-war level, agriculture - to the level of 95.3%. No serious technical re-equipment took place; production output increased mainly due to the expansion of production at old enterprises that continued to function, as well as due to the reactivation of those that were stopped for various reasons. Moreover, throughout the entire length of the NEP, such a disastrous phenomenon was observed as the retirement of fixed assets of industry, which, as a result of devastation, military operations on the territory of the country, etc., reached by 1920/21. 30% of the 1917 level. By 1923/24 here they “added”, according to various sources, up to 12%. This process was reversed only in 1926/27, with the beginning of socialist industrialization.

During the course of the NEP, the Soviet village became “middled up”; the consumption of bread by the middle peasant and the poor increased. But behind this seemingly favorable, at first glance, trend was hidden a general parcellation of peasant land ownership and a corresponding decline in the marketability of agricultural production. In 1926/27 The middle and poor peasants provided about three-quarters of marketable grain (74%). But the marketability of grain in this group was only 11.2%, and taking into account the more productive kulak farms - 13.3%; i.e., half the pre-war level, which was estimated at 26%. Grain yields, right up to collectivization, continued to remain lower than pre-war (7.9 cents per hectare versus pre-war 8.5 cents).

It should be said that the assertion that during these years the private NEP man “clothed, shod and fed” the country, to a decisive extent, also belongs to the realm of mythology. The country was shod, clothed and fed by state industry and state-sponsored cooperation, which quickly developed on the basis of the “rehabilitation” of commodity-money relations. By 1926/27 state-owned enterprises provided 91% of all industrial products, their share in total trade turnover reached 40%. The maximum of private trade turnover occurred in 1922/23, when it accounted for 43.9% of total trade volume. Subsequently, it sharply decreased from year to year, in 1924/25. fell to 25% and continued to decline.

It is striking that for the NEP as a whole the general economic level of 1913 was in all respects it acts as a kind of standard. But was this level actually such a “reference” level and could it, at that historical stage, even in the slightest degree serve as a guideline for effective economic policy?

This is yet another myth of our “perestroika”ists, pseudo-reformers and their followers in the left movement - the myth of Tsarist Russia as an economically highly developed country.

Indeed, after the peasant reform of 1861, which represented our domestic version of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, in Russia, as it should have been, there was an industrial upsurge and high rates of economic growth were observed. The content of this process was a massive transition from manual labor to machine, factory labor. But it was the end of not the eighteenth, but the nineteenth century. And what was a powerful breakthrough into the future for the second half of the 18th century, for the era of the industrial revolution in England, a hundred years later it was simply and only making up for what had already been accomplished by the leading bourgeois states. Tsarist Russia failed to become one of the leading countries in global industrial development. All the growth rate records it set during the post-reform period fall mainly on such industries as oil production (which previously practically did not exist), coal and ore mining, iron and steel smelting, the spread of steam (i.e. mechanical) engines, etc. P. Whereas in the USA and Germany, for example, in the same decades, industry was already moving to the power base of steam and hydraulic turbines, electric motors, internal combustion engines, diesel engines, and this opened a wide path to the development of the automotive and aircraft manufacturing, electrical, aluminum, and chemical industries. In all these positions, Russia was practically uncompetitive with the leading capital countries.

In 1913, Russia's share in world industrial production accounted for only 2.5%, versus 38.2% for the USA, 12.1% for England and 13.3% for Germany (at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries). . In production of all types of industrial products per capita, Russia lagged behind the United States by 11 times, and in labor productivity by 10 times.

During the years of Soviet power, this gap decreased by more than 5 times. In 1986 Labor productivity in industry in our country was 55% of the American one. The USSR provided a fifth of all world industrial production, the socialist community as a whole - more than 40%.

I will also add that Russia’s dependence on the import of industrial equipment in 1913. was estimated at 63.8%, and this simply did not allow us to talk about its technical and economic independence. The technical and economic independence of the country was achieved only as a result of the implementation of the second Stalinist five-year plan (1932-1937), when the massive import of machinery and equipment ceased completely and only individual samples of new equipment were imported from abroad, so to speak, for educational purposes.

Sometimes you hear that the evil Bolsheviks interrupted the unprecedented rise and prosperity of Russia in the last decades of tsarism. But it was not the Bolsheviks who organized the devastation in the country; they truly had nothing to do with it. The point is not the machinations of the Bolsheviks, but the fact that somewhere around the beginning of the First World War, the possibilities of CAPITALIST industrialization of Russia were objectively exhausted.

Russian capital was rapidly concentrated and monopolized, and the emerging monopolistic associations, in their own selfish interests, slowed down the development of production in order to keep prices at a sufficiently high level. On the eve of the First World War, an industrial hunger for fuel and metal developed in the country. So much for the fantastic pace... You still need to judge by the final result, and not by what happened at the beginning and in the middle. During the war, the metal famine entailed, firstly, the curtailment of production in civilian industries, which already led to a commodity famine, a frantic rise in prices, speculation, etc. Secondly, the tsarist government was forced to place huge orders for weapons abroad and other army needs, right down to horse harnesses, and this meant the low quality of weapons and equipment, their shortage and the shameless robbery of the country by foreign suppliers.

During the war, transport practically collapsed. In some places they starved and froze, in others mountains of unexported coal, food, etc. accumulated. So there is no need to blame the sick head for the healthy one. The Russian tsarism and the armless Provisional Government that replaced it organized the Bolshevik revolution for themselves.

As a lyrical digression, I will cite an interesting observation shared by the director of one of the factories that was subject to evacuation in 1941.

If it weren’t for the general drama of the moment,” he writes in his memoirs (I retell it in my own words), “one could admire what was happening on our railways at that time. Day and night, continuously and endlessly, from west to east and from east to west, trains went and went, loaded with a wide variety of equipment, the countless material wealth of the people created during the years of Stalin's five-year plans. Trains with equipment from evacuated factories departed into the interior of the country. Military echelons rushed towards them, guards stood on platforms, guns, tanks, and parts of aircraft were visible from the outlines under the tarpaulin.

This is such a symbolic contrast.

And now, since, as I believe, you have had enough rest from the theoretical text throughout the above figures, let’s return to the conversation about the socialist modification of value.

Socialist modification of value: the process of its formation. Tax reform 1930 The first general reform of wholesale prices 1936-40.

SO, since the surplus product - also known as net income - is a public property, then in a socialized economy the state must firmly “put its paw” on it already at its very formation. The very process of its formation and accumulation must proceed in such a way that no one except the state has real access to the objectively “ripe”, “precipitated” surplus product.

It follows from this that net income under socialism cannot be generated in any significant amount directly in economic units. And since the end of the 20s, our state has waged a decisive struggle against the inflated selling prices of enterprises, since net income “nests” nowhere else than in price. But the surplus product itself, which objectively accumulates in price, should not have suffered. In fact, as a result of the pressure exerted on prices, it was translated into a non-monetary form of cost savings, or reduction in production costs. In this form, which is its SOCIAL RATIONAL form, it became inaccessible to a given economic unit, neither to its management, nor to the labor collective, and was transferred to the next links in the socio-technological chain.

Subsequently strictly carried out by the state POLICY OF PLANNED REDUCTION OF SALE PRICES, - which is practically equivalent to a systematic reduction in costs - became in the Soviet economy a systemic analogue of CAPITALIST COMPETITION. It also aimed the manufacturer at reducing costs, developing invention and innovation, stimulated receptivity to the achievements of scientific and technological progress, and blocked tendencies towards bureaucracy.

“In our economic system,” said the resolution of the February (1927) Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. “On reducing selling and retail prices”, - the policy of lowering prices is the means by which the working class influences the reduction of costs, ... pushes towards the rationalization of production and thereby creates truly healthy sources of socialist accumulation, so necessary for the advancement of the industrialization of the country.

The real fight against bureaucracy and the streamlining of the industrial economy are closely connected with the problem of lowering prices, because it is high prices that serve as a source of excessive growth and bureaucratic perversions of production and especially trading apparatuses.”

Well, the state prevented the division of net income at the local level, and did it absolutely correctly, but how does it itself become the owner of the total surplus product? Indeed, in an economy where commodity-money relations continue to take place, objectively justified, “healthy” accumulation can only be extracted from the PRICE OF A GOODS, only when the goods are sold on an equilibrium, balanced market.

The structure of the socialist market was generally revealed by I.V. Stalin in his famous "Economic problems of socialism in the USSR". This Stalinist work was published in 1952, but Stalin described in it the already established economic reality, and its formation, as was said, was in full swing from the second half of the 20s. So let us calmly use this description.

On the socialist market, land, material and technical means of production (as well as any of their substitutes, the so-called “securities”), as well as labor, are not commodities and are not subject to purchase and sale. Only the means of reproduction of labor power, or consumer goods, continue to be goods. Therefore, only there - in the consumer market - can the state under socialism, as a spokesman for the interests of the entire society, legally extract a full-fledged, “healthy”, objectively mature social net income.

Actually, the state did just that, but in the conditions of the NEP multi-structure, when the planning principle was not sufficiently developed and the methods of socialist economic management as such were just being groped, - under these conditions the state could influence the processes of income generation and income distribution in the national economy mainly only empirically: i.e., for one reason or another, it established the appropriate payment for a specific purpose. But this was by no means a general, disorderly taxation; there was simply a search for the most adequate and effective ways to form the finances of a socialist society.

However, the number of such payments quite soon began to be measured in dozens, and in 1930. tax reform was carried out. The multiplicity of payments was eliminated, they were unified into a single turnover tax (by the way, it included 54 payments).

In subsequent years, all these innovations were subject to clarification and adjustment, and in the end, as stated in Soviet economic literature,

"since January 1, 1934 the bulk of society's net income in the form of turnover tax moves from the sphere of material production, i.e. from industrial enterprises to the sphere of circulation.”

In other words, there has been a massive and widespread suppression of income generation processes where they do not need to occur under socialism: in the prices of socially intermediate products - products for industrial and technical purposes, which in the socialist economy are not goods, are not sold or bought, but therefore, it objectively cannot accumulate net income in its price.

Net income in the form of cost savings was, as it were, squeezed out from everywhere, along various socio-technological chains, into the market of socially final products for us - consumer goods. Here it took the monetary form of a turnover tax and went entirely to the state budget. The value of the surplus product, which is also the net income of society, was accumulated in its determining part, thus, not at the local level, not at enterprises, but at the national level - on the all-Union, nationwide consumer market. But this transfer of income generation from the local level to the national level is the key link, which, if mastered, then we can rightfully say that the task of socializing the total surplus product has, in principle, been solved.

By the way, the results were not long in coming. From January 1, 1935 the rationed rationing of bread and bakery products, introduced in 1929, was abolished, “at the end of the NEP” (ardent admirers of the NEP usually tend to forget that this was precisely its ending). The abolition of bread cards was also facilitated by the fact that with the creation of domestic mechanical engineering in the USSR, there was no longer a need for massive imports of foreign equipment, and therefore for counter-exports of bread and other foodstuffs. From October 1, 1935 rationed supplies for other food products were abolished, and from January 1, 1936, for industrial consumer goods. During the transition from rationing to trading at fixed state prices, the general level of retail prices increased slightly, while the wages of all categories of workers increased. But by the end of 1935. food prices have dropped by almost half. For manufactured goods, prices have also been reduced repeatedly since 1935.

The tax reform, with all its beneficial consequences, had barely ended when the first general reform of wholesale prices in the history of socialist economics in the USSR began - in 1936.

In the previous presentation, the emphasis was placed on the fact that the center of gravity of income-generating processes in our economy has steadily shifted from enterprises to the consumer market. But this, of course, cannot be imagined in an overly simplified way. On the one hand, some share of net income - although not excessive - still had to remain at the disposal of enterprises. On the other hand, it was necessary to exclude the opposite phenomenon - the unprofitability of enterprises, their being subsidized by the state.

There was especially a lot of nonsense around subsidies in our state industry: that - they say - during the period of the so-called command-administrative economy, no one cared about profitability, about profitability, the plan was carried out without taking into account the costs, the state, for political reasons, covered any losses, and etc., etc. Indeed, in the late 20s - the first half of the 30s, budget subsidies for enterprises, mainly in heavy industry, were quite widespread. In our economic literature, it was rightly noted that in the conditions of a radical breakdown of old national economic proportions and the creation of new proportions corresponding to socialist production, the regime of budget subsidies was an inevitable and completely justified form of financial assistance to heavy industry enterprises, as well as a unique method of limiting the impact of the law of value on progress of socialist industrialization.

But at a certain stage, subsidies became a brake on the development of production, and already in 1936. The wholesale price of the enterprise for all industries was set at a level exceeding the planned cost at a rate uniform for the entire national economy of 4% of the cost.

Based on the results of the wholesale price reform of 1936-1940. the entire Soviet industry, both heavy and light, until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, worked, with rare exceptions, profitably, made a profit and did without government subsidies.

Socialist modification of value (two-scale price model) is a systemic analogue of the “price of production” under capitalism. Its specific type (“wholesale price of an enterprise” plus “wholesale price of industry”). Second general reform of wholesale prices in 1949,BUILDING a new society in the USSR in the 20s - 30s, when they talk about it, you usually hear:

industrialization, collectivization, cultural and personnel revolution, preparation for war.

But let's remember the Marxist definition of production, or basic relations, as the “structure of society.” If this basic structure does not exist, then everything else will not happen:

there will be no industrialization and collectivization, just as there is no finished building without a foundation and frame.

But in the 20s, this basic frame was only half present:

Socialist state property has historically been forced to work in tandem with an inadequate mechanism for the accumulation and distribution of the value of surplus product, temporarily taken from the previous formation.

Essentially, half of the main economic task of the proletarian revolution has not yet received the proper solution; Moreover, the classics of Marxism did not anticipate or foresee this most serious difficulty at all.

And this task, world-historical in its scale and complexity, had to be solved not just on the fly, but also at a faster pace than all the others, since without it, these others would run into a dead end. It is not for nothing that in the party resolution of 1927 cited above. emphasized:

“The problem of prices intersects all the main economic, and therefore political, problems of the Soviet state.”

And they crossed each other in such a way that they did not leave the right for even the slightest mistake, since the vital vital interests of huge masses of people were instantly affected, and jokes with these things are generally bad and can end badly.

And yet, the problem of completing the socialist base to its full systemic and formational integrity was resolved; and although it was decided, at first glance, purely empirically, nevertheless, the deep CONCEPTUAL meaning of what was happening was not only present, but it was tracked, grasped, revealed and embodied in various institutional arrangements with absolutely amazing speed, tenacity and accuracy. But still, due to its enormity, none of the participants in the events at that time, not excluding I.V. Stalin himself, clearly grasped the true scale of the problem being solved. Surely all of them would be extremely surprised if they were told that, among other things and even above all else, they were rapidly forging and bringing to the required conditions a socialist modification of the law of value: that is, the second half of the basis of the socialist economy , if the first is the principle of social ownership of the means of production.

Meanwhile, work in this direction since the mid-20s has been continuous, painstaking and extremely intense. Tax reform and general reform of wholesale prices are highly responsible measures; in their impact on the very type and character of the economy, they are comparable to the force of impact of a direct political revolution or counter-revolution. Just as a political revolution qualitatively changes property relations, so price reform complements new property relations with a qualitatively new principle of income generation. But it can also “unhook” from this harness an adequate, already found mechanism of income generation, and thereby, in essence, structurally disorganize the entire mode of production; as did the third general reform of wholesale prices in the USSR - the Kosygin “reform” of 1965-67, which purposefully destroyed the socialist modification of value and actually played a powerful counter-revolutionary role.

However, if in our leftist press you can read enough about Kosygin’s counter-reform, which destroyed, as was said, the mechanism of socialization of the total surplus product, then about the two Stalinist reforms, thanks to which this mechanism was created, and especially about the very fact of its creation, In general, as far as I know, no one except me speaks. And even then they are rushing in pursuit that, they say, so-and-so Khabarova to this day stubbornly supports Stalinist delusions.

I will say this: whether someone likes Khabarov or not, but without the doctrine of socialist modification of value, without the theory of socialization of surplus product and without the history of its practical socialization in the Soviet Union during the reign of I.V. Stalin, there can be no Marxist political economy in the 21st century and it won’t, I can definitely guarantee that to anyone. Yes, without all this, the political economy of Marxism has long since ceased to exist; because only by being equipped with all the arsenal outlined above is it now able to give answers to the questions that most torment us, and actually gives such answers.

So, today the time has come to restore historical justice and add this, almost crowning achievement, to our recognized achievements of the 30s and 40s:

FINDING A FORM OF SOCIALIZATION OF SURPLUS PRODUCT created by the labor of workers of socialist social production.

Or, finding a “paired” principle of income generation to socialist public property; or, finding a modification of commodity-money relations that is specifically historically characteristic of socialism, which is also a modification of the law of value. Or, to sum up all of the above, BUILDING THE ECONOMY OF SOCIALISM AS A SYSTEM.

The socialist modification of value took shape as a result of the first general reform of wholesale prices in 1936-40. It was called the “TWO-SCALE PRICE SYSTEM”, and this is logical, since price, its structure, is a key category for any modification of cost relations. The capitalist modification of value is characterized by the so-called “price of production” - this is the cost plus the average profit generated in proportion to the invested capital.

The systemic analogue of the price of production in a socialist economy is a unique set of two prices:

the prices of non-products, socially intermediate products that do not enter the market, and the prices of goods, socially final products.

The price of a non-product was called:

THE WHOLESALE PRICE OF THE ENTERPRISE was the sum of the cost and NET INCOME OF THE ENTERPRISE, or PROFIT.

Let me clarify that all the terms given here are our official terminology of the corresponding era, and not some of my inventions. You can get acquainted with this specifics at least from the textbook “Political Economy”, published in 1955. The net income of the enterprise was uniform throughout the national economy and fluctuated within a few percent of the cost. The production unit used part of the enterprise’s net income for its own needs, including improving the cultural and living conditions of workers; part of it was withdrawn to the state budget in the form of deductions from profits.

It was already mentioned above that non-commodity, socially intermediate products were mainly products of group “A” of branches of social production, or products for industrial and technical purposes.

As for the social final product, it was the product of group “B” of the branches of social production, it was also a consumer product sold through the distribution network.

The selling price for these products was called the WHOLESALE PRICE OF INDUSTRY. The wholesale price of industry is cost plus profit (i.e. the wholesale price of the enterprise), plus another income-generating component, TURNOVER TAX. Turnover tax, I repeat once again, was not at the disposal of enterprises; it was entirely directed to the state budget. Together with deductions from the profits of enterprises, it formed the CENTRALIZED NET INCOME OF THE STATE.

And finally, state retail prices for personal consumption goods. These, in addition to the wholesale price of industry, also included distribution costs and profits from wholesale and retail trade.

And so, that price structure, which in our socialized economy is systemically similar to the PRICE OF PRODUCTION in a private capitalist economy, is a link:

ENTERPRISE WHOLESALE PRICE PLUS INDUSTRY WHOLESALE PRICE.

Actually, this is a socialist modification of the law of value:

the price of industrial and technical products with a minimum income-generating component in it, in the form of enterprise profit,PLUS the price of a consumer product, loaded to capacity with an income-generating component in the form of turnover tax.

If the average profit in the price of production is added up BY CAPITAL, in proportion to its costs, then the main income-generating component of the socialist modification of value - the turnover tax is added up BY LABOR, in proportion to the costs of living labor in the national economy. After all, the turnover tax is derived from the price of the means of reproduction of labor power, but it is quite obvious that just as much living labor is spent in society as the funds used for its reproduction.

And this time, the terms “turnover tax” and “enterprise profit” can actually be put in quotation marks, since by their economic nature these payments are not profit at all and not taxes at all, but these are specific, concrete historical forms, in which under socialism accumulates social net income. Prominent Soviet economist A.V. Bachurin wrote in his 1955 monograph:

“... the turnover tax has the nature of non-tax income and its name does not correspond to the content of this most important part of the centralized net income of the state...” “... the turnover tax in the USSR has nothing in common with taxes on the population, because it is one of the forms of net income of a socialist society... All this indicates the need to abandon the name “turnover tax”... “... it would be most correct to call this form of centralized net income of the state general state income.”

I’ll say a few more words about the second, post-war general reform of wholesale prices in 1949.

The fact is that during the Great Patriotic War, subsidies arose in a number of branches of heavy industry, as in the late 20s and early 30s. Well, what do you want from an enterprise that, for example, was forced to evacuate to a new location, sometimes literally in an open field, develop production from scratch, and then return to its previous address? So that it still gives you profit? Naturally, it had to be subsidized, or, otherwise, the selling prices for its products should be sharply increased.

The Soviet government took the path of strictly maintaining wholesale prices for heavy industry products at pre-war levels. Prices for raw materials and fuel also remained stable. Where planned losses arose, they were compensated for by subsidies. This made it possible to maintain stable retail prices in the rationed trade system throughout the war. The rationed supply of essential items operated throughout the country uninterruptedly and without failure. Lamentations about some very hungry life in the USSR during the war are mostly fiction of a later composition. In the occupied lands, where the Nazis managed to dominate and through which the front line passed twice, or even four times, after their liberation the situation there, of course, was sometimes depressing. But in the territories that did not fall under occupation and did not suffer directly from the fighting, no one died of hunger; this is simply idle fiction.

From the very beginning, subsidies to industry and transport were interpreted as a temporary measure and from January 1, 1949. were discontinued. Prices for all industrial products returned to the level of the industry average cost plus profit according to the standard of up to 5% of cost. There is no dispute, they have increased slightly, as have freight rates. This did not affect retail prices. In the light and food industries, all increases in prices were compensated by the state through turnover tax.

And then the traditional approach to reducing wholesale prices again came into its own. Wholesale prices decreased annually and already on July 1, 1950. became lower than at the start of the general reform, and in 1953. - lower than pre-war. This was achieved under the conditions of the complete abolition of government subsidies and while ensuring a sufficient level of profitability throughout the national economy.

Distribution of the socialized surplus product BY LABOR is a regular reduction in retail prices plus a systematic increase in funds for unpaid public consumption.

Agricultural price policy in the Stalinist model.

SO, the total surplus product is concentrated in the hands of the state in the form of centralized net income of the state (CNSDG) - i.e., turnover tax plus deductions from profits. It accumulated at the general economic, national level, and this is one of the most important OBJECTIVE processes in the socialist economy.

Now it needs to be distributed. And the second thing that we must firmly state on this problem, as they say, is that the distribution of net income, or the value of the surplus product under socialism, can be carried out, equally, only according to GENERAL ECONOMY, NATIONAL, NATIONAL CHANNELS. Such channels are the government's planned REGULAR REDUCTION OF BASIC RETAIL PRICES AND SYSTEMATIC EXPANSION OF FUNDS FOR FREE PUBLIC CONSUMPTION.

Just as it cannot, OBJECTIVELY cannot, net income in a normally functioning socialist national economy accumulate to any significant extent within a single production unit, so under socialism there cannot be any division of the bulk of the surplus product in monetary terms at a given enterprise, within a given labor collective. All this is simply Trotskyist demagoguery, which the sooner and more decisively we put an end to, the better it will be for the cause.

Reducing retail prices and increasing funds for free public consumption is our systemic analogue of APPROPRIATION OF PROFIT BY AN INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP CAPITALIST AS THE OWNER OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION. Just as under capitalism the surplus product is appropriated by the private owner of the means of production in the form of monetary profit, so we - co-owners of the socialized means of production - appropriate our total, socialized surplus product in the form of regular reductions in consumer prices and an ever-increasing volume of free or symbolically paid social goods and services.

What is happening in this case in our socialist society is DISTRIBUTION BY LABOR. There are no other ways to distribute the surplus product BY LABOR in nature - as I have probably already repeated hundreds of times on every occasion of any relevance.

What happens in this case in a privately owned society is DISTRIBUTION BY CAPITAL, or, as it is sometimes called, distribution by value.

For a long time, we have been associated with the problem of distribution, which is high time to get rid of, since it extremely interfered - and still interferes with - to understand this whole problem correctly. What is this confusion about? Our theorists cannot in any way understand for themselves and for others that what is “distributed according to labor” is in no way wages, but only surplus product, or net income.

The economic function of wages is the reimbursement of labor costs, and in this capacity wages are an integral part of the cost of production. Both capital and current costs for the reproduction of labor are subject to reimbursement. Capital costs went mainly to the previous training of the employee, his training, etc., i.e. to ensure that he achieves that degree of professionalism, that qualification, skill, experience that he actually has. And also to ensure that this professional value is constantly maintained at the proper level. Reimbursement of capital costs for the reproduction of labor is the main economic content of the tariff rate or official salary, as well as various qualification categories, etc. This is, so to speak, a line in the staffing table.

And current costs, they largely indicate how the employee used this professional potential in the specific place where he is currently working: how he copes with the planned task, what place he took, for example, in socialist competition, how conscientious and diligent he is in his work, etc. This is a system of various incentive bonuses to the rate and salary, bonus payments, etc., which can be partially provided for in the wage fund, and partially carried out from the profit of the enterprise. But this, strictly speaking, again has nothing to do with distribution according to labor.

Under socialism, the bulk of the newly produced value is distributed among labor, which took the form of a centralized net income of the state. Let me remind you that in a properly functioning socialist economy, i.e. in the Stalinist economic model, the centralized net income of the state is, in fact, the monetary expression of the savings accumulated over a given period from increased economic efficiency. The state transfers part of these savings to workers in the form of another reduction in retail prices. Specifically, this is done through turnover tax. A significant share of savings goes through another channel - to expand the sphere of free public consumption. There are estimates according to which each family under Soviet power received 12-15 thousand dollars a year through this line.

When consumer prices fall, the state must maintain their equilibrium character, which was done impeccably under Stalin. The older generation remembers that Stalin’s price cuts never entailed outbreaks of rush demand, the shelves not only did not become empty, but became even more abundant, and the people were even more calm about this abundance.

Maintaining the equilibrium nature of prices with their systematic massive reduction is possible only if the national economy actually saves costs along all socio-technological chains, increases labor productivity and increases the output of goods. Therefore, with a correct, Marxist-based pricing policy of a socialist state, the LEVEL OF BASIC RETAIL PRICES acts in a socialist society as a systemic analogue of the AVERAGE RATE OF PROFIT under capitalism. The tendency towards a steady decrease in the consumer price level in the Stalinist model is similar to the DOWNWARD TREND in the rate of profit in the bourgeois economy.

For a capitalist, proof that he has run his business competently and efficiently is when he receives a normal average profit. For the economic bodies of a socialist state, this confirmation is that they were able to complete the planning period with a massive reduction in consumer prices without losing balance in the commodity market. The level of equilibrium retail prices for us is the same CRITERIAL VALUE as the rate of profit in the so-called market (private-ownership) economy.

Sometimes you can hear that the reduction in retail prices in the Stalin era was achieved through a simultaneous reduction in production prices. I must say frankly - in addition to the fact that this is simply not true, this is generally complete nonsense. Any attempt to reduce prices in a similar way, without actually increasing the production of goods and making them actually cheaper, i.e. without a corresponding reduction in their cost, it would cause a wave of rush demand and instant emptying of shelves, plus a loss of income from the state budget. Is it worth clarifying that nothing similar was ever observed under the Stalinist economic model.

What else remains for us to discuss?

We still have to fix that the TOTAL ANNUAL VOLUME – or, if you like, the “lag” – of the REDUCTION OF BASIC CONSUMER PRICES is, for our conditions, a NATIONAL ECONOMIC CRITERION OF EFFICIENCY. It can be considered as a systemic analogue of INCREASE IN NATIONAL INCOME in capitalist countries.

Without a doubt, one should not get too carried away with these analogies; they are not literal; but we’ll still do another one.

LOCAL EFFICIENCY CRITERION- i.e., an indicator of management efficiency within a single production unit - should serve for us REDUCING PRODUCT COSTS of this production unit. But with one obligatory condition - that the consumer of this product, or the “neighbor on the right”, due to the reduction in the cost of these supplies, the cost also decreases, and does not increase. This requirement in our economy, even in its best times, was not always observed. But if it is elevated to a norm of economic legislation - which, by the way, is proposed in our draft of the new edition of the 1997 USSR Constitution - then it will put a strong barrier to attempts to reduce costs by deteriorating the quality of the product.

THE REDUCTION OF PRODUCT COSTS and the dynamics of this value under socialist management are approximately similar to the dynamics of the NET PROFIT of a private owner of the means of production under capitalism. I repeat again, however, that these analogies are systemic, not literal, and you shouldn’t get too carried away with them.

And another important issue that cannot be passed over in silence is the agricultural pricing policy of the socialist state.

In the Stalinist economic model, it was assumed that the maintenance of collective farms was carried out through machine and tractor stations - MTS. MTS were state-owned enterprises, where the current production process was subject to appropriate economic discipline, and large-scale expanded reproduction of the technical base was financed from the state budget. Of course, the collective farms paid for the work of the MTS, but any rental of equipment always costs much less than its full maintenance.

Thus, a very significant share of total costs was, as it were, withdrawn from the cost of agricultural products; they were actually taken over by the state. From the economic side, there were no exaggerations here: everything was done very cunningly, in the good sense of the word, and gracefully. This economic trick made it possible to keep procurement prices for agricultural products consistently low. And this, in turn, was one of the decisive prerequisites that ensured periodic massive reductions in retail prices.

Destruction of the Stalinist economic model(socialist modification of value): third - “Kosygin” - general counter-reform of wholesale prices 1965-67.

The lack of eradication of anti-Stalinism in the “left” movement is the main reason for its current ineffectiveness.

AND IN CONCLUSION, a few words about the wholesale price reform of 1965-67.

Immediately after the death of I.V. Stalin, attacks on the two-scale economic model sharply intensified, “evidence” began pouring in that in the two-scale model the law of value was “violated”, prices for means of production were “skewed downward from value,” etc. By the mid-50s, economic saboteurs managed to get the country’s top party and state leadership to decide that henceforth prices for all products, without dividing them into goods and non-goods, should be built, in fact, according to the “price of production” scheme in capitalist economy. In the prices of any product, the income-generating component should now be formed in proportion to the costs of materialized, rather than living labor: that is, in proportion to the cost of production fixed assets and material working capital used for the manufacture of products.

And since the costs of materialized labor can be measured and taken into account only directly in the production cell, the entire process of income generation was thereby “pulled” from the national economic level back to the local one. That is, the very basic structure of the socialization of the total surplus product was purposefully destroyed. This sabotage strike was so catastrophically accurate that I personally do not believe that all this happened unintentionally, by mistake or thoughtlessness. Some of the bastards who worked on this—a big bastard, at that—understood perfectly well what they were doing.

The result was a kind of “NEP in reverse”; but if at the beginning of the 20s the return to capitalist price and income formation was justified by the fact that the corresponding socialist principle simply did not yet exist, now the fully established SOCIALIST income generation mechanism was barbarously destroyed - it is unknown in the name of what. Socialist public property was again left without an adequate principle of accumulation of net income, but if in the 20s we had a historically logical, although not very pleasant, temporary stage of our development, now it was already one hundred percent informational and intellectual sabotage.

Having changed the principle of income generation, the “reformers,” naturally, did not even remember that the “price of production” scheme is effective only under conditions of capitalist competition, i.e. free flow of capital investments. But we didn’t have this. And at the same time, the focus on reducing wholesale prices, which, as we have already discussed, under socialism systematically replaces competition, has also been consigned to the archives. In other words, all reasonable levers for forcing the economic unit to perform conscientious and highly productive work have practically been turned off.

In this situation, the dependence of the supposedly extracted “income” simply on the sheer volume of material costs made in production quickly became apparent. Products that were material-intensive, conservative, and even regressive in terms of the technical and technological solutions incorporated into them often became profitable for the manufacturer. Essentially, this system encouraged and encouraged mismanagement by the product manufacturer. This is the source of the REAL, and not at all far-fetched, crisis that gripped the Soviet economy in the pre-perestroika decades.

And that’s why there can only be one answer to the question of where we should return, to what point in our previous evolution: we will have to return to Stalin. Of course, not quotationally, of course, not nostalgically, of course, taking into account all the accumulated vast experience, both positive and negative; but in basic, structural terms, we have not risen higher than under him in the entire history of our people and our state. For half a century we have been crawling from those heights into the current pit, and to this day, unfortunately, there is nothing to compare with. We can only hope that we won’t have to climb back for half a century. But this depends on how soon the movement matures into a final and irrevocable break with any kind of anti-Stalinism - both obvious and disguised.

Our problem is not that there are supposedly no valuable, productive ideas and concepts; the problem is that the movement as a whole is completely insensitive to these ideas and concepts. I presented all this material in fully developed form five years ago at the Youth Seminar at the State Duma. How many more five-year plans will it take for the theory of a socialist economy to be adopted, against which a normal person has nothing to object, and when expounding on it, a normal Soviet person should rejoice and be filled with a sense of pride for his country, and not be angry and grumble?

This is anti-Stalinism in action. And if this action of his continues without restraint, judge for yourself what prospects can await us.

Valentin Katasonov: Stalin's Corporation. The Soviet Union under Stalin was a real corporation with a powerful economic system. Stalin and the Bolsheviks took into account the mistakes that led Russia to become dependent on the world financial clans.

Valentin Katasonov: The Stalinist economy is not a synonym for the Soviet economy, it is not a synonym for the socialist economy. Conventionally, we can talk about the Soviet economy as the period from the end of the 17th year to the end of the 91st year, this is 74 years in its pure form. But within this rather long period there were several stages, several phases, and here it is necessary to carefully and subtly understand how the socio-economic model was structured within a separate phase. Because the discussion often begins methodologically incorrectly as to whether the Soviet or socialist economic model was good or bad. And at the same time, it’s as if the entire period is taken at once. In fact, it is necessary to discuss individual phases, because there were nuances, and there were fundamental differences in socio-economic models within this period, seventy-four years.

Any literate person knows from a history textbook that first there was a period of war communism. Then there was the NEP period, then there was industrialization. Then there was the war and the post-war economic recovery. And then there was a certain period of peaceful socialist construction, which gradually turned into stagnation, into decay, and all this ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, under the rubble of which this very model of the economy perished. One of the modifications.

It is necessary to immediately determine the subject of discussion, the subject of dispute, the subject of analysis. From my point of view, of course, the most interesting stage of the Soviet period is precisely the thirty-year period: the period from the end of the twenties, and approximately until the middle, with some assumptions, until the end of the fifties. The maximum is thirty years. And I must say that critics of socialism, critics of the Soviet Union, they act very slyly. They basically draw all their arguments from that period, which we call the stagnation period. There really is a lot of negativity, there are really a lot of things that can be called deviations from the Stalinist economic model. Not just deviations, but these were holes in the Soviet economy that led to the fact that the ship, on which the USSR was written on board, sank.

Within the framework of the Stalinist period, as we said, three sub-periods can also be distinguished.

— These are the thirties, relatively speaking, industrialization. We can say that this is not only industrialization, but it is the construction of the foundations of socialism. This, at least, was recorded in 1936, when a new constitution was adopted. One can also say that this was a mobilization model of the economy. But this does not contradict the definition of this period as a period of industrialization.

- Then it's the forties. Naturally, I am simplifying this a little, because this has a point on June 22, 1941. But the end of this period, I still think, is the end of the 47th, the beginning of the 48th year. Typically, some researchers time this to coincide with the completion of Stalin's monetary reform. And it took place in December 1947.

— The third period, from my point of view, is especially interesting. It may be the shortest. This is from 1948-49 and we can say with confidence, until the mid-fifties. With some allowances we can say that this is the 56-57th year, maximum 59th year. Later I will try to explain why I name such dates.

If we take the entire Stalinist period, then I would conditionally define it this way.

The first point, the starting point, is the 29th year. This is the beginning of the five-year plan. Well, the final point in time, I would still say, for clarity and persuasiveness, that this is the twentieth party congress, at which Khrushchev’s secret report was read, and as the textbooks say, the cult of personality was debunked. But, in fact, the blow was dealt not only to Stalin’s personality. In fact, the socio-economic model of the previous period of Soviet history was called into question. This, in a sense, gave Khrushchev a free hand so that he could begin his experiments in the field of economics. But we will talk about this later.

Let me also remind you of some key features of this model. In principle, some of the signs that I will name were present, perhaps even before the birth of the Stalinist model of the economy. And some of them existed until the last years of the Soviet Union. It is clear that some elements and some signs were simply blurred, or, conversely, were not formalized in the early years. Such features are, first of all, the state form of ownership of the means of production. This is such a coined formulation from any textbook. It is clear that there has never been one hundred percent ownership of the means of production, not in any of the seventy-four years. But, nevertheless, of course, the prevalence of state ownership of the means of production is an important feature of the Stalinist economy. With all this, a sign of the Stalinist economy is not its multi-structure, but at least its two-structure. Because in the era of the NEP there was truly a diversity of structures. There was also foreign capital, there was small-scale production, there was cooperation, both in industry and in agriculture, there was a public sector. And already in the era of Stalin there were only two ways of life left. It is state-owned and cooperative. But cooperative, it occupied a subordinate place in relation to the state one.

If we look at this issue from a theoretical point of view, it is important to emphasize that the principle of the Stalinist economy was the principle of obtaining income from labor contribution, from labor participation. In any economics textbook, modern, and not only modern, even take some pre-revolutionary textbooks on political economy. I sometimes leaf through pre-revolutionary books - there is this theory of Jean Baptiste Say about the three factors of production, it is the cross-cutting idea of ​​a political economy textbook. That is, there are three factors of production. First of all, it is labor power, or labor. The second factor of production is capital, which everyone understands to the extent of its depravity. Some say they are means of production. Some extend it to the concept of trading capital, money capital. But in general, we can say that capital is like past labor. It may or may not be materialized. If these are some kind of electronic banknotes, then this is also past work, but it is not materialized. Therefore, it is rather more correct to say that this is not materialized labor, but past labor, or the right to certain fruits of past labor.

And third is natural resources. Natural resources, land, that is, what is given from God. And yet, although this is given by God, textbooks on economic theory say that the owner of a natural resource has the right to rent. This means that rent, further, is income on capital, or it is industrial income, business income, or it is trading profit, or it is loan interest. And accordingly, the employee can count on receiving wages.

This is approximately how I explain the theory of the three factors of production in this concisely popular form, and it has existed in one form or another in any textbook on the economic theory of political economy for at least a century and a half. It is believed that this theory was most clearly and consistently presented by Jean Baptiste Sey.

So, in the socialist, especially Stalinist model of the economy, income is provided by only one factor of production - labor. More precisely, the right to receive income is received only by the owner of labor, a person who, in one way or another, creates a social product with his hands or head. But at the same time he is a co-owner of the means of production. In the language of bourgeois political economy, he is the owner of capital and is the owner of natural resources, including land. And now, not very well, maybe you can see and read this clearly in Stalin’s works, in the same work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, which, oddly enough, Stalin’s opponents and his consistent apologists and supporters like to refer to .

From my point of view, Stalin, I have already spoken about this many times, as a practitioner, as a business executive, as an empiricist, much stronger than Stalin, as a theorist. And by the way, we will still remember Bukharin today. Mostly, of course, Bukharin is remembered in a negative sense, but I would like to remember Bukharin at least once in a positive sense. Back in the twenties, when a discussion began about what kind of economic theory the Bolsheviks needed, Bukharin said: “We don’t need political economy, we need economic policy. Political economy, it grew from the depths of bourgeois society. Political economy explained and justified capitalism, because, initially, it was not Marx’s political economy, but English political economy.” And here I have to agree with Bukharin. But, you know, it’s difficult for me, of course, to penetrate Stalin’s train of thought, but Stalin, of course, followed the line that we need the political economy of socialism.

I see in the audience here the majority of their age, people who have probably studied political economy, and not only capitalism, but also socialism. And for many it was just some kind of toothache. This was probably the correct reaction of a healthy body to this kind of textbooks. You can also add that textbooks on scientific communism, scientific atheism, and so on caused the same toothache. But, since I still studied at the Faculty of Economics, I mainly had to study and pass the exam on the political economy of socialism.

Let me remind you that Stalin, somewhere in the thirties, was already fired up with the idea that it was necessary to write a textbook on the political economy of socialism. Then the still unknown Professor Ostrovityanov was invited to Stalin, received the task and the work began. Work was interrupted, or at least slowed down, during the war years, and it resumed somewhere in the late forties and early fifties. You can look on the Internet. There is quite a lot of material there that relates to the topic of discussion about the political economy textbook.

Stalin’s work “Economic Problems in the History of the USSR” seemed to sum up these discussions. From my point of view, of course, the work does not answer many burning questions. I have said many times at meetings of the Russian Economic Society that economics, first of all, is not a science. But people want to drive economics into the Procrustean bed of science.

But tell me, do people here, depending on their age, sometimes, I hope not often, visit doctors? Will they go to a doctor who has passed all his exams at the institute with straight A's, or will a person go to a doctor who, as people say, is from God? But the doctor who is from God, he, of course, knows some basic things, any doctor, good or bad, should know some minimum of a nurse. But then the art begins. Then creativity begins.

I always tense up when they ask me: “Valentin Yuryevich, what should the model in our country be like in ten or twenty years?”

I say: “I’m not an astrologer, I’m not some kind of perspicacious old man, in order to answer such questions. The moment will come, and then we will determine what the model will be.”

And even a good doctor, he won’t say that you need to be treated according to this scheme, and here’s the medicine for you, and I’ll come back in a month.

What a good doctor will do is: “Let’s try it, take this medicine, we’ll see. If after three days you don’t feel sharply unwell, then we will continue treatment.”

That is, you see, this is a very delicate process. I see a lot of analogies with medicine. And therefore, when I hear some proposals: “Why, if the patient has a headache, let’s cut off his head”

These are the kind of economists we have now. Why did I seem to go a little to the side? Yes, because Stalin was a doctor. It’s not clear why he needed to force some things into the Procrustean bed of the political economy of socialism. Because there were mistakes, of course, but there were also achievements.

We all remember the resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus on bends or excesses during collectivization. Back in high school, we studied “Virgin Soil Upturned” by Sholokhov. So, everyone remembers these bends and kinks very well. This is a special topic. Because often bends and excesses did not occur in Moscow, not at the level of Stalin. They happened locally. This is so, a little lyrical digression. Some people understand that the socio-economic model is something scientists came up with, presented a certain report to Stalin, first at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus, and then at the next congress it was approved, and now, for five years everyone has been living according to this document. No. There was a creative process, trial and error. This is how this model was born, why it is valuable.

We are trying to invent something like this today. Inventing is probably not a bad thing. But to invent when you already know all the wealth, all the heritage not only of human thought, but also of human creativity and human practice. Therefore, I am by no means calling for anyone to vote for the Stalinist economic model with both hands and two feet, but you need to know this. As a good doctor, he practices in a hospital, and sometimes he has to visit the morgue. But only then will you become a good doctor. So it is here. And there can be no other options. And then, of course, a good doctor must start working as a nurse, must be able to give injections, and so on, and so on. Why am I talking about this? Because today we have a lot of economic managers who, excuse me, were not even shop managers at the enterprise, let alone some more responsible areas.

I return to some distinctive features of the Stalinist economy. And such a sign is that only the working person receives all this additional product that is created during the year or simply created by our society. Of course, he, being a co-owner of natural resources and means of production, also receives some part, which can be calculated mathematically. He receives something else besides wages. And this something else was called Public Consumption Funds.

Public consumption funds are free medicine, free education, free travel, and so on. Plus, I’m getting ahead of myself a little, but I would like to talk about a dividend that is evenly distributed among all members of society (under the Stalinist economy), this is a reduction in retail prices. Some, without understanding this issue, say that Stalin was simply engaged in some kind of PR and carried out a reduction in retail prices.

Stalin made a decision on six reductions.

The first reduction was timed to coincide with the monetary reform of 1947. Immediately, almost simultaneously with the reform, the first reduction in retail prices occurred. The latter happened already on the first of April 1953, after Stalin passed away, he was passed away, more precisely, but the decision on this reduction was also made by Stalin. And this has already become part of a certain system, and this was Stalin’s purely formal approval, because people have already become accustomed to such a biorhythm that every year in March or April there is another planned reduction in retail prices. You see, you can carry out such a PR campaign once to reduce retail prices.

But in order to avoid distortions in the economy, it is necessary that, in parallel with the reduction in retail prices, there is a reduction in wholesale prices.

So, I wasn’t too lazy, I looked for some statistics. Now there are even some declassified statistical collections on the Internet. I came across one website, and there was a statistical collection marked “Top Secret”. Now it has been declassified, it is written somewhere that there are thirty copies, apparently it was distributed not even to all members of the Central Committee, but only to members of the Politburo and secretaries of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus. There is a sign there called “Changes in production costs by industry.” You yourself understand that secret documents usually contain the truth. It is still possible to allow some distortions in open sources. So, from 1948 to 1953, this directory shows a trend towards a consistent reduction in production costs.

Accordingly, if there is a reduction in the cost of production in industry, then a reduction in wholesale prices also becomes natural. And, naturally, reductions in wholesale prices do not occur every month, or even every year. But according to another source, during this period of time there were three planned reductions in wholesale prices. And retail prices dropped every year. You see, you need to understand this.

Of course, we can say that the reduction in production costs was ensured due to labor enthusiasm. Indeed, if people know how and want to work, then of course there will be a reduction in costs. Of course, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Here at the Russian Economic Society we study not only pure macroeconomics, but also anthropology. Because, after all, the source of all material and intangible wealth in our common society is man. Accordingly, a person can be a creator. Man is created in the image and likeness of God. Accordingly, if he really wants to get closer to God, then he shows such qualities as a creator. God is the creator, God the provider. The first quality in any theology textbook is that God is the creator: he created the world and man.

Perhaps there is another type of person that we see all the time today. Of course, one can somehow condemn such a person. But on the other hand, we understand that both environment and education shape this person. And not only education and the environment, but even those motives, those incentives that are created for a person who is in production. My point is that the Stalinist economy had a certain set of indicators.

Today, the modern student cannot understand what a plan is. The plan is the law. If you carry out the plan, then you are truly a responsible person. If you do not follow the plan, then punishment follows. Modern man cannot even understand this. A modern young man who studies using these economics textbooks.

In the Stalinist economy, natural indicators were the main ones. Because if the main indicators were cost and monetary indicators, then, probably, our society could go to a faraway country. Let's say this, Stalin and many others from his circle lived under the conditions of Russian capitalism, and not from textbooks, but from life, they understood what profit is and where profit can lead. Therefore, when we were studying, and many of those sitting here probably remember when party discussions were taking place there. The threat of petty-bourgeoisism—it seemed to us like a kind of abstraction. It is clear that if a person develops a craving for money, then this craving for money can transform into very serious things that destroy the individual himself, but also destroy society, and threaten this society politically.

Therefore, Stalin allowed small-scale production. Even under the conditions of the NEP, there were cooperative enterprises where workers worked; there were certain standards, up to one hundred, one hundred and fifty people, but nothing higher. And even then, it was a temporary state, because those politicians, those Bolsheviks who made the decision on the NEP, they understood perfectly well what they were risking. And it is designed in such a way that the formula “Money for the sake of money” operates for some time. That is, money as a self-increasing value. I am now beginning to understand better why the Bolsheviks were so afraid of the manifestation of petty-bourgeoisism. Because this is an external, small infection, it could decompose the entire body.

I was talking the other day with one fairly experienced financier, a banker, and I said: “Do you feel that in Russia you live a little differently than the American bankers on Wall Street? American bankers on Wall Street have slightly different priorities. Let’s say you have a million, or ten million, how will you invest these ten million?”

Basically, what he said, it turned out, concerned financial instruments: deposits, various bonds, foreign currency, ruble.

I say that a banker from Wall Street, a serious banker, he will, suppose, spend these thousands of units approximately like this.

— Out of a thousand units, he will direct two hundred units to the media.

— He will use another two hundred units for lobbying and bribing politicians.

— He will use another two hundred units to finance American universities.

“But maybe he will use the remaining four hundred units to purchase these stupid financial instruments.”

That is, these guys have long since rebuilt.

They understand:

— That the most effective investment is in politics.

— The most effective investment is in the media.

— The most effective investments are investments in people. But not a person with a capital M, but a person understood as a homo-economicus with several reflexes.

— Naturally, they also spare no expense in preparing textbooks on economics. About twenty years ago we had a Mr. George Soros here, who also handed out grants right and left so that textbooks could be written on the formation of homo-economics from our youth.

I'm already tired of repeating the joke about the most valuable resource of a market economy. Of course, for them the most valuable resource of a market economy is a fool. Of course, I speak rudely and harshly, but this is a person who has two or three reflexes, who is an ideal biorobot.

Of course, there is no need to dumb down the Bolsheviks, because these were people with fairly good life experience. And they, of course, felt some threats. Another thing is that I am not going to extol them, because, of course, often these were people not only far from Orthodoxy and from Russian life, they were enemies of Russia and so on. But even a fool knows how to scold his enemies. But taking from the enemy what is valuable and necessary, I really think this is an important quality, and we must also cultivate this quality in ourselves. So, you see, I even remembered Bukharin, although, in general, I have a negative attitude towards Bukharin. I also remember Lenin, because, despite all Lenin’s Russophobia, he nevertheless thought through many things absolutely correctly and made the right decisions. So, in this sense, I do not hesitate, even in Orthodox society, in Orthodox audiences, to remember both the Bolsheviks and the Communists.

Then we move along our path, we find out what the signs of the Stalinist economy are. This is a certain set of planned indicators. Of course, I didn’t say anything about the plan, that goes without saying. That it’s not just the state sector of the economy, but also a planned economy. For the last twenty-five years we have been told that the plan is some kind of relic, this is some kind of anachronism. That the market itself will regulate everything. You know, it seems that people have already had enough of economic liberalism, but I see with what persistence, with what consistency, economics textbooks continue to reproduce all this nonsense. Poor students, unfortunately, are forced to take this. So, indeed, our youth have a very hard time. There seems to be nothing to prove here. Moreover, the question is not only about what planning is needed or not, but about what kind of planning should be: time horizon, five-year planning, annual planning. At first we had annual planning; in my opinion, the first annual plan was drawn up not as an industry plan, but as a national economic plan, in 1925. The first five-year plan is the 29th year. Of course, the plans are directive. Because indicative plans were and are still used in many countries.

Although, today, of course, there is no longer Keyesianism, there is no derigism, which was in Europe in the sixties and seventies. Nevertheless, all the same, some industry programs, they are actually called programs rather than plans, they exist.

And there’s nothing to say about the corporation. The corporation is built on a strict plan. And I would like to emphasize once again that the Stalinist economy is a model of some kind of super corporation with the code name USSR. This is a corporation that has many structural divisions. And each of these divisions works towards a certain final integral result. The final integral result is a certain social product, which is primarily expressed in natural terms, and secondly has some kind of value expression. And in order to get the maximum integral result, everyone must work in a coordinated manner for this result. Accordingly, the conclusion is that this should be a rigid vertical control.

I cannot boast that I worked a lot in some large corporations, but for a year and a half I worked as a consultant in one corporation, in a Western corporation. And you know, after a while I had such a strong feeling that this was a model of the Soviet Union. The individual divisions of this corporation interact with each other: some technology, some semi-finished products, some know-how are transferred. Some kind of conditional settlements are taking place between these structural divisions. But the remuneration of employees operating in these structural units comes from the overall result. The only difference is that in Western corporations, the integral result is monetary profit, and in a corporation called the Soviet Union, the integral result is a certain social product, which, first of all, has specific physical characteristics.

And it must be said (I’m getting ahead of myself a little here) that Stalin questioned the effectiveness of such an economic model precisely at a time when the possibility of truly accurate, effective and long-term planning of economic activity appeared, not by tens, hundreds, and thousands of positions, but by millions. At this time, already in the West, corporate management assumed, took into account and used electronic computers, automatic control systems, which calculated, mind you, in physical units, in physical indicators, the movement of some intermediate products. Especially in mechanical engineering. And there were no restrictions for improving such a model.

After all, cybernetics appeared at this time. Cybernetics, of course, is an exotic name, but in essence, it is management based on the use of computers and electronic computers. Glushkov, Birman, these are all our cybernetics. I remember now, even at school, I was already in the tenth grade: for some reason they criticized two sciences: genetics and cybernetics. These two are the most corrupt girls of capitalism. I don’t know why cybernetics suffered so much. Now I look back and understand that it was necessary to really improve this management system. Instead they started talking about the market. They began to say that some invisible hand of the market would better regulate this whole matter.

For as long as I can remember after college, I had to teach economic disciplines, and even political economy, in one way or another. True, I immediately categorically refused to teach the political economy of socialism. I say that I teach the political economy of capitalism, but don’t even pester me about socialism, don’t make a fool of me. I taught political economy, and I remember these countless discussions at different levels. At university levels, some all-Union conferences, even sometimes somewhere on Old Square. What should socialist production be like: commodity or non-commodity? And so, from year to year they poured from empty to empty.

In fact, Stalin already had everything ready. The group of industries that we used to call group A is not commodity production. And group B is those industries that create the final product of human consumption. This is the textile industry, this is the clothing industry, this is the food industry, this is the furniture industry, and so on. And according to these two divisions, group A and group B, our monetary system was formed, which I have already called a double-circuit monetary system. One circuit is non-cash money, and the other circuit is cash money. So, where cash met consumer goods, it was, of course, a market. It was a market, and in this market there were fixed prices. But these fixed prices, as we have already discussed, were adjusted every year. Adjusted taking into account changes in production costs.

As for non-cash money, these were, of course, symbols. There were, of course, some methods that made it possible to calculate wholesale prices for products from industries in group A. I immediately admit that I did not dive deeply into the study of these methods. But I want to say, it doesn’t even matter if the methodology gave some errors, because the most important thing was what we needed? Determine the trend: the cost is decreasing or increasing. This is the most important thing. And for this there was no need to develop any super-complicated and super-precise methods. That is, these were certain conventional units that made it possible to carry out planning, which made it possible to carry out accounting and control. And that was quite enough.

And it’s exactly the same in Western corporations. After all, between structural divisions there are some kind of conditional commodity-money relations, but only conditional ones. There are so-called intra-corporate transfer prices, which may have nothing in common with market prices. Because all these prices are optimized in order to get the maximum financial result, that is, profit. Of course, offshore companies are used there and different taxation regimes are used.

But in the Soviet model, everything is different there. There, taking into account local conditions, taking into account the extraction of minerals, taking into account the Arctic, or the Arctic, or the Subpolar, and so on. That is, these natural and climatic factors are the very points that were also taken into account when forming these conditional wholesale prices. So, there were multiple wholesale prices. But this is for specialists; let’s not go so deep now.

Of course, there were some signs of the Stalinist economy that predate the Stalinist economy itself. Another thing is that these elements, these principles have been improved. They were already working with one hundred percent efficiency. I mean what is close and understandable to me, what I did at the institute and after the institute is foreign trade. And above all, it is a state monopoly of foreign trade. Actually, for five years I studied at the Institute of International Relations at the Faculty of International Economic Relations, International Economic Relations, majoring in foreign trade economist. And, of course, what a state monopoly of foreign trade is, in five years I have understood quite well.

The Bolsheviks also understood perfectly well what a state monopoly of foreign trade was, although here too they were pioneers. I will allow myself to develop this topic in a little more detail. Because the sphere of foreign economic relations has always been under the special control of the state. Not only socialist, but any state. In order to understand why anyone, naturally, any capitalist, you need to understand what the main problems of the capitalist economic model are. The main problem lies in implementation, or, as the classic of Marxism put it, “There are insurmountable contradictions between limited effective demand and supply.” And periodically this machine, called capitalist economy, it suddenly stops dead in its tracks, because production cannot develop further, it rests on limited effective demand.

In my book “On Loan Interest, Judicial Interest, Reckless Interest,” I described all this in detail. Moreover, I tried not to repeat the classic of Marxism. Because the classic simply said that these are the predatory capitalists, industrialists, factory owners, commercial capitalists, they rob the people like this. In fact, the people have no money left. And, naturally, production works for the mass market. If there are no paying buyers in the mass market, then production stops. I explained it very popularly. For the Talmudist Marx, naturally, all this took several hundred pages, and even two and a half volumes. But if you translate from this Talmudic language, then you can generally make comics called Capital, and even somewhere already quickly explain to children in kindergarten how the economy works. But the fact is that the crafty Marx, he turned the arrow on whom? To factory owners and commercial capitalists.

The capitalist model of the economy reminds me of a drawing from a biology textbook - a food pyramid. An industrial capitalist, he is at the lower level of this pyramid. At a higher level is the merchant capitalist, at the top, or at the top of the pyramid, is the money capitalist. You understand that in the jungle of capitalism, this stratification, or this hierarchy, is determined, as it is now fashionable to say, by competitiveness. So, of course, the money capitalist is the most competitive. Of course, this did not happen immediately, not suddenly, but (I am also writing about this) when it was possible to break through the incomplete or partial coverage of the banks’ liabilities. It means that? That banks managed to achieve the right to make money out of thin air.

Who can compete with the guys who know how to make money out of thin air? Even the drug mafia, I think, is not able to compete. That’s why the drug mafia is eager. During the last financial crisis, when the largest banks experienced a cash shortage, it is clear that for each monetary unit of cash, you can make five or ten non-cash units. Naturally, here the drug business began to offer its dirty cash, and some world-class banks found themselves under the control of the drug mafia. So what is happening here is, of course, the merging of these types of businesses.

But no one has canceled the fact that making money out of thin air is the most profitable and most competitive. So of course these competitive guys end up at the top of the pyramid. Therefore, in the conditions of the capitalist jungle, everyone eats everyone. In the end, fifty years of so-called Russian, or Russian capitalism, is a visual aid to how it all happened.

Yesterday, or the day before yesterday, I also remembered such a giant, the Russian entrepreneur Vasily Kokarev. At one point, Vasily Kokarev was probably the richest man in Russia. But after a while his wealth began to evaporate because he was basically a contractor. He built railroads, he traded. But he was not a money capitalist, and it is clear that he was a priori in a losing position. After some time, Vasily Kokarev went bankrupt. You know, sometimes it's very useful. Because after this people begin to understand very clearly and better than others how the economy works. Here some people nod - when you go through all this on your own skin, then you can write textbooks.

In this sense, money capitalists always come out on top. This is a very important point. And why I started talking about this is that, of course, the Bolsheviks took this point into account. And under no circumstances did they allow bank capital to expand. Even now, some say, under the NEP we had one and a half thousand banks. Indeed, one and a half thousand banks. But, firstly, they did not last very long. Then I looked at the statistics, in fact, these statistics included branches and branches of some banks. A lot, of course, but they lasted a total of seven or eight years.

Somewhere already, the credit reform of 30-31 led to the fact that the banking system was already tailored to the Stalinist model of the economy: there was a State Bank, and there were several specialized banks. Mutual lending societies also disappeared. Perhaps this was the most obvious capitalist form of organization in the banking sector, the Mutual Lending Society. They also ceased to exist around 1931. So, the monetary and banking model was extremely simple.

Today, in textbooks, poor students are told: a two-tier, three-tier monetary system. Stalin had a one-level system and that was enough. Then the next reform took place in the early sixties. Even some specialized banks were liquidated there, and in general, already around 1961, only three banks remained. One bank is the State Bank, the other is Promstroibank, and the third bank is Vneshtorgbank.

Vneshtorgbank, it seemed to provide such an important principle as the principle of state currency monopoly. The state currency monopoly is inseparable from state foreign trade.

Returning to the topic “State monopoly of foreign trade,” I would like to say that, of course, even in early capitalism, the state always placed control over both exports and imports. First of all, of course, imports and customs protectionism. And the first economic schools appeared, such as, say, mercantilism. Mercantilists proceeded from the fact that the personification of wealth is gold and precious metals. Where does gold come from in the country? The mercantilists said this: “There are two sources of gold: either it is foreign trade (naturally, with a surplus of foreign trade), or it is simply picking the earth (gold mining).”

Second: “Have a foreign trade surplus.”

To have a foreign trade surplus, import duties must be introduced. The idea of ​​customs protectionism is as old as the capitalist world. And it’s strange that somehow our modern leaders don’t really understand what customs protectionism is and what its meaning is. That is probably why the vote in the State Duma on Russia’s accession to the WTO was so easy. Of course, many of those who voted did not even really understand and still do not understand what a state monopoly of foreign trade is.

In the 20s there were hot battles. Today I remember Bukharin for the second time. Bukharin said: “Why do we need such a strict state monopoly of foreign trade? Let's just provide customs protectionism. And for this you just need two things. Firstly, we need to have a fortified border so that there is no smuggling, and we will introduce appropriate customs tariffs.” Bukharin even remembered Mendeleev once. Mendeleev laid the foundations of customs tariffs for the Russian economy and the Russian Empire. Bukharin took a rather liberal approach to this.

But look, what decrees, what decrees were adopted literally in the first months after the revolution? First of all, this, of course, was a statement that the new government was renouncing the debts of the Tsarist and Provisional Governments. This is about 18.5 billion gold rubles at that time.

At the outbreak of the First World War there were about nine. The debt almost doubled as a result of us borrowing (borrowing) so much. This is a separate story. I think a separate session should be devoted to this song. Today they just talked about the fact that in 2014 it will be a hundred years since the start of the First World War and, unfortunately... I even talked to historians. They say: “Many of the mysteries of the First World War truly remain mysteries.” Who financed the First World War and how? Not some conspiracy theories.

When we begin to study the financial history of the First World War, the hair stands on end. And you begin to understand that those guys whom our top government officials call our partners have always been our hidden enemies, including in the field of finance, because they let us down more than once even during the First World War. The state monopoly of foreign trade is indeed such a cross-cutting principle. Yes, Trotsky also stood very rigidly at first. He said: “Yes, we really need a one hundred percent state monopoly in the field of foreign trade.” I even remember (I read somewhere) that Lenin was in very poor physical condition, and the issue of a state monopoly on foreign trade was to be discussed at the plenum. He entrusted this issue to Trotsky, believing that Trotsky was indeed such a radical supporter of the state monopoly of foreign trade. But later - already somewhere in the 25th - 26th year - Trotsky began to speak differently. Moreover, Professor Preobrazhensky was his advisor. Professor Preobrazhensky said that “we need to take a differentiated approach. Here is the state sector of the economy - yes, in relation to it, let there be a state monopoly of foreign trade. But we don’t yet have a public sector. Let them just go freely to the market.”

Accordingly, if they freely enter the market, it means they receive foreign currency. And if they receive currency, it means that they can dispose of the currency freely. And if they freely dispose of currency, it means that the state monopoly on money issue is undermined. One thing clings to another. Therefore, in order to effectively implement a state monopoly in foreign trade, it is necessary to simultaneously introduce a state foreign exchange monopoly. And it, of course, was introduced later. There were such dangerous games here too. This, of course, is not Stalinist economics, but to make it clear. That the Stalinist economy could not have happened at all.

The People's Commissar of Finance was Mr. Sokolnikov, his real name was Brilliant. There is a real one (very real), but I can’t pronounce it. Brilliant (Sokolnikov) was entrusted with carrying out monetary reform. You understand what the situation was in the country during the era of war communism; the state bank was completely liquidated for some time. They believed that money is a relic of capitalism. And some divisions of the State Bank were simply transferred to the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Finance. They started printing these very banknotes.

The nightmare and horror was about the same as in the Weimar Republic in 20-22. That is, if you received your salary in the morning, then you had to shop it before the end of the working day, because the next day it was just a pile of waste paper. Our country found itself in approximately the same state. Therefore, Stalin is preparing a reform: the introduction of the chervonets. At first, it seemed that the proposals of Sokolnikov and his adviser Preobrazhensky did not raise any special questions. But at some point Sokolnikov began to insist that the chervonets should be an international monetary unit. Chervonets should “walk” both in Russia and in global financial markets. Here, of course, Stalin and some of his supporters began to think: “What will come of this?”

Moreover, life experience worked again. Still, they lived a little under the conditions of Russian capitalism and recalled that the Russian ruble was the object of speculation on the Berlin, Paris and London stock exchanges. That is, what kind of stability could the Russian economy have if the ruble was “walking”? But everything was done cunningly there. The gold ruble was introduced there. But radish horseradish is not sweeter. We have already spoken about the gold ruble more than once in this audience of the Russian Economic Society. If necessary, I will speak again.

Why am I forced to remember Witte’s golden ruble? Because, periodically attending various patriotic parties, such a true patriot comes out and begins to nostalgically remember Tsarist Russia (Russian Empire). He begins his list of nostalgic memories with a gold ruble. How many times have I already said that Witte’s gold ruble is actually a golden noose. They even made a video and called it the “golden noose.” So I seem to have said everything, but the audience somehow, apparently, does not watch or does not watch attentively enough the films that Cognitive TV makes, including. Every time you have to go to the podium and explain to the audience that there is nothing to be proud of (the gold ruble). Because the gold ruble actually drove us into such debt that then the Bolsheviks had to say already in 1917 that “we are renouncing the debts of the tsarist government.” This is the situation.

So one thing clings to another, so, excuse me, I’m moving a little away from my general line, but I’m returning to it again, that is, the state monopoly of foreign trade.

Of course, the West categorically did not want to accept our state monopoly of foreign trade. Already Lloyd George said in 1920: “We are ready to consider concluding a trade agreement with Soviet Russia, but on the condition that it renounces the state monopoly of foreign trade.”

You can remember another story: the Genoa Conference of '22. I remember it especially often, because I remember my professor Nikolai Nikolaevich Lyubimov, who taught me, and in 1922 he was a member of the delegation at the Genoa Conference. He was still young then, but already had the status of an adviser in this delegation. So, it turns out that we were even ready to discuss the issue of partial recognition debts of the tsarist government. Naturally, we demanded that the West then make concessions in return and recognize, say, our legitimate demands for compensation for damage caused by the intervention and blockade. In general, some beginnings began, but everything fell apart when they said that we still had to abolish the state monopoly of foreign trade. They were ready to concede anything, but the state monopoly of foreign trade is a kind of stone, a stumbling block, and that’s where all the negotiations ended.

We had to resort to some tricks. Let's say the British said: “We want to trade with the Russian people.” And translated into Russian, what did this mean? That they were ready to recognize some kind of cooperative organizations (cooperative forms of ownership), so some of our foreign trade organizations had the status of cooperatives, in order to have at least some kind of trade, because the country was in ruins, the most basic things were missing. There wasn't even medicine.

I'm reading some memoirs. When our representatives were traveling to negotiate a trade agreement and the opening of a trade mission. As a rule, all this ended in nothing, but they returned to the country with shipments of medicines, because this was the most scarce commodity and they simply bought it and transported it. But there was also a trade blockade, although the Entente lifted it in 1920. But instead of a trade blockade, a naval blockade appeared. There could be practically no trade, because all ships in the Baltic Sea were simply stopped. There was some trade, but it was semi-smuggling. With the Swedes, for example, there was trade through the Estonian corridor, but the ships were intercepted.

Then the “golden blockade” began. The “Golden Blockade” is actually a refusal to accept Russian gold. Hard to say, what's happened gold was in the 25th year. There was talk of restoring the gold standard. But, in general, some authors say that it was actually barter trade (say, food for gold). Some said that gold was already perceived as money. Hard to say. The time was so turbid. But, nevertheless, they did not want to accept gold either as a commodity or as money. And the situation especially worsened by the 30th, 31st year.

Last time we discussed industrialization. I would like to emphasize once again: many authors completely wrongly claim that we were able to industrialize in the wake of the economic crisis. The logic is that the economic crisis began and we saved the West. Figures are given that in the 30th and 31st years, from 30 to 50% of mechanical products from the world market were bought by the Soviet Union. How much money did we buy it with? That is the question. If, say, prices for machinery fell (according to different sources) by 20-30%, then prices for traditional goods of Russian raw material exports fell significantly: for wheat they fell six times, for timber they fell several times, for flax and etc.

Pre-war foreign trade statistics are very interesting (there is no such thing now). Then exports and imports and individual commodity items were measured not only in gold rubles, but also in tons. And it is very interesting to see how the tonnage of our exports has grown. The export tonnage increased several times, that is, we increased physical volumes in order to receive the same monetary revenue. That is, for us, industrialization was achieved with blood and sweat, sweat and blood. We really carried out forced exports.

But the Jesuit policy of the West was that they said: “But we are ready to buy only grain from you.” After some time, the “golden blockade” was expanded - not only grain, but also timber, flax, and other raw materials. They even declared a blockade on oil. They said, “Only grain.” This is about the origin of the Holodomor.

People sometimes ask me: “Did we really build nine thousand enterprises during the Holodomor?”

I say "No".

The fact that the West really tried to starve us to death is correct. That's what it was like. There really was a famine - there is nothing to deny. But this famine was generated precisely by the policies of the West. Their market for timber, oil, and flax was closed to us. And, in general, in no year did bread account for more than 40% of Russian exports - not in any year. There were years when we received ABOUT higher export earnings from oil than from grain.

The West has created such a situation. It was a purely political action, because America was burning grain. I don't know if grain was burned in England. But England bought grain from us, which it could buy even cheaper (virtually for nothing) in America. America was ready to give away grain simply for transportation: “You just pay for transportation and you will receive this grain.” This, of course, was the Jesuit policy of the West. And all the talk about the fact that Stalin organized the Holodomor is, to put it mildly, a distortion of the situation that developed in the early thirties.

I think last time in this audience we talked about some versions of the sources of industrialization. We came to the conclusion that, of course, grain did not provide us with the main foreign exchange income. After all, industrialization is in the purchase of imported equipment and imported machines, so, offhand (my rough calculations), if we spread it out over the entire thirties, then grain exports provided our foreign exchange earnings by 5-10%. 5-10% - this is the true importance of grain exports for our industrialization.

I am now publishing a series called “Mysteries and Myths of Stalin’s Industrialization.” The solid residue is this: that we really must carefully study this period of Soviet history. Especially (I repeat again - there was simply not enough time to consider) the period of the late 40s - early 50s. Why is he interesting? It is interesting because the material and technical base has already been created. Already industrialization was carried out. This is the next stage in the development of the Stalinist economy.

And second, that this development took place in a relatively peaceful conditions. Of course, there was no military-strategic parity yet, but there was already an atomic bomb. And we also tested the hydrogen bomb earlier than the Americans. That is, we could already afford to reorient our resources a little. There was such (you know) law, formulated in political economy textbooks, about the accelerated development of industries of group A in relation to the development of group B. It would hardly be necessary to erect this certain tendency into a law. I believe that, of course, in the 50s we should have and could have brought the pace of development of Group B and Group A closer together. In fact, Stalin began to do this. Moreover, he used not only the resources and capabilities of the public sector of the economy, but there was also cooperation. And usually we always remember collective farms. But there was urban cooperation. There was a fishing artel.

And, by the way, in 1950 (according to the same reference book that I mentioned today), the fishing artel accounted for 9% of industrial output. Almost two million people (1.8 million) worked in this sector. This is a very interesting phenomenon. Stalin did not intend to destroy this sector, because it covered the needs for many consumer goods.

I, perhaps, end my conversation on a comma, but I hope that we will continue it, because today, when we compare the current realities of our economic life with the Stalinist model, we immediately have many questions and, most importantly, many proposals about how to get out of the current impasse. Thank you for your attention.

Vladimir Khodukin, Great Fatherland Party: Tell me, is it possible to somehow compare the blockade that Iran and North Korea now have with what happened to the Soviet Union?

Valentin Katasonov: Good question, especially since I even planned to write an article in order to draw parallels between the blockade of Iran and the blockade of the Soviet Union. Lots of similarities. By the way, I had articles on Iran. I explained what modern blockades are, what today’s sanctions are from the United States and the European Union. But Iran is breathing. And not only does it breathe, but some of its industries are developing very rapidly. So rumors of death are premature. Iran is alive.

And even more than that, I want to say: Iran has created a bad precedent for “Uncle Sam.” It turns out that the economy can do without “green paper” altogether. After all, they put pressure on Iran, and Iran today practically does not use the dollar. I’m afraid to get carried away about what he uses and how he uses it.

— Including the same halava, that is, it is cash payments without using the banking system. But these are not large contracts, of course, not large transactions.

— This is the use of gold, especially in Iranian-Turkish trade.

— This includes the use of barter (the same Iranian-Chinese trade).

— Use of national currencies. I must say that Russia is quite actively participating.

China is sometimes afraid to violate certain sanctions, but Russia in this case acts more decisively, more boldly.

Then what is commonly accepted in the media today is “black knights.” “Black knights” are small and medium-sized companies that act as intermediaries. They are not afraid of American sanctions.

Therefore, of course, Russia (Soviet Russia), the Soviet Union also had their own corridors. I am not afraid to say that there was smuggling, there were “black knights” - everything happened. So a lot of things are very similar. And there is no need to be afraid of blockades - this is the most important conclusion: there is no need to be afraid of blockades. In fact, if you are not afraid of blockades, then these blockades boomerang back to the one who started them. But this is a separate topic.

Anatoly Otyrba, economist: Valentin Yuryevich, I’m going to continue this question. The blockade of Russian gold probably should have been formulated more clearly. I think, how was it? Forced to use the pound in the thirties, but at the moment - the dollar (in calculations). Perhaps this was what it was leading to? This is precisely what dictated the blockade (it is coercion). And in this regard, I would like to return to the year 57. In 1957, a decision was made to sell Soviet resources for dollars. Before this, they were always selling only for gold. Khrushchev made the decision. I believe, for example (maybe I’m wrong, correct me) that it was as a result of this decision that at the very moment when the decision was made to sell Soviet resources for gold, the verdict on the Soviet Union was signed.

Valentin Katasonov: Do you mean that we supplied the West with some raw materials and received gold for it?

Anatoly Otyrba: No, they weren’t trading for foreign currency back then. The decision to sell oil and so on simply for dollars (“green”) was made in 1957 by Khrushchev.

Valentin Katasonov: No. You are a little mistaken here, because trading for dollars was carried out before. You touch on a very interesting topic regarding... Maybe we will even hold a special meeting. Because 2014 is a round date: seventy years of Bretton Woods. The topic of Bretton Woods, it is also very poorly covered in our literature. There they discussed the question of how the world would trade and pay after World War II.

Anatoly Otyrba: Actually, the Bretton Woods Agreement is precisely the most important document on World War II.

Valentin Katasonov: Of course, it is a very important document.

Anatoly Otyrba: Key.

Valentin Katasonov: Well, in general, yes.

Anatoly Otyrba: This is what they fought for.

Valentin Katasonov: Yes, they fought. But I must tell you that, of course, there is very little material. Personally, I have very little material. If anyone can help with any materials on the Bretton Woods Conference, I would be very grateful. Stalin understood perfectly well that they (that is, we - the Soviet Union) were superfluous at this wedding. There, the British and the Americans actually fought among themselves.

But Stalin agreed to participate in this conference because at the Tehran conference there was a preliminary agreement that Roosevelt would give us a loan of six billion dollars immediately after the end of the war. And in order to support these, of course, quasi-allied relations, but at least maintain some kind of politeness, we sent our delegation. I even tried to find some documents (reports of our delegation). In general, our delegation was just a statistic. The task was this: sit, listen, keep a low profile, and then report everything that happened there.

Stalin was a realist. He understood that he would have to build his own economic system—the world economy. And in 1949 the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was created. It is clear that CMEA could not be a completely self-sufficient group. Some items had to be purchased from the West. Of course, the purchases were made in foreign currency. Of course, first of all, it was the American dollar. As for trade within the socialist community, it was mainly barter. We had trade agreements with Yugoslavia. There were clearing settlements: clearing balances were covered in American dollars. In general, we could not suddenly break away from the dollar.

Back in 1952 and 1953, Stalin insisted on speeding up the development of a single currency for the countries of the socialist community. Unfortunately, this happened eleven years after Stalin's death. In 1964, the transferable ruble appeared. But there has always been currency.

I, too, at all sorts of patriotic parties usually have to take the floor in order to carry out explanatory work. Because some patriots say: “Well, how long will we sell our oil for American dollars?! We have to sell it for rubles.”

I then come out and say: “But the Soviet Union, by the way, in 1950 had an incomparably more powerful position in the world economy. And Stalin was asked many times: “Let’s export your goods for rubles.”

And Stalin said: “No. We will never accept rubles. We will never let our rubles into global financial markets.”

Artyom Voitenkov, Cognitive TV: I still can’t wrap my head around why, on the one hand, the West gave us loans (in the 20s - 30s), and on the other hand they declared a gold blockade, took nothing except grains, food and all that other stuff. Why do the bourgeoisie give loans to the young Soviet state, which declares: “We are a workers’ state. Bourgeois are enemies, bankers are bloodsuckers, bloodsuckers. We will cut them all out, they must all be removed, an abscess on the body - the healthy body of the proletariat.” But, nevertheless, these bloodsucking bankers give these guys loans. The Bolsheviks are using these loans to build factories where they rivet tanks and other military equipment and the bourgeoisie will go to war - that’s understandable. Why did they do this? I don't understand.

Valentin Katasonov: Firstly, I want to say that the desire to earn money sometimes outweighed political considerations, and sometimes political considerations outweighed the desire to earn money. There are and have always been different groups, and the scales swung in different directions. Therefore, blockades were introduced and blockades were lifted. As for loans and credits in general, there is no need to overestimate the role of this source of financing. Basically, these were some kind of commercial loans. A commercial loan is actually a deferred payment.

Yes, if we look at foreign trade statistics, let’s say, the foreign trade deficit in 1930-1931 was large. And in 1932-1933 there was a big plus. That is, in fact, we were already earning foreign currency and with this currency we were repaying our obligations on commercial loans. Long-term loans were not given.

There is still a version circulating in our literature that the Soviet Union cheated all the bankers. How? They simply exported the goods abroad to consignment warehouses (this is when the crisis began), and then, using the security of these goods, they took out a bank loan, bought equipment, cars, and carried out industrialization. But I’ll tell you that under the Stalinist regime, this is an almost hara-kiri operation for the person who decides to export goods. What if you don't sell it? Do you understand what it means: “you won’t sell the product”? I remember even in Soviet times. After all, I came into contact with Vneshtorg. I understand the level of personal responsibility of a Vneshtorg employee who allows some deviations or some losses under some contracts and transactions. And here, excuse me... What is this? Did Stalin make a decision every time? They ran to him and said: “Now we’ll take the goods to the consignment warehouse and wait for the buyer to appear.” And then, excuse me, this is already a crisis.

And if a banker appears, the banker will give you a loan at a 90% discount. He always gives a loan with a 50% discount (I mean the discount is the assessment of the collateral), and in a crisis, excuse me, the discount will be 90%. How much money will we get from such an ingenious operation? I think - “with a stupid nose.” I'm just saying that the role of loans and borrowings should not be overestimated.

By the way, in 1936 the Pravda newspaper said that “we have an external debt of about fifty million gold rubles.” This is ridiculous. Do you understand what fifty million gold rubles are?

In general, a rather paradoxical situation has developed. Look, on the eve of the war our debt is almost zero. There, however, we took a loan from Germany in 1939, but it was a normal loan. There are, in my opinion, two hundred million marks, but this is not an exorbitant amount of debt. If you convert it into dollars, I don’t know how much it is: seventy to eighty million dollars. But for a country like the Union this is nothing. Further. They built nine thousand enterprises and also accumulated gold. My industrialization equation doesn’t add up yet. Again, the figures for gold were classified. Now something is emerging.

In 2009, I wrote and published a book called “Gold in the Economics and Politics of Russia.” One figure appeared: a book was published in 2009, I don’t remember the title, but I remember the author well and even know him personally. This is Rudakov Valery Vladimirovich. Rudakov Valery Vladimirovich is an experienced person in the gold mining industry: he headed Glavalmazzoloto, headed Gokhran, was the Deputy Minister of Finance, who oversaw “gold issues.” So, in his book it is written: “In 1940, the gold reserves of the Soviet Union were two thousand six hundred tons.” Yes, gold mining was developing. Yes, by about 1940, according to some sources, we had already reached one hundred and eighty tons of annual production, but it still doesn’t add up.

I want to what is this, answering your question? I cannot fully answer all your questions, but do not overestimate the role of loans and credits. Last time I mentioned such a mysterious source. It is truly mysterious, and in order to figure it out and say “yes” or “no” you need to delve into the archives, which are still classified. And again I remember the year 1937. I remember the 37th year and the 18th year. Do you know what the years 18 and 1937 have in common? In 1818, the chairman of the Cheka, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, went to Switzerland for a month and a half. Why do you think he went to Switzerland at such a busy time, for a month and a half?

Answer: Get treatment.

Valentin Katasonov: To undergo treatment - well, yes, that’s the version. And in 1937 - interrogations at Lubyanka. Because in 1937, according to some sources, interrogations were conducted not in order to find out what political views this or that oppositionist adhered to, but in order to simply obtain passwords and bank account codes. There was a lot of money there, in Swiss banks.

Question: My question is this: you said that construction in our economy took place through trial and error. This problem of construction from a purely economic point of view is not the fact that Lenin began the construction of socialism contrary to the theory of Marx, who demanded the construction of the first phase of communist society. There are still scientific grounds and corresponding evidence. And the second point. Given the shortage of financial funds at the initial stage of construction, our government exported jewelry by carload. Do you know anything? How effectively were these jewels turned into appropriate funds?

Valentin Katasonov: I have half a book dedicated to these issues. The book is called “Gold in the Economics and Politics of Russia.” And, of course, the pages that are especially interesting are the pages starting somewhere from the year 14 even. Today I mentioned the First World War - interesting stories begin there, about which the general public knows little. Well, then, from October 17, it becomes even more interesting there. Of course, there was also “locomotive” gold. That is, under the guise of purchasing steam locomotives and wagons, gold was exported to Sweden along the Scandinavian corridor. Gold went to America. The right people were there: Julius Hammer - Armand Hammer's dad. Zhivotovsky was there, as well as other citizens sympathizing with the Russian revolution, who placed all this in the right instruments in the right banks.

Next is Comintern gold. Comintern gold is also a very interesting topic. In practice, Zinoviev made a special effort there, because Zinoviev led the Comintern. There they simply gave out gold by weight to make a revolution in one, another, or a third country. And, by the way, I’m answering your first question right away, because Lenin never really answered the question: is it possible to build socialism in a single country? Rather, Lenin avoided this issue altogether, leaving carte blanche, giving carte blanche to Trotsky. Like, let Trotsky voice these questions. Well, Trotsky, naturally, spoke about the world revolution.

It was later, when Vladimir Ilyich passed away, that Stalin quite clearly and clearly said: “Yes, it is possible to build socialism in a single country. But to build socialism in a single country, you need this and that. To begin with, the country must be self-sufficient, self-sufficient. It must be closed from all interventions and all economic blockades and sabotage. Hence the state monopoly of foreign trade, hence the state currency monopoly. That is, Stalin said this clearly. Lenin never said this clearly. Our topic today is not Stalin as such, so we will not discuss his ideology now.

Of course, there were other such things that were clearly discordant with Marxism. Let's say Marxism and the withering away of the state. But for Stalin it’s the other way around: the increasing role of the state and the class struggle (at a certain stage). Stalin was a practitioner, an empiricist, and then he adjusted Marxism to suit his own political decisions. And I think that's right. Because if he had been blindly guided by the dogma of Marxism, then, I think, the socialist experiment would have ended very quickly.

Question (about Marx): Do you think Marx’s theory of a communist society with a bright future for humanity is a utopia or is it a real scientific teaching?

Valentin Katasonov: This is not just a utopia. I will say more harshly: this is not a utopia. I perceive Marx as a cynical and very crafty author who understood everything perfectly - he fulfilled a social order.

Question: Why then do our Marxist scientists (and there are a very significant number of them) continue to praise Marx as a unique world thinker whom we all need to follow here?

Valentin Katasonov: You know, not everyone follows. Members of the Russian Economic Society, for example, do not follow. How can we, excuse me, be guided by the conclusions of such a hereditary Talmudist as Marx? After all, we poor students and graduate students were forced to study “Capital”. Well, it’s as simple as a toothache. After all, it was possible to write in normal Russian language briefly and clearly. And then (I already confess), when freedom of speech appeared here, when all sorts of books appeared, I bought a selected volume of the Talmud and decided to read it. I read about thirty pages of the Talmud and remembered: “I’ve already read something similar somewhere.” Then it suddenly dawned on me: “So this is Marx’s Capital!” Can a Russian person read Marx’s “Capital”?! You can hurt your head!

From the audience: This should not be a point of view. Here there must be a clear answer from the highest philosophical science, why it does not exist today.

Valentin Katasonov: The fact is that we are Orthodox. For us, the highest science is one science.

From the audience: No. I’m not talking about your Orthodox, but I’m talking about official secular fundamental science.

Valentin Katasonov: You know, I’ve been in this science for forty years now. And, to be honest, I’m already crawling away from her as far as possible. Here some joker very correctly said: “Science comes from the word “to the ear.” The evil one whispers in the ear, and these scientists then spread the whole thing. You know, in general, science is a very crafty thing, because science appeared somewhere not so long ago. Remember, there was this Reformation, then the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment - that’s when science appeared as a kind of institution that was designed to replace God. You see, there are some eternal truths, but crazy people appeared who said that “ We are the bearers of this truth. Listen to us here“, these people said. And it must be said that some became their followers.

But man - after all, he was created by God, and an important property of man is the ability to comprehend the world around him. But people did not call themselves scientists. They were wise people. They comprehended this world. Any medieval university was engaged in science, but there was not even such a word as “science”. This word is already from modern history, this is already when Protestantism appeared, when Christianity in Europe began to die - that’s when science appeared as a substitute for some truly higher truths. So here I am somehow... We have already discussed these issues for ourselves at the Russian Economic Society and are not returning to them.

Vladimir Khodukin, Great Fatherland Party: Do you think industrialization—since at that moment there was actually a certain turn toward the construction of a new empire (Russian) by Stalin, including some kind of symbolism returning, something else—couldn’t It may be that this, relatively speaking, was built with royal gold. Perhaps some kind of help for the dynasty, something else...

Valentin Katasonov: At our previous meeting, young people even began to think out loud about how to make this equation. There were even versions that the Federal Reserve System printed dollars, then through some unknown channels it went to the accounts of equipment suppliers. In general, you know, you can write so many novels here, you can actually become such a famous person. But I still prefer a little like this, to return to the sinful earth. In general, I want to say that it is in vain that we, like Protestants, are trying to rationally explain everything. For an Orthodox person, for example, the world around God is a miracle. History is also a miracle, economics is also a miracle. And I assure you that even if I lived not one, but ten lives, I still would not fully explain how industrialization happened. Because if so, frankly speaking, I think it was a miracle. This was God's gift to our people.

From the audience: I believe, Valentin Yuryevich, that this was financed in the same way as Hitler’s Germany was created in parallel with the creation...

Question: A hackneyed question: what was the reason for the collapse of the USSR and socialism?

From the audience: A separate topic.

Question: Some say that the possibilities of socialism have been exhausted, that is, the image of socialism is not able to develop. Others say that socialism was built in violation of Marxist theory. Still others say that it died as a result of a secret conspiracy of the West, as a result of a long, multi-year internal intervention. Different variants. And, moreover, this is what people of science say. You, as a representative of science, have your opinion.

Valentin Katasonov: You know, I distance myself from science. So, what you said is partly true. But, again, I give the analogy of medicine. Suppose there is a sick person. A sick person has something inside that hurts. The doctor comes, he doesn’t have any equipment. He sees that your temperature is elevated, he sees that you have some blisters, some skin disorders, maybe some other external signs. And so he records all this. He recorded and said: “Here is patient Ivanov - this, that, that.” He is right. But the doctor did not reveal the root cause. What you said is all correct. Yes, this is necessary, but not sufficient for an explanation. We need a root cause.

Many wise people said: “Half-knowledge takes you away from God, full knowledge brings you closer to God.” Here is a small child, he asks questions. And such questions that bring him closer to God.

And adults say: “What are you doing there with your stupid questions. They will explain everything to you at school.”

Or: “Ask some Aunt Masha - she will explain everything.”

There are different people. As a teacher with forty years of experience...

Some people ask the question: “Why did the crisis begin?”

You will tell him: “The crisis began because they raised the interest rate and there was a collapse.”

He is everything: he is pleased with this answer. He received the answer: cause - effect, effect - cause. And it’s enough to say that this is the reason for this and that, and he leaves, satisfied. And he even believes that he is a very smart person, and he even deserves some degrees: candidate, doctor or even academician. These are the types of people in science. But the world is more complicated. Our endless world consists of a very long chain of cause-and-effect relationships. Now, if we, as adults, begin to be curious children and begin to ask these questions, then we will come to the end of this thread.

What happened in the economic sphere in the last years of Stalin's life?

Let's start by comparing the price level for basic food products as of 01.51 to the price level of 01.46 - as a percentage.

The table shows that prices for basic food products in the 5 post-war years in the USSR decreased by more than 2 times, while in the largest capitalist countries (in two of them - the USA and England - there was no war on their territories) these prices increased , and in some even 2 or more times. What does this mean?

This speaks of the tremendous success of a country in which just five years ago the most destructive war in the history of mankind ended and which suffered the most from this war!!

In 1945, bourgeois experts gave an official forecast that the USSR economy would be able to reach the level of 1940 only by 1965 - provided that it took out foreign loans. We reached this level in 1949. Without any external help. Sami.

Since 1946, work has been launched in the USSR:

Thus, in the USSR, during one five-year period - from 1946 to 1950 - in the conditions of a tough military-political confrontation with the richest capitalist power in the world (on its initiative) without any external assistance, at least three socio-economic problems were solved:
1) the national economy was restored;
2) sustainable growth in the standard of living of the population is ensured;
3) an economic breakthrough has been made into the future.

This is what capitalist economists wrote in 1952. Englishman F. Lindsay: “Russia is experiencing extremely rapid economic growth” , American A. Nove: “The Soviet economic challenge is real and dangerous” . (And in 1958, the future US President John Kennedy, speaking in Congress, noted the large gap between the Americans and the Soviet people in the field of space research as a consequence of their lagging behind us in the system of education, medicine and science.)