Conclusion Party and economy in the USSR: from stagnation to collapse

Summary

This book set out to explore the role of the CPSU in the Soviet economic system, and to try to identify whether party interventions helped or hindered Soviet economic progress.

Our conclusion, based on an exhaustive reading of the relevant national newspapers and journals from the period 1975 to 1985, is that the economic stagnation which crept over the USSR during the Brezhnev era was in no small part due to the close monitoring of economic life exercised by the CPSU. The latticework of vertical and horizontal bureaucratic controls was so firmly established that managers were left with little room for manoeuvre. Efforts to expand the scope for market like forces, even on a modest scale, came to naught. This was not simply because of political opposition from conservative elements. It was more a case of the whole body politic rejecting the foreign cells of marketization, however modest, which local experiments or central reforms sought to inject.

There was a clear contradiction between the principles underlying party activities in the economy and the work of industrialists and farmers. The former had their own rules of the game, defined by the political logic of the CPSU – campaigns, slogans, orders, reports, reprimands, praise, initiatives, victories. The managers in turn had their own rules to follow, laid down by their ministry in Moscow. Their life involved petitioning for more resources, chasing down supplies, keeping their workers happy, and all with the goal of meeting output plan targets.