The main directions of international politics in the 1960s were determined by the problems of disarmament, the prohibition of atomic weapons and their testing, the cessation of a number of regional conflicts and hostilities that took place in different regions, primarily in Indochina and the Middle East.

On the general state relations between countries were influenced to a certain extent by factors related to technological progress, such as the exploration of outer space and the development of nuclear technologies, including for military purposes.

The United States openly challenged the USSR. In the 1960s, American services planned 20 thousand objects that were to be destroyed with the help of atomic strikes. This forced the Soviet leadership to spend huge amounts of money in order to achieve a strategic priority. American propaganda, on the other hand, intimidated its people and the peoples of Western countries with an imaginary Soviet threat.

On the way to "discharge". Despite the difficult problems that existed in the 1960s, and the fact that the arms race continued to spin the flywheel of acceleration, there were still the first glimmers of understanding by the warring parties of the need to negotiate. What began to be traced in the 1960s and found its development in the 1970s began to be called "détente" in our country, and "easing of tension" in the West.

In the 1960s, negotiations began in Geneva between the USSR, the USA and Britain on ending nuclear weapons tests. Such tests increasingly worried the world community, as they caused terrible, and sometimes irreparable harm to the environment. This made it necessary to speed up the search for ways to limit them, or even better, to completely stop them.

At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, and especially in the 1960s, positive shifts began to be seen in the negotiations between the USSR and the USA. There have been certain changes in the American position, and Soviet government became more flexible.

US President John F. Kennedy, under whom the rearmament program began, managed to rise above the global American ambitions, which, in particular, was shown by Caribbean crisis. It was under him that diplomatic methods in the foreign policy program began to be used much more often than before. Even short

Kennedy's stay in the White House suggests that he understood the need to find ways to establish contacts with disarmament partners.

Negotiations that lasted several years between representatives of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain on ending nuclear weapons tests were difficult. against such an agreement different reasons were France and China. The US and Britain were not ready to go for a total test ban. Nevertheless, in the early 1960s, the negotiators slowly, step by step, with caution, but still moved towards clearing the rubble " cold war". In November 1962, the 17th session of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling on the nuclear powers to stop nuclear weapons testing no later than January 1, 1968, regardless of the course of negotiations in Geneva.

By the summer of 1963, it became completely clear that the Western countries would not agree to a total ban on nuclear weapons tests. Under these conditions, the Soviet government decided to single out from the draft treaty those questions on which a common opinion could be reached. On July 2, 1963, it proposed to conclude an agreement on a test ban in three areas: in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water - based on the use of national means of control. The negotiations of the three powers began on July 15, 1963 in Moscow and ended on August 5 with the initialing of the text of the treaty proposed by the Soviet side. It stated that the USSR, Britain and the United States pledged not to conduct any nuclear weapons tests and nuclear explosions in three areas and expressed the hope for reaching an agreement on general and complete disarmament under international control and the cessation of all nuclear testing including underground. The Moscow Treaty entered into force after ratification on October 10, 1963. It was open for signature by all countries.

Although the Treaty did not prohibit all tests, it showed that, with mutual desire, it is possible to reach agreements acceptable to all. This was the first experience of a coordinated solution of the problem in parts, with the allocation of those issues on which consensus can be achieved. More than 20 years later, the issue of medium-range and shorter-range missiles was also resolved in this way.

The first years of the sixth decade of the XX century. were contradictory. On the one hand, the conclusion of the Moscow Treaty, the first manned flight into space, on the other hand, the landing of Cuban counter-revolutionaries on Playa Giron and the international political crisis in the region. caribbean. This crisis, which has already been mentioned above, has placed mankind before real threat war. Negotiations were directly conducted with President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Prime Minister N. S. Khrushchev, and both sides, unwilling to allow terrible disaster, made mutual concessions. The Soviet Union took cancer from Cuba

you and the planes, the United States has officially declared that it will not resort to armed struggle against Cuba.

Preparation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

In the second half of the 1960s, the USA and the USSR were ready to take a kind of "time out" to regroup their forces and determine further steps in order to maintain their influence in the system of international relations. Some researchers believe that it was during this period that the superpowers tried, while maintaining their positions, to find possible ways of development in order to avoid being drawn into serious conflict and prevent nuclear war.

After the signing of the Moscow Treaty on the Partial Cessation of Nuclear Tests, the Soviet Union, together with its negotiating partners, continued to develop measures for disarmament and the conclusion of a Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

The fact is that the number of nuclear powers increased, and consequently, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons increased.

In the 1960s, there were negotiations on the reduction of conventional weapons. There is also a new problem associated with the exploration of outer space. The main issue in it was the question of prohibiting the use of outer space for military purposes and the launching of nuclear weapons into outer space. The USSR and other socialist countries took steps to prevent the FRG and Japan from obtaining atomic weapons.

The Soviet Union raised these questions at the 18th session of the UN General Assembly. The consistent struggle of the USSR and other socialist countries led to the abandonment of the creation of joint nuclear forces with the participation of the FRG in them.

The buildup of nuclear arsenals and the growing destructive power of new types of nuclear weapons could not help but worry the most far-sighted politicians and specialists. Therefore, the negotiations that took place in the 1960s attracted the attention of the world community. By the middle of this decade, research-type nuclear reactors were operating in 38 countries. In addition to the nuclear powers, in 1968, 13 states had plutonium-producing reactors.

The UN General Assembly urged its members to take the necessary steps to rapidly prepare a treaty that would be a link in the chain of general and complete disarmament. The resolution of its 20th session instructed the Committee of 18 States to urgently consider the issue of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In this respect great importance had an announcement individual regions nuclear free zones. Thus, in the summer of 1964, at a conference in Cairo, the OAU adopted a special declaration in which Africa was declared a nuclear-free zone.

Under the influence of world events, the moods of people who held important positions in their countries changed. Such changes in the second half of the 1960s could be seen in ruling circles England, USA and a number of other countries. In France, the opinion was being strengthened that it was necessary to develop a document on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons within the framework of the UN. Thus, we can conclude that in the second half of the 1960s, the opinion about the need to ban the spread of nuclear weapons was becoming universal.

The question of preparing and concluding a treaty on this problem was discussed during a meeting at the 22nd session of the UN General Assembly by Soviet Foreign Minister A. Gromyko and US Secretary of State D. Raek. It should be noted that in the course of work on its text, the position of the United States changed in the direction of rapprochement with the position of the USSR.

Step by step, at meetings of the Committee of 18 and at regular sessions of the General Assembly, acceptable wording of the articles of the treaty was developed, as a result of which the three powers - the USSR, the USA and Great Britain - submitted a joint draft. It was considered at the XXII session of the General Assembly, the work of which was postponed until the spring. After discussion, the General Assembly on June 12, 1968 approved the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and asked the depositary governments to open it for signature and ratification as soon as possible. On July 1, 1968, the Treaty was opened for signature in Moscow, Washington, and London. On the same day in Moscow, it was signed by A.A. Gromyko, as well as representatives of 36 other states.

The conclusion of this Treaty was a significant victory in the fight against nuclear weapons. Its 71st article obliged the participants to negotiate in good faith on effective measures to end the nuclear arms race and in the near future on nuclear disarmament.

Under Article 1, each nuclear-weapon Party to the Treaty committed itself "not to transfer to any person nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control of such weapons or explosive devices, either directly or indirectly."

The USSR, the USA, and Britain submitted to the Security Council proposals on security guarantees for non-nuclear countries, agreed by them on March 7, 1968. On June 19, the Security Council adopted a resolution on security guarantees for non-nuclear states parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

After ratification, the Treaty entered into force on March 5, 1970. By that time, about 100 states had signed it. It opened up prospects for reaching other agreements on the nuclear issue.

During these years, the Soviet Union and a number of other countries took active steps to convene a pan-European conference. Preparations for the conference took more than one year: the second half of the 1960s - the first half of the 1970s.

At the end of the 1960s, the issue of demilitarization of the seabed was raised and preparations began for a Treaty on the Prohibition of the Placement of Weapons of Mass Destruction on the Bottom of the Seas and Oceans. At the XXIV session of the General Assembly, a draft of such an agreement was considered, submitted after agreement with the USSR and the USA on October 7, 1969.

Thus, the 1960s gave the world two treaties concerning nuclear weapons, opened the way to space. Very difficult tasks were solved during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

1950s

In the 1950s, the party proclaimed a new program for the growth of the village. The priority areas were the increase in investment in agriculture, the increase in purchase prices, the development of virgin lands. Women's magazines received a direct order to intensify propaganda work among readers. New headings were introduced, special reports, essays, sketches, etc. were published.

In the second half of the 1950s, during the "thaw", the degree of influence of political and economic propaganda decreased. To control the population in the press, moral and psychological methods of influencing the audience began to be used. The image of a Soviet woman became the standard for women's magazines, where, along with professional qualities, its spiritual world was also considered. In the conversations of teachers and psychologists, the education in a woman of the concepts of motherhood and family responsibilities was promoted. Public discussion was necessary to spread personal feelings and attention to appearance uncharacteristic of a woman in a totalitarian society. Women's magazines gradually began to publish materials about the working conditions of women, about the standard of living in the family, that is, the old ideals lost their relevance. A lot of informative headings and materials began to appear in magazines. Gradually, magazines began to focus on helping women in everyday life and family life: there are applications for the whole family, sections on housekeeping, needlework, education, psychology. Socio-political women's publications began to acquire universal character. 26]

In the 1950s, magazines began to use reproductions of paintings as illustrations. famous artists. Readers tore out pages with them and hung them on the walls in their homes. Joseph Stalin decorated his dacha in Volynskoye with a copy of The Girl with a Lamb cut out of a magazine. After the death of the leader, the Peasant Woman magazine placed his portrait on the cover in a mourning frame.

1960s

In the 1960s, the consequences of the economic crisis, urbanization and the extinction of the countryside, and a slowdown in the development of production were felt in the USSR. Women's magazines have intensified their work to combat these phenomena, for example, Rabotnitsa introduced the sections Raid of Rabotnitsa, Good News from Women's Councils, and Volunteering. With renewed vigor, propaganda of professions that a woman could master was launched. "Krestyanka" suggested "to share experiences more widely", giving a significant number of pages for materials from the field. The journal took up active promotion of chemical science and the implementation of its achievements in life, even special sections "The ABC of Agrochemistry" and "Chemistry for Children" appeared. Also in the publication appeared permanent headings dedicated to cinema, literature, publication of various entertaining information. The covers of Peasant Woman became more diverse in the 60s: the heroines admired the clear sky near the tractor, participated in skiing competitions, posed for a photographer against the backdrop of huge coils of cable.

Unfortunately, problems were brewing in the USSR that had much more deep reasons than the primitivism of one leader.

Like the West, the USSR was going through a systemic transition. Two competing systems in material meaning they developed almost simultaneously. Science and technology were about the same level. Somewhere ahead was the West, somewhere - the USSR.

By the beginning of the 1960s, not only the industry and agriculture destroyed by the war were not only completely restored, but also were made big steps forward. The established defense system and the nuclear shield were sufficient to ensure that the external military force did not pose a danger.

In the USSR, of course, a society of abundance was not created, but healthy material prosperity was achieved everywhere. Everyone was shod, dressed, fed, trained, had the opportunity to rest and use medicine.

In this situation, the old principle - work as well as you can, and the distribution will be according to the principle of the most needy, ceased to operate.

When there is hungry and barefoot nearby, you need to feed and put on shoes in the first place. But when everyone is fed, it makes no sense to work hard to provide the neighbor with the pleasures that he wants. When people begin to work for the sake of pleasure, and not for the sake of joint survival, competition inevitably begins for the right to get more pleasure and get them before a neighbor.

In such a situation, both the military-command organization of production and the military-command organization of social consciousness ceased to produce results and lost their meaning.

In 1961, the highest dream of the natural science idea, the highest dream of physics, the flight of man into space, came true.

In the 19th century, a steam locomotive was a miracle; in the 1920s, a tractor, electricity and radio; in the 1930s, giant factories. Even fundamental theoretical physics ran out of steam in the 1960s.

All the dreams of materialistic science have come true. In the material sense, there was nothing more to dream about, except for goods for his pantry.

The share of the urban population of Russia exceeded 50 percent. Without knowing it, the USSR began to turn into an idealistic society, in which surpluses and relations of people among themselves prevail, and not relations between people and nature.

Choice 1960s

The country was at a key point, at a bifurcation point. There was a transition from the “realm of natural necessity”, when development was determined not so much by desires as by external factors and the material needs of the body. There has come a transition to the “realm of conscious necessity”, to the “realm of subjective freedom”, where development beyond the necessary depends only on the desire, imagination and will of the people themselves.

The society itself was aware that strong changes had taken place and that new goals were needed. Disputes broke out between physicists and lyricists, disputes between idealists and materialists. A theoretical discussion of commodity and anti-commodity workers began among economists. They argued about whether there are commodity-money relations under socialism or not.

Instead of endlessly quoting the classics, it was enough for economists to go to the people and ask if people's daily relationships are built through goods and money, or on some other principles. Do people think primarily about goods and money, or do they have other values.

Ultimately, the choice of new targets was up to the leadership of the party. Key decisions were made at the 21st Congress in 1959. On the XXII congress In 1961, the Third Program of the CPSU was approved.

The third program of the CPSU stated that the goal of the revolution of 1917 was fully achieved - socialism in the USSR was built and reliably protected.

The further strategy, the strategy of building communism by 1980, consisted of three main goals:

1. The development of the material and technical base of communism, that is, the further growth of industry.

2. Satisfying the growing needs of the population in the consumption of goods.

3. Strengthening the communist education of the new man.

Thus, in a society that has become essentially idealistic, the development of production was put in the first place. The productive forces were supposed to bring happiness by themselves.

It was a strong step back even in comparison with 1917, when justice, the struggle against the bourgeoisie as a class, was put forward in the first place, and only then materiality.

Moreover, this strategy simply did not work in conditions of saturation. If 2 million tractors are needed to cultivate all the fields and meadows of the country, and there are 200 thousand, then each new tractor gives more at help. But when there are already 2 million tractors, a further increase in their production is only to the detriment.

At this moment, it is necessary not to increase production, but simply reduce it to the level of replacement of worn-out and improve quality, reduce energy intensity, and so on. Planning from what has been achieved and increasing production by inertia completely do not take into account the fact that sooner or later there will be a transition from quantitative to qualitative changes.

In such a situation, the growth of production becomes not an improvement in people's lives, but an increase in indicators in the reports. The main becomes the same account book(which migrated from the religion of money to the theory of Marx), the growth of transactions, only expressed not in gold, but in rubles or in physical terms. From a natural account book to a real golden account book - one step.

The economy has become an “economy”, the economy has become a fetish, an economy for the sake of the economy.

Moreover, in the conditions of the idealization of society, Marx's theory of labor and physical value ceased to work.

Goods of pleasure cannot be expressed in terms of labor costs and measured in kilograms or meters. For investment in light industry, in whose products the main indicator is the subjective consumer properties of goods and their subjective quality, it is impossible to use the same formulas that worked when investing in an objective heavy industry.

Soviet pricing was carried out from GOSTs. For functional goods, it is easy to establish GOST, which measures a dozen of their most important physical characteristics. It is practically impossible to establish GOST for goods of pleasure, because pleasure cannot be measured by physics.

Materialistic thinking imposed strong restrictions on the producers of goods. They believed that if the product is well made from their point of view, then it objectively good product. It was necessary to look through the eyes of the buyer, realizing that the product is a subjective category.

Status goods were generally outside the Soviet worldview. Therefore, their place in society began to be occupied by primitive, but bright and rare imported goods.

In second place in the new program of the party was the development of commodity consumption, and only on the third - the development of consciousness. Between these two goals there was a direct, albeit unconscious, contradiction.

At first glance, consumption is material, education is spiritual. But in terms of its effect on consciousness, increasing the consumption of goods as a goal, especially in front of spirituality, is a direct path to idolatry. This is the binding of consciousness to goods and money, this is the development of the religion of money.

Having "exposed" the cult of the Personality on the one hand, and setting the goal of increasing wages and consumption of goods on the other hand, the party itself told people that they should think more about money and goods, and less about sacred concepts.

For communist education, a simple and clear, deeply Christian in essence, Moral Code of the builder of communism, which we cited in the 3rd chapter, was adopted.

But in everyday life, communist ideas became routine rhetoric, which was used to achieve more important goals - the growth of production and the growth of consumption (often the personal consumption of the ideologue).

Envy, greed and greed cannot be overcome by increasing material production.

To top it all off, the 22nd Congress included in the party program the provision on the withering away of states during the construction of communism. Considering that communism was planned to be built by the 1980s, it turned out that the state should have died out by this time.

If we continue to develop bourgeois revolution in a straight line, then commodity-money relations really lead to the withering away of the state (and its replacement by supranational corporations). But if we talk about the state of justice, about the state as a system of protection from violence, then it will never die.

This position has become Trojan horse in the minds of society, and during perestroika it was actively used to destroy Soviet power.

The adoption of the Third Program of the CPSU was accompanied by a symbolic gesture. The 22nd Congress decided to remove the body of I.V. Stalin from the mausoleum.

Why was it decided in 1961 to build communism in twenty years?

Look at how much has been done in the previous twenty years, from 1941 to 1961. Despite the war, despite the huge defense spending. If so much could be done in twenty years with poverty, then what can be done in twenty years with the most powerful industry and with the best science in the world.

Was it possible to build communism in twenty years?

It is possible, if in Marxism there was no dogma of materialism. "Scientific Communism" should not be a materialistic discipline, but a consciously designed religion. It was required not only and not so much a further increase in production, because the level of the necessary was provided, but the control of desires, subtle and flexible control of the consciousness of people and society. Happiness cannot be material.

The development of technology and the growth of material production make sense only as a development of consciousness. If knowledge stops, and the production of things continues, then in such a situation any society degenerates.

Scientific communism is the creation of a consistent, balanced, self-developing spiritual world society. Scientific communism is the control of public consciousness.

The way in which the Party's program envisaged a transition to communist relations could not but create the strongest internal contradiction in every person. On the one hand, material development and material consumption are the main goal of man and society. On the other hand, a person must constantly abandon this main goal, sacrifice himself. Its stimulus must be ideas and ideology, which the theory itself recognizes as a secondary superstructure.

With such a split consciousness, most people will consciously or unconsciously choose the primary - the material and discard the ideology. Not most of people will reject the material and choose the spiritual. Those who try to combine will be forever unhappy and mentally unstable.

Moreover, the primacy of production also gives rise to a superstitious fear of the productive forces that supposedly rule the world. It paralyzes the will and ability of a person to develop these very productive forces.

Instead of treating production as a tool completely subject to man, admiration for the productive forces begins. There is a fear of "angry" them, to do wrong. Fear of violating some mythical proportions of their development, unknown to anyone, but vaguely indicated in the works of the classics, which it is not clear how to interpret. The more people think about how to develop them, the greater the uncertainty in their actions. A whole sacral cult of productive forces arises.

In this sense, the blind pursuit of profit has a great advantage. Production is considered exclusively as a secondary tool. There are no prejudices and superstitions to make production work and to subjugate nature.

The half-starved and shoeless society of the 1920s and 1940s, all of whose forces were directed towards survival, was great because it despised what it did not have and lived on ideas.

The well-fed and prosperous society of the 1960s-1980s became more and more philistine, because it set as its goal what it already had - material consumption.

Why were purely material goals set in the 1960s? As people sometimes ask, why didn't Stalin prepare his replacement?

Where in the 1950s and 1960s was it possible to find a communist who would graduate from a theological seminary?

Since the beginning of the industrialization of the year, twenty-five years have passed of life in a continuous military situation, in conditions of constant and maximum exertion of forces, in conditions of hot and cold war. The race to develop physical science and technology and the army organization of society was not a desire, but the only possible way survival. These conditions were by no means conducive to the selection of philosophers for leadership, as well as to the development of freethinking in society as a whole.

The Soviet leadership consisted of deep techies and production workers or from the military. Their consciousness was practical, industrious, workable, savvy. But it was neither sublime, nor spiritual, nor philosophical.

A great country can only have a spiritual leader.

What do you remember about 1960?
Khrushchev taps his boot on the UN platform and promises to show Kuz'kin's mother to the imperialists. Dogs Belka and Strelka go on a space flight. The four construction workers drift for 49 days in the open ocean and become famous all over the world. On May 1, over the Urals, a Soviet missile shoots down the plane of the American spy Harry Powers. In the capital, the Moskva pool is being opened and the Taganskaya prison is being closed. Crime is fought by the forces of vigilantes, and parasites are fought by the whole world. . The city of Yaroslavl celebrates its 950th anniversary.
Private life takes its course. In the yards they dance to Maya Kristalinskaya and master new game- badminton. Children wear stockings and bras, women knit meningitis hats. In the cinema they watch "Nights of Cabiria" and "Babetta Goes to War". At Komsomol meetings, bearded men and transparent blouses are scolded. A new word "knock out" appears in the lexicon. It becomes fashionable to go hiking and work as a geologist. “Cool” is only contempt for parasites, and “blue” is the peaceful sky above your head.
And in this stream of particular and historical, momentary and epochal, one more thing cannot be lost. an important event- your birth in one thousand nine hundred and sixty.

—A little boy rode the elevator, Everything is fine, only the cable broke. Grandma digs in a pile of bones, Looking for sneakers for 300 rubles. … A little boy rode the elevator, Everything is fine, only the cable broke. Grandma digs in a pile of bones, Looking for sneakers for 300 rubles. Type: Sadistic rhymes

—In one pioneer camp there was a blue bed, and everyone who lay down on it died. Once they put a girl there, and the next morning they found her dead. Us… In one pioneer camp there was a blue bed, and everyone who lay down on it died. Once they put a girl there, and the next morning they found her dead. The next evening, the second one lay down on this bed - and also died. The guards called the police. An investigator arrived with assistants, but found nothing. Then the investigator decided to lie down on the bed himself, and ordered his assistants to watch what would happen. He lay down on the bed and suddenly began to die. The assistants are watching, and some tubes lead from the bed to the basement. They ran to the basement, and there a man with blue teeth was sitting and drinking blood through tubes. He was arrested, and the investigator was barely saved. And the man with blue teeth was shot - he turned out to be a fascist traitor and hid from our people in the basement after the war.

ratings: 0

Type:

We bring to your attention an article by Professor, Doctor of Economics Grigory Isaakovich Khanin "A decade of triumph Soviet economy. Years of the fifties", originally published in the journal Svobodnaya Mysl-XXI, 2002, No. 5.

Statements about the unviability of the command economy, often heard in Russian and Western economic literature and journalism, are based on data on the inefficient use of material and labor resources in pre-war period and a continuous decline in economic growth and resource efficiency throughout the 1960s and 1980s. However, these facts are still far from stating the collapse of the command economy, since before the collapse of the political system of the USSR in 1990-1991 there was neither a prolonged absolute decline in GDP, nor (in post-war period) the fall in the standard of living of the population, nor the suspension of technological progress - all this happened after the abandonment of the command economy.

In comparison with the last period, it is legitimate to speak of the indisputable advantages of a command economy over a market economy in Russia, unless, of course, one considers (for which there are some grounds) the enormous difficulties of the 1990s as the consequences of a protracted transformational crisis.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that these advantages are obvious even when compared with that variant of the command economy, degraded by the mid-1980s, which is very far in character from its classical model.

There is one very long period in the Soviet economy when it experienced a real flourishing - this is the 1950s. Subsequent events to a large extent ousted this period from the sphere of historical and economic study. More attention has attracted and is attracting such turning points like the NEP, 1930s, the degradation of the command economy in the 1960s-1980s. Known role in special attention ideological considerations also played into these periods. History, as is often the case with it, has become at the service, not always conscious, of the interests of political struggle. An analysis of the reasons for the flourishing of the Soviet economy in the 1950s and the transition to a slowdown in economic development in the subsequent period deserve, in my opinion, much more attention of historians and economists than is the case at present. Ten years of economic development is too long a period for its successes to be explained only by purely temporary factors.

The period of the 1930s does little to reveal the potential of the command economy, because it was characterized only by the formation of its foundations. This was the childhood of the command economy. In addition, it was extremely complicated by the most severe domestic and foreign political crises and problems that had a negative impact on the nature of economic development. The efficiency of the Soviet economy during this period was significantly influenced by low level qualifications of managerial, engineering and working personnel, due to the general low cultural level of the country and the rapidity of structural changes. On the other hand, in the 1960s and 1980s, the command economy was actually being dismantled.

Both numerous Western and alternative Soviet (including mine) estimates of economic growth show that in the 1950s the USSR was among the countries with the highest rates of economic growth along with the FRG, Japan, France and some others, significantly outperforming this figure the US and the UK. Comparison of the dynamics of economic development of the largest developed countries of the world, of course, I will begin with the dynamics of GDP. Biggest problems with estimates refer to data for the USSR. The available calculations for this period give very contradictory results. For example, according to the calculations of the CIA, in 1951-1955 the GDP of the USSR grew 1.3 times, while according to the calculations of A. Bergson - 1.5 times. My own calculations refer to the entire period 1951-1960. After much thought, I came to the conclusion that the most accurate results are obtained by using two indicators: changes in the ratio of GDP of the USSR and the United States, according to the calculations of the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR, and fuel consumption in the Soviet economy. With a certain overestimation of the absolute values ​​of the estimates of the CSO of the USSR, they quite reliably reflect the dynamics of the GDP of the USSR, since the overestimation of this level was the same for all periods due to the use of the same calculation methodology. The results obtained, which, of course, do not claim to be absolutely accurate, turned out to be slightly higher than my previous estimates of GDP growth for this period, but they are still somewhat lower than the estimates of the CSO of the USSR, despite the fact that the distortion of the dynamics of Soviet economic growth by the CSO in this period was the smallest.

The calculation, made on the basis of the ratio of the GDP of the USSR and the USA, gave a growth index of 2.48, based on the production of fuel (foreign trade of which during this period was small) - 2.23, that is, on average - 2.35. This indicator has been transferred to the data on the dynamics of fuel production by the ratio between this dynamics and the dynamics of fuel production for the entire period (1.05). This figure is much higher than my previous estimates, which apparently did not sufficiently take into account the growth rate of military spending and the service sector, which grew especially rapidly in the 1950s (my calculation referred to the national income in the Soviet interpretation, excluding the service sector). For the period 1951-1955, it is close to A. Bergson's calculations. Most likely, the above estimate is somewhat exaggerated, but it still gives enough good performance about the dynamics of the process.

Table 1.

Dynamics of GDP in the developed countries of the world for the 1950-1960s, in % to the beginning of the period taken as 100%

Sources:

USSR: “The national economy of the USSR. 1922-1982" M., 1983, p. 91 (the ratio of the national incomes of the USSR and the USA in 1950 and 1960 - 31 and 58 percent, respectively).

For Western countries:

• for 1951-1955: "Economics of the capitalist countries after the Second World War". M., 1959, pp. 857-863;
• for 1956-1960: "The national economy of the USSR in 1967" M., 1968, p. 141 (calculated as the difference between the data for 1951-1960 and 1951-1955).

As can be seen from the data in Table 1, GDP growth in the USSR as a whole over the entire period of the 1950s was many times greater than growth in countries such as the United States and Great Britain, significantly outstripped economic growth in France, was higher than in Germany, and only slightly inferior to economic growth in Japan (the magnitude of which, undoubtedly, was also affected by the fact that by 1950 Japan's GDP had not yet reached the pre-war level, and therefore at the beginning of this period there were high growth rates inherent in the recovery period). At the same time, in 1951-1955, economic growth in the USSR was higher than in all other countries, and only in the next five-year period did the country give way to Japan in first place.

The exceptionally high rates of economic growth in the USSR in this period are also visible when comparing the growth dynamics of the most important branch of the economy - industry. AT this case I use my old calculations to determine the dynamics of industry in the USSR.

Table 2.

Dynamics of industrial development in the largest countries of the world in 1950-1960s, in % in relation to the beginning of the period taken as 100%

Sources:

USSR: G. I. Khanin. Dynamics of economic development of the USSR. Novosibirsk, 1991, p. 146.

For Western countries:

• for 1951-1955: "Economics of the capitalist countries after the Second World War", pp. 62-63;
• for 1956-1960: "The National Economy of the USSR in 1967", p. 148; "Statistical Yearbook". UN, 1962, p. 80-87.

Most likely, the data I calculated are somewhat underestimated, since for this period (unlike 1965-1975) I could not include the dynamics military industry, which grew, of course, much faster than the civil one. Nevertheless, these data also show that the growth rates of industry in the USSR were much higher than in the USA, Great Britain and France, only slightly inferior to the growth rates of West German industry and very much - Japanese. A similar advance in comparison with these countries (including Germany, but without Japan) can be traced in such key indicators for that time as steelmaking, electricity production, cement, all types of fabrics, and, finally, and most importantly, electricity consumption in industry. , where the ratio with Germany rose from 210 percent in 1950 to 249 percent in 1960. The advance was observed not only in traditional industries, but also in such a rapidly growing industry that arose on a mass scale only after the Second World War, as the production of artificial and synthetic fibers, compared with the USA, France and Germany.

A fundamentally new circumstance characteristic of this period in the history of the Soviet economy was that, in contrast to the previous period, intensive factors became the main ones in its development. Thus, with GDP growth of more than 100 percent, the number of employed increased by only 22 percent in the 1950s. Thus, more than 80 percent of GDP growth was ensured through the growth of labor productivity, while before the war - less than half. GDP growth in the 1950s was much faster than the growth of fixed assets, which grew by only 70 percent, by my calculations (all fixed assets grew even less), while in the pre-war period, GDP grew much more slowly than the growth of fixed assets. Finally, the material intensity of the national economy's products has noticeably decreased, while before the war and in the 1940s it increased significantly.

According to a number of indicators of changes in the efficiency of the economy of the USSR during this period, they also surpassed the main capitalist countries. As an example, I will give data on changes in labor productivity in industry (Table 3).

Table 3

Change in labor productivity in industry in 1951-1960, in % to the beginning of the period taken as 100%

Sources:

• for the USSR - see table 2; "The National Economy of the USSR in 1967", pp. 144, 148;
• for the USA, Great Britain, France and Germany - ibid., p. 714;
• for Japan: "Economics of the capitalist countries after the Second World War", p. 829.

As can be seen from the data in Table 3, in the 1950s, in terms of labor productivity growth, the USSR significantly outperformed the United States and Great Britain and only slightly lagged behind France and the FRG. Given the underestimation in Table 2 of the dynamics of industrial output in the USSR, this difference should have narrowed even more. Only in comparison with Japan, the difference in labor productivity was huge. What has been said for the entire period also applies to the sub-periods, with the exception that in 1956-1960, labor productivity in the industry of the USSR in terms of growth rates was equal to that of West Germany. Thus, according to this indicator, the USSR in the 1950s was among the world leaders.

Unfortunately, there is no single quantitative indicator by which one could compare the rates of scientific and technological progress in the USSR and the largest capitalist countries. If we talk about the novelty of scientific and technical solutions, then the USSR, no doubt, was very far behind the United States. Scientific and technological progress in the Soviet Union during this period was predominantly borrowed. An important role in the acquisition of the latest scientific and technical knowledge was played by product samples obtained during the war years under Lend-Lease; documentation acquired under reparations and seized on the territory East Germany; scientific and technical espionage during the war years and in the post-war period. There were a number of original discoveries and inventions, but they covered only a relatively small part of the equipment introduced into production (with the exception of the military, where their share was much higher). However, what was said about the novelty of scientific and technical solutions in the USSR apparently also applies to some other countries, which at that time also did not have a serious and effective base for independent scientific and technical solutions (except, perhaps, Great Britain).

If we talk about the introduction of new technology into production, then it happened quite quickly in many industries and in transport. An indicator of such growth (albeit not entirely accurate) is the increase in the number of new types of machines and equipment created (accepted for production) from 650 items in 1950 to 3089 in 1960. An important evidence of the successful scientific and technological progress in the USSR was the high rate of growth in labor productivity, which was mentioned earlier. The high rates of scientific and technological progress during this period were ensured by exceptionally high growth rates of appropriations for science, although a significant part of them was used for military purposes. Among the undoubted successes of the Soviet Union in this area are such major events as the launch of the first satellite of the Earth, the launch of a nuclear power plant, the first flight of a supersonic passenger aircraft, as well as a number of other technical achievements in which the USSR was ahead of the United States. It should be noted that in such an important industry as the creation of electronic computing technology, Soviet developments at that time did not lag behind in their technical data from computers created in the USA. Apparently, the technical level of such industries as electric power, ferrous metallurgy, the coal industry, and some branches of non-ferrous metallurgy did not lag significantly behind the level of the United States during this period. major achievements Soviet industry during this period were the development of continuous casting of steel, the creation of hydrofoils, unified system power industry for the European part of the country and some others.

The 1950s were characterized by exceptionally rapid structural shifts in the economy. Urbanization grew rapidly, new sectors of the economy developed (production of electronic computers, instrumentation, chemical industry, air transport, production of rare metals), a radical technical reconstruction was carried out railway transport, the system of scientific institutions in various fields of science and technology was improved.

On the basis of the high rates of economic development and the attitude to the problems of people that changed after the death of Stalin, in the 1950s there was a qualitative improvement the standard of living of the population. If at the beginning of the 1950s the level of consumption of basic foodstuffs in the USSR was more typical for a developing country, then by the end of the decade, as a result of the rise in per capita consumption of such high-quality foodstuffs as meat, milk, sugar, vegetables and gourds, by 1.5 -2 times or more, it has reached the level of a number of developed countries of the world. Malnutrition, which was still very common in the early 1950s, has been virtually eliminated. The per capita consumption of the most expensive types of fabrics (woolen and silk), outerwear and linen knitwear, hosiery, and leather footwear increased by 2 or more times. The sale of cultural and household goods increased several times, reaching a fairly high level for some types (watches, radios and radiograms, bicycles and motorbikes, sewing machines). For the first time, relatively complex household items such as televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines began to be mass-produced, although their output was still small. The rent of living space increased by 2.5 times, reaching, in terms of per capita, the level of highly developed countries. For the first time, many millions of people received separate housing; barracks were practically finished.

The concentrated expression of these and other measures to improve the standard of living of the population (such as, for example, improving health care) was the rapid increase in life expectancy of the population - up to 69 years, that is, to the level of the most highly developed countries in the world. It can be said without exaggeration that during the 1950s, in terms of the standard of living of the population, a new country appeared, free from poverty and, by world standards, provided, although not rich, for the bulk of its citizens. The working hours have been reduced. All these achievements in the field of the standard of living of the population occurred simultaneously with huge changes in the socio-political atmosphere: the cessation of mass political repression, the process of rehabilitation, the revival of cultural life.

In the 1950s, despite some reduction in the intensity of capital construction at the end of the period, a huge amount of capital investment was made in the production and non-production spheres. As a result, according to my calculations, the main production assets grew by 70 percent over the decade. The level of capital investment is also eloquently characterized by natural indicators. Thus, the number of installed metal-cutting machines increased from 1.2 million in 1951 to 2.44 million in April 1962. The capacity of power plants, the development of which was given special importance, increased simply colossally: from 19.6 million kilowatts in 1950 to 66.7 million in 1960, that is, more than 3 times. The commissioning of residential buildings (without commissioning by the population) increased by more than 2.5 times.

The high growth rates of the Soviet economy made it possible to massively equip the country's armed forces with the most modern military equipment, as well as to provide the armed forces of the USSR's allies with it. During this period, mass production of nuclear weapons, rocket technology for various purposes was established, powerful jet aircraft, a complex air defense system, a huge submarine fleet on the basis of modern diesel and nuclear submarines - the facts characterizing the military buildup are too well known to delve into details. It is only important to emphasize not only the huge scale, but also the high technical level of this equipment, often not inferior to the level of the United States, which would be impossible without the presence of a highly developed military industry and the industry of related industries, without a developed scientific base for defense research.

During this period, the USSR carried out significant financial, credit, scientific and technical assistance to its allies in Eastern Europe and China (until 1960), began to provide significant assistance in the economic development of a number of developing countries, the most noticeable manifestations of which were such facilities as the Bhilai Metallurgical plant in India and the Aswan Dam in Egypt.

An intensive increase in investments in the development of education, health care and science continued, which assumed enormous proportions already in the pre-war period. Its scale is best characterized by an increase in expenditures for these purposes from state budget, which, due to a slight increase in prices, practically coincided with real investments in these industries. Thus, budget spending on education rose from 5.7 billion rubles in 1950 to 10.3 billion in 1960; for the needs of health care and physical culture - from 2.1 billion rubles in 1950 to 4.8 billion, that is, in both industries by 2-2.5 times. In terms of the share of spending on education, health care and science in GDP during this period, the USSR, as is known, occupied one of the highest places in the world.

The most serious economic achievement of the 1950s was financial stabilization, unprecedented in the USSR and rarely seen in the 20th century in general, expressed in a budget surplus, a minimal increase in retail and wholesale prices, and even their reduction in the early 1950s. Retail prices, as is known, during the fifth Soviet five-year plan decreased (even taking into account some of their growth in collective farm trade), while wholesale, according to my calculations, did not change. In the Sixth Five-Year Plan, there was an insignificant increase in retail prices, while wholesale prices throughout the entire national economy, according to my initial calculations, slightly increased (by 13 percent). Such the highest financial and economic stability was ensured not only by a sharp increase in production efficiency, but also skillful management in the monetary and financial sectors, and a high degree the effectiveness of these areas in ensuring monetary and financial stability at very high, which must be emphasized, absolute and relative growth rates of the budget and credit investments in the national economy.

HUGE ECONOMIC and social achievements make it possible to call the 1950s the era of the “Soviet economic miracle”. As has been shown, these achievements were not inferior to those of, say, the FRG, whose economic development in the same period was called the "German economic miracle". Title released in the early 1960s documentary film by one East German film director, The Russian Miracle, which was ridiculed by many Soviet intellectuals in the conditions of serious economic (including food) difficulties at that time, was quite justified in relation to the economy of the 1950s. As a result progress The USSR in military, scientific and economic terms became a superpower, second only to the United States, but far ahead of all other countries in the world. Considering the socio-economic backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia and the huge human and material losses as a result of the three most difficult wars and social upheavals, this fact should be assessed as a unique socio-economic achievement.

The economic successes of the 1950s were so significant that by the end of the 1950s, many Soviet economists, and the vast majority of Western economists known to me who dealt with the Soviet economy, and statesmen in Western countries had the idea that in the future of the USSR will inevitably outpace the US economy. The differences boiled down only to the estimate of the time when this should happen: in the 1970s, as the Soviet leadership believed, or in the 1980s and 1990s, as many Western economists counted on. As an example, I will cite the works of one of the most talented Soviet economists, academician S. G. Strumilin, who calculated the period necessary to achieve abundance in the USSR and the transition to communist principles of distribution. It was in the atmosphere of euphoria caused by the achievement of truly major socio-economic successes that the famous plans for the transition to communism in the next twenty years were born, which were reflected in the program of the CPSU adopted in 1961.

THE ANALYSIS CARRIED OUT shows that the sources of the greatest economic achievements of the 1950s were as follows. The command economy during this period showed its viability and macroeconomic efficiency. Being, in essence, the world's largest corporation, the Soviet economy skillfully used the strengths inherent in any large corporation: the ability to plan and implement long-term plans, use colossal financial resources for development priority areas, to make large investments in a short time, to spend large amounts of money on research and development, etc. The achievements of the 1950s relied on the powerful potential of heavy industry and transport created in the 1930s-1940s, which then, due to the focus mainly on military purposes and low efficiency of use gave little return for expanding the production of consumer goods. The USSR skillfully used its limited resources for the development of sectors that determine long-term economic progress: education, including higher education, health care, and science. At the same time, the enormous possibilities of a totalitarian state, capable of sacrificing the short-term interests of the population, were used. In itself, the rapid development of education and healthcare as a factor in economic growth was not a Soviet discovery. Successes in this direction are known, for example, in the USA and Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the speed and scale of shifts in the development of these industries were unprecedented and in the second half of the 20th century they were a model for many countries of the world. Almost unique was the high share of production accumulation in the gross domestic product, which made it possible to quickly increase the volume of production assets at a high technical level for that time, widely using foreign technical experience and equipment. Thanks to extensive exploration work, a powerful raw material base for the development of all sectors of the economy.

By the end of the 1940s, the overall qualifications of workers and engineering personnel increased significantly, which was at a low level during the 1930s due to the hasty and massive involvement of low-skilled labor from the countryside in non-agricultural production and the accelerated increase in the number of higher and secondary special educational institutions with the inevitable release of low-skilled specialists under these conditions. Many practitioners during this period remained in leadership positions due to a lack of trained personnel, as well as their political merits acquired during the years of the Civil War and collectivization.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, great efforts were made to improve the skills of workers on the basis of individual and collective apprenticeships and, most importantly, a more perfect system for training young cadres. The barbaric destruction of experienced economic workers in the era of mass repressions from the point of view of the economy, sadly to say, led to a general improvement in the quality of personnel, because those who replaced the repressed had, on average, a much higher level of qualification and training, not to mention about the energy of youth. After 2-3 years of difficult assimilation at new posts, already in the early 1940s they ensured a noticeable increase in the efficiency of the economy and, on the whole, quite successfully (unlike military personnel) managed industry and transport during the war, ensuring the solution of such difficult economic tasks, as the evacuation of industrial enterprises, their transportation and the establishment of production in new places in as soon as possible. The successful solution of the problem of meeting the needs of the front with military equipment was largely determined by the skillful organization of production, although, of course, the unprecedented concentration of the country's resources in military production to the detriment of civilian needs and lend-lease assistance played an exceptionally important role. The restoration in the shortest possible time of the pre-war level of the economy during the Fourth Five-Year Plan, along with the solution of the most difficult task of mastering the production of nuclear and missile weapons, jet aircraft, also characterize the increased level of qualification of the leading cadres of the Soviet economy, workers, engineers and technicians, although the use of reparations.

In the second half of the 1950s, additional favorable factors for the development of the economy appeared: increased attention to the development of agriculture, a rapid improvement in the living standards of the population and working conditions, a more favorable socio-political situation, and a reduction in military spending in 1953-1957. Due to the increased maturity of the Soviet economy, the sharp reduction in the forced labor system after 1953 had a minimal impact on the development of the economy, although it seemed to many then that this system was almost a bulwark of the Soviet economy, which it was in the 1930s and 1940s with a lower the level of development of the economy and society.

The data on their educational level in different periods. So, on January 1, 1941, of all the directors of enterprises in the union and union-republican industry, only about a quarter had a higher or secondary special education. By the end of 1956 specific gravity graduates among the directors of light industry enterprises reached 45.2 percent, oil - 78.2, mechanical engineering - 87.2, including heavy engineering - 94 percent. It should be borne in mind that at the beginning of the period the most qualified specialists were concentrated in the central management and planning bodies, scientific and design institutes. There was also a big difference in the training of specialists in the 1930s and 1940-1950s: in the post-war period, it has grown qualitatively.

MANY ECONOMIC PROBLEMS remained quite acute by the end of the 1950s. The quality of most types of products remained low compared to Western countries, especially for consumer goods in terms of appearance and technical excellence. The production of many consumer goods lagged behind effective demand, and often they were not produced at all. The quality and quantity of many types of services remained low. Scientific and technological progress in the civilian sectors of the economy was largely borrowed. The efficiency of the use of equipment and materials lagged far behind those of the developed capitalist countries. The level of specialization, cooperation and combination of production was low. There were many weaknesses in the structure of the economy and production assets, the organization of production, which was deeply and comprehensively written by such prominent Soviet economists as S.A. Heinman, Ya.B. Kvasha, K.I. Klimenko and some other large business executives - N.N. Smelyakov, O.A. Antonov.

A number of events in the economic and social life of the USSR in the 1950s prepared for the fading of economic growth and the decline in production efficiency, which began in 1958-1960 and continued almost continuously until the early 1980s.

First of all, I will note a huge impact growth in military spending. In the 1950s, three stages can be distinguished in their dynamics: a sharp increase in the early 1950s; stabilization in 1953-1957; a new sharp rise in 1958-1960.

Their most complete assessment in terms of material costs is contained in the recently published data for the first time on the input-output balance of the USSR for 1950-1970, prepared for publication by Yu. V. Yaremenko. These data are contained under the heading “other final consumption”. However, it should be borne in mind that at the beginning of the period the growth in military spending was not limited to an increase in material costs for defense, but also included a significant increase in the size of the armed forces, which created additional tension in the national economy. According to Yaremenko, the material costs of defense increased from 1.36 billion rubles in 1950 to 2.85 billion in 1953 in comparable 1958 prices, that is, more than 2 times. In 1958 they reached 2.93 billion rubles, that is, they grew insignificantly. In 1960, they already amounted to 4.53 billion rubles, that is, they increased by 54 percent compared to 1957, and in absolute terms in the same volume as in 1950-1952. The sharp increase in military spending in 1950-1952 undoubtedly slowed down the development of the Soviet economy, especially affecting agriculture, which stagnated during this period. However, overall economic development has been rapidly and the standard of living of the urban population also increased. The slower growth of military spending in the late 1950s was more painful because it coincided with many other factors that slowed down economic development. In addition, the growth of military spending in the early 1950s was mainly carried out on the old technical base, with the exception of rocketry and the just-started deployment of the production of nuclear weapons. At the end of the 1950s, dozens of new industries and industries were created to produce a fundamentally new military equipment requiring newest species materials and devices in large quantities and with high quality.

Possessing incomparably less economic, scientific and military power than the capitalist world, even if not entirely united in its totality, the Soviet Union had to exercise maximum restraint in its own interests in its own interests. foreign policy, at least until the time when the power of the socialist system equals or exceeds the power of the capitalist, which in the mid-1950s there were certain grounds for counting on. Instead, the USSR, in the second half of the 1950s, by its actions (supplies of weapons to the Middle East, attempts to establish control over West Berlin, etc.) increased the fears of the Western powers for their security and thereby spurred an arms race, which it could not withstand without irreparable damage to economic development. (It is interesting in this regard to note that L. Beria, according to some evidence, was ready to agree to the unification of Germany in exchange for receiving financial assistance for the reconstruction of the Soviet economy.)

The direction of huge funds for the development of the military industry and related scientific research negatively affected the dynamics of the renewal of production assets, scientific and technological progress in civil industry and the dynamics of the standard of living of the population. This is also evidenced by the general indicators of the development of the economy: a slowdown in the growth of capital investments and retail trade turnover. But they hide more important negative structural changes(capital investments, for example, also include significant investments in military engineering and defense construction).

The first victim fell, as always in the USSR, agriculture, investments in which were sharply reduced. Plans for a second industrialization collapsed with the help of a radical reconstruction of industry on a new technical and organizational basis (development of specialized production of intersectoral products - casting, stampings, forgings, etc., mechanization of auxiliary work), on which plans for a sharp increase in labor productivity were largely based . An alarm sounded already in the middle of 1960, when it was announced that the plan for capital investments in civil engineering in 1959 - the first quarter of 1960 was only 85 and 88 percent, respectively. At the same time, it was also reported about the depressingly low quality of agricultural engineering products developed by civilian design organizations, the worst provided with specialists and equipment. Plans for a sharp expansion of the production of durable industrial goods, which competed with military equipment in providing materials, labor, and qualified specialists, were frustrated. Their level, and especially the quality, remained very low in comparison with Western countries, and this gap deepened.

Thus, the Soviet economy, despite the still rather high rates of development, was unable to immediately withstand the solution of these contradictory tasks. The priority of military production, military-technical research and assistance to other states has already begun to affect the successful solution of other problems of economic development. The most important source of economic development of the Soviet economy in the past - the rapid expansion of fixed production assets on a high technical basis - began to be undermined. This most important circumstance then went unnoticed by almost all Soviet and Western economists, with the possible exception of Colin Clark. As far as agriculture is concerned, the neglect of its needs showed itself already at the very end of the 1950s, when it almost stopped growing.

In the fourth and early fifth five-year plans, in connection with the complication of economic development and in order to strengthen control over the use of material resources, the number of indicators of the production plan, material and technical supply and directive norms for the consumption of materials was significantly expanded, which had a positive effect on strengthening the balance of production plans, supply and reducing consumption rates of material resources, which during this period were exceptionally high. However, these measures have complicated the process of planning and management, increased the burden on the central economic authorities. Instead of intellectualizing the planning process (for example, using computer technology), after the death of Stalin, the Soviet leadership, under the slogan of expanding the independence of lower economic bodies, for which the necessary economic preconditions, went to a predominantly unjustified reduction in the number of indicators of the national economic plan. Having increased from 4744 in 1940 to 9490 in 1953, they then continuously decreased to 6308 in 1954, 3390 in 1957 and 1780(!) in 1958.

Unfortunately, we do not know exactly how this reduction occurred. But roughly imagining the composition of the national economic plan at that time, we can assume that it was primarily about a sharp reduction in the number of natural indicators (due to their consolidation and reduction) and directive norms for the consumption of material and labor resources. Consolidation and reduction of directive natural indicators unleashed the hands of the ministries for a relative reduction in the production of products that are unprofitable for them in terms of profitability or complexity of manufacture, without taking into account the needs of consumers and the national economy. Reducing the approved consumption rates of materials made it possible to “ensure” the reduction in the cost of production by reducing its quality and manipulating its nomenclature and assortment. In general, these measures have led to an increase in disproportions in the development of the economy, a slowdown in scientific and technological progress that is not provided with the necessary materials and equipment, and a decrease in production efficiency. On the other hand, they made life much easier for the top economic leaders by loosening control over their activities.

If we return to the comparison of the Soviet economy with the largest monopoly, it is natural to look for one of the reasons for its failure in the formation of its leadership. Based on a study of the now very numerous memoirs and publications of archival materials, it can be concluded that, starting from the death of Stalin, there was an improvement in the selection of personnel at the lower and middle levels of economic management, and in top management- almost continuous deterioration. Stalin himself, along with weaknesses, had very strong features: strategic thinking, a deep understanding of the features of the command economy, skillful selection of personnel, that is, what first of all characterizes a great manager. His successors (N. Khrushchev, N. Bulganin) were much inferior to him in all these indicators.

Four stages can be distinguished in the process of replacing more qualified senior managers with less qualified ones at the level of heads of ministries and departments. The first, from my point of view, was the removal of L. Beria, who played an important role as an organizer in the development of a number of sectors of the economy (the fuel industry, the military-industrial complex, nuclear and missile weapons). The second stage was associated with the transition from a sectoral system of management to a territorial one, when many major managers of the central level of management were either removed or lost their former importance. The third is connected with the defeat of the so-called anti-party group, as a result of which such effective economic leaders as G. Malenkov, L. Kaganovich, M. Saburov, G. Pervukhin were eliminated. Yes, and V. Molotov had vast experience in economic management as head of government and broad strategic economic thinking. And, finally, the fourth - when in the late 1950s such a talented business executive, who stood guard over state financial discipline, was dismissed as the Minister of Finance A. Zverev (and in the early 1960s, the Chairman of the Board of the State Bank of the USSR A. Korovushkin). According to the practice adopted in the Soviet system, the removal of the top leader entailed a chain of displacements of his confidants. Some part of the top economic leaders who showed themselves well remained in the management of the economy, mainly the military-industrial complex. And among the new ones, too, there were successful appointments; but in general, based on the data now available, one can speak of a qualitative deterioration in the top management in terms of qualifications, responsibility and honesty. A successful generalized portrait of the head of industry of that period was drawn by A. Beck in the book “The New Appointment”, where I. Tevosyan, the long-term Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy of the USSR, also dismissed by N. Khrushchev, became the prototype of Onisimov.

After 1953, there was a sharp weakening of the control functions of the state in the field of the economy. Along with the completely justified and timely reduction of the functions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the political field, they were also reduced, if not eliminated, in the economic field, where the “organs” played just a positive role, providing the political leadership of the country with objective information. This turned out to be extremely beneficial for the economic nomenklatura, which, to a large extent, strove for lack of control in order to embellish the state of affairs and personal enrichment. At the same time, there was a weakening of economic control on the part of other bodies (the prosecutor's office, the Ministry of State Control, the control bodies of departments). In other words, in the 1950s, absolutely necessary for any centralized system- and especially for a command economy where there is no market control - the control system has been largely dismantled. When in the early 1960s dangerous consequences of such dismantling were partially realized and a more thorough check of the activities of economic organizations and authorities began, significant amounts of corruption and abuse were revealed. Approximately 12,000 leading officials, including 4,000 (!) party workers, were brought to court at that time.

The weakening of the control of the Center as the most important reason for the sharp decrease in the effectiveness of the command economy after the death of Stalin is also noted by the largest American economist Mansour Olson: "Once communist power began to disperse, communism was doomed to collapse".

The weakening of the control functions of the state was not accompanied by the emergence of either market control mechanisms or sufficiently effective forms of public control. Certain efforts to create and strengthen public control, of course, were made. The role of the press increased, its statements became sharper and demanded a response, letters to the press were checked by state bodies, the role of party and trade union organizations in controlling the administration increased somewhat, and other public control bodies appeared. But all these innovations were not effective enough and only partially compensated for the weakening of the role of state control bodies. The social system created in the USSR was unable to democratize, the command economy and broad democratization in the Western sense were indeed incompatible.

In the second half of the 1950s, ill-conceived and hasty reforms were carried out that seriously worsened management. economic life. Although the sectoral management system had many shortcomings (departmental isolation, poor consideration of local characteristics), the industry and construction management system introduced instead in 1957 had even more of them (localism, loss of management of industries, territorial isolation). It seriously hindered the leadership of scientific and technological progress.

The sale of agricultural machinery from the MTS to collective farms and state farms worsened its use and complicated the financial situation of agricultural enterprises and rural population. According to a number of economists (for example, G. Yavlinsky), the abolition in 1954 of a one-time revision of output standards seriously hampered the possibility of increasing labor productivity. To these major erroneous reforms must be added the liquidation in 1953 of the centralized system of management of material and technical supply and the dissolution of the sectoral bureaus of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, as a result of which the management of large national economic complexes was hindered. On the whole, a rather harmonious and efficient system of economic management, which justified itself in the 1940s and early 1950s, turned out to be seriously shaken and disorganized.

This disorganization was also facilitated by the increased role of party bodies in managing the economy. Since the end of the 1930s, the well-known dual power in the field of economics of state and party bodies began to be replaced by the autocracy of state bodies. This process affected, in particular, the increase in the role of the government at the expense of the Central Committee and even the personal composition of the Politburo, where the proportion of statesmen grew more and more at the expense of the party. The culmination of the struggle between state and party bodies for the leadership of the economy and other areas of public life was the June plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1957, where the leaders of state departments spoke on the side of the so-called anti-party opposition, and on the side of N. Khrushchev - party workers, dissatisfied with the belittling of their role in government. Khrushchev's victory meant a new strengthening of the role of the party in the appointment of economic leaders and the current management of the economy. In addition to the fact that any dual power in managing the economy is fatal, the harm from it was intensified by the fact that the qualifications of party leaders, cut off from direct management of the economy, as a rule, were lower than the qualifications of economic leaders.

These changes in the economic mechanism prove that by the end of the 1950s classical system The command economy that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s was largely dismantled and largely became formal. This circumstance has played a major role in slowing down the economic development of the USSR since the late 1950s. Therefore, claims that the command economy was the cause of this slowdown are very superficial. By this time there was little left of her. In confirmation of this idea, I will refer to the ardent anti-communist Y. Gaidar and the experienced business executive N. Nazarbayev. The first called the years 1929-1953 "the only period when communism triumphed." And Nazarbayev wrote in 1991: “For three decades (that is, since the late 1950s - G. Kh.) we simply did not have any planned economy or planned economy. And behind these terms were hidden not just other methods of management, but terrible mismanagement and irresponsibility. Finally, A. Belousov, describing the causes of the crisis of the industrial system in the USSR, wrote about "the disintegration of the hierarchical system of economic management and the formation of closed departmental structures, the substitution of national economic goals and development priorities for departmental-corporate goals", and although he refers this institutional crisis to 1960- 1970s, it arose already in the 1950s, when the governing bodies largely ceased to control economic life and purposefully manage it.

It is indicative, from my point of view, that the intra-Party crisis broke out not in 1953, when political liberalization measures began to be carried out (I mean, first of all, the release of prisoners from the camps and the cessation of mass political repressions), but precisely in 1957, when the creation of economic councils began the dismantling of the command economy (a sharp protest was also caused by the substitution of state bodies by party bodies and incompetent economic decisions by N. Khrushchev).

certain role The slowdown in economic growth at the end of the 1950s was undoubtedly played by the disposal of equipment that began at that time, which arrived in the USSR during the war years under Lend-Lease and then, in the first post-war period, under reparations. This fact was first noticed by V. Bogachev back in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the receipts of machinery from reparations still played a certain role in equipping the economy, especially in the balance of the stock of metal-cutting machine tools, where (according to approximate calculations, taking into account changes in the fleet of this equipment, possible disposal and annual production), machines received from reparations provided nearly 50 percent of the park's growth. However, in general, the significance of this source was still small during this period. So, if its value is determined in the amount of the "imbalance" of the inter-industry balance under the article engineering and metalworking, according to Yu. Yaremenko's calculations, then this article in 1951-1952 accounted for approximately 15 percent of the deliveries of domestic engineering, and from 1953 or was absent altogether. , or was insignificant both absolutely and relative to domestic production. The beginning of the disposal of reparation equipment affected machine tools already in the first three years of the sixth five-year plan, when the growth of the fleet turned out to be much less than the total production in these years (taking into account the balance of exports and imports). Subsequently, however, this gap narrowed due to a large increase in domestic production. An approximate calculation, which for lack of space I cannot give, based on data on the supply of machinery and equipment in the 1950s, the increase in production capacity during this period, and the amount of reparations in the form of machinery and equipment (with the disposal of 80 percent of them in the sixth five-year plan ) shows that the reduction in the gross domestic product due to this factor can amount to about 3-4 percent over the entire sixth five-year plan. This reduction explains most of the drop in growth rates in the sixth five-year plan compared to the fifth. However, if we focus on metal-cutting machines, then most of the retirement of repair equipment occurred in the first three years of the Sixth Five-Year Plan and, therefore, does not explain the drop in economic growth rates at the end of the Sixth Five-Year Plan, and even more so later, when this retirement had very little effect on the pace economic growth in the USSR.

In the late 1950s, a mass retirement of the generation born at the beginning of the century began. It was mainly formed in the moral sense in the 1920s, when many labor traditions and moral foundations of the pre-revolutionary period were still preserved. New generations were formed already in the 1930s-1940s, in an atmosphere of fear and lies, although the influence of the elders on their labor and moral character still retained to a certain extent. In addition, many moral values Soviet era were quite positive. In general, I think this change of generations had a negative impact on the success of economic development. It was during this period, under the influence of the change of generations, and the weakening of discipline and exactingness in society and the economy, that the period of “free socialism” began, which rapidly developed and flourished in subsequent periods in all areas of life.

The revelations of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the expansion of contacts with the West in the second half of the 1950s played a significant role in the beginning disintegration of society. Stalin's revelations shook the faith in socialism and the methods of the command economy among the ideological part of the leading cadres, demoralized them ideologically. In such circumstances, it was difficult to expect the appearance of new Onisimovs. Foreign contacts also influenced in the same direction. That part of the population that had the opportunity to travel to capitalist countries, including defeated in the recent war, saw there a higher level of well-being and domestic comfort and often became infected with the desire to ensure the same life, if not for the whole society, then at least for themselves, for example, by plundering socialist property. Of course, corruption has always existed in the Soviet state apparatus, but now it has engulfed its higher strata, which was facilitated by the reduction in the privileges of this apparatus that occurred in the second half of the 1950s (the abolition of packages).

Noteworthy is the point of view that during this period the great (though most likely utopian) communist idea began to be abandoned, and the loss of the socio-cultural meaning of the development of Soviet society became the most important factor the beginning of the degradation of the entire social economic system. “The substitution of the great communist plan for the Western ideal of a “consumer society” very quickly led to the erosion and subsequent discrediting of the Red Idea. The fundamental reason for the collapse of the USSR that broke out three decades after the announcement of "goulash communism" was precisely the change in the paradigm of historical development, the betrayal of the Red Cause. The country has lost its super-task of global significance, consecrated by the metaphysics of the Universal Space Project, the prospect of national and world development, and at the same time the sense of historical rightness. Mao Zedong and V. Molotov wrote about this in the early 1960s.

It should be borne in mind that the Soviet leadership did not use the available reasonable proposals that did not run counter to the foundations of the command economy for improving the methods of managing the economy, which were put forward by many talented scientists and practitioners. As an example, I will only mention the proposal to replace gross output, which stimulates an increase in material costs, with indicators based on the labor intensity of production, and the proposals put forward by O. Antonov on greater consideration of product quality in planning and evaluating the activities of economic organizations. The implementation of these proposals could well, in my opinion, compensate for the influence of factors causing a decrease in economic growth rates (deterioration in the conditions for mining, a decrease in the effect of the movement of labor from agriculture, the need for more rely on its own scientific and technical potential). In any case, it was possible for a long time to ensure higher rates of economic growth than in the United States, albeit lower than in the 1950s, if only due to the fact that the effect of replacing unskilled personnel with more qualified ones was to decrease.

FINALLY, our analysis shows that the main reason for the continuous decline in economic growth rates in the 1960s-1980s was the gradual dismantling of the command economy and the deterioration of the level of economic management. This conclusion largely coincides with the one that was presciently made back in 1954 by the sociologist Barrington Moore. In his once underestimated book Terror and Progress in the USSR, he wrote: “Industrial expansion (in the USSR) comes almost exclusively from above. By itself, the Soviet economic system does not generate the ruthless energy that made the USSR a first-class industrial power. The communist elite in this respect is a substitute for the adventurous spirit that created the great industrial and financial empires Western world. If a political source industrial expansion will disappear or decrease, there is nothing that could replace it. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich fully agree with this statement of Moore in the preface to a collection of articles on the disintegration of the Soviet economic system. As the leading cause of the steady decline in economic growth in 1958-1982, they put forward an almost continuous decrease in pressure from above. Explaining N. Khrushchev's victory over the so-called anti-party group, V. Molotov said: “Everyone wanted a break, it was easier to live. They are very tired. Let the tension go somewhere." The next most important reason (and I agree with this) Ellman and Kontorovich call the complexity of managing the economy as the number of products, industries and economic ties increases. But there were also opportunities to resist. negative influence this circumstance by changing the organization of industry and improving planning methods.

My analysis shows that the fading of economic growth that began in the late 1950s was not an inevitable consequence of the vices of the command economy as an economic system, but was the result of its gradual dismantling and low-skilled actions of the political and economic leadership during this period. However, the question arises: was not the very degradation of the level of state leadership during this period an inevitable consequence of the vices of the Soviet political system, which did not generate talented leaders, but preferred convenient mediocrities like Khrushchev and Brezhnev to them? Unlike a joint-stock company, where shareholders have the opportunity to change a failed leadership, the shareholders of the "USSR Corporation" - the population of the country or even only members of the CPSU - did not have such an opportunity. They also did not have the opportunity to change the political system itself in the direction of its greater democracy and the creation of a mechanism for monitoring the actions of the leadership. In the period 1985-1989, such an attempt was made on the initiative from above, but it quickly went beyond the socialist choice, and due to the lack of experience in democratic life, the economic decisions made by representative bodies turned out to be no better in quality than those made by the authoritarian political leadership of the USSR. If not worse...

One more circumstance should be noted. The economic development of the USSR (as well as other countries with a command economy) was imitative. It mainly copied both scientific and technical innovations and structural changes in the advanced capitalist countries. There was no (at least in the civilian economy) mechanism for innovative change. Back in the 1970s, Academician A. Mileikovsky was credited with saying that when socialism triumphs throughout the world, it will be necessary to leave at least one capitalist country in order to have someone to adopt modern technology and price levels for establishing them in trade between the socialist countries. At the same time, I am not at all going to argue that there were no innovative solutions of a socio-economic nature in the USSR. There were quite a few of them, but they either had a limited distribution or did not receive support from the political leadership even during the classical period. command system, and especially after moving away from it.

IN THE CONDITIONS OF THE DEEPEST CRISIS of the 1990s in Russia, the choice of a command economy as a tool to overcome the economic crisis seems to be a real prospect with some chances of success. This will require the creation of such prerequisites that are extremely difficult to implement, otherwise this attempt itself will turn into an expensive farce. It should also be borne in mind that the greatest successes of the command economy were achieved at the stage of the industrial economy. They may turn out to be incomparably smaller in an economy where not traditional industries predominate, but more complex, knowledge-intensive ones, such as electronics and others. I also leave out of consideration the question of what price in the field of political freedoms society will pay for a return to an authoritarian socio-economic system.

And finally, the last necessary remark. Inattentive readers of my previous works may conclude that the present article conceptually deviates from some main line of my economic analysis associated with the identification of the general inefficiency of the economy of the USSR. It suffices, however, to compare the present text with the contents of the corresponding passage in the book on the dynamics of economic growth in the USSR in order to be convinced that the characteristics of economic development in the given period coincide in both works.

25. E. Gaidar. State and evolution. SPb., 1997, p. 113.

26. Op. by: D. Gross. Kremlin dead end and Nazarbayev. M., 1993, p. 53.

27. See " Where does it go Russia?" M., 1994, p. 25.

28. See L. M. Kaganovich. Memoirs. M., 1996, pp. 510-521.

29. See G. I. Khanin. The end of a free society? - "Science in Siberia", 1999, No. 1.

30. The statement of V. S. Kortunov is quoted from: A. Belousov. Formation of the Soviet industrial system. - "Russia-XXI", 2001, No. 2, p. 73.

31. Op. in: "The disintegration of the soviet economic system". Edited by M. Ellman and V. Kontorovich. L.-N. Y., 1992, p. 34-35.

32. Ibid., p. ten.

33. “One hundred and forty conversations with Molotov. From the diary of F. Chuev. M., 1991, p. 312.

34. G. I. Khanin. Dynamics of economic development of the USSR, pp. 187-191.