Kosygin’s reforms can be called the apogee of “developed socialism.” Their result was a significant increase in the level of economic development of the country, as well as the standard of living of the population.

Unfortunately, Kosygin’s period at the helm of the Soviet economy was short-lived, and after the “Golden Five-Year Plan” (1966–1970), an era of “stagnation” began.

Huge production

The prerequisite for the reforms was the gigantic industrial base of the Soviet Union. In the mid-60s, the country had more than 300 industries, 47 thousand enterprises and more than 12 thousand construction organizations.

Strict centralized control could not put this whole machine in order. Problems arose at all levels of production - with supplies, with sales of products, and with the distribution of wages. Alexey Nikolaevich Kosygin undertook to improve the Soviet economy.

The essence of the reforms

As the minister's contemporaries noted, Kosygin was a figure who was only interested in economics, so he did not want to get involved in politics. Being a true economist, he understood much better than other government members the importance of profit, profitability, workers’ interest in the results of their labor and other components of the national economy.

The reforms he implemented came into clear conflict with the totalitarian political regime of the country.

1. Enterprises were given significant autonomy. Now they themselves determined what they were going to produce, modernized the production process at their own expense, negotiated with suppliers and consumers, managed profits, set the number of employees on staff and the size of their salaries. For violation of the contract, the company was subject to a monetary fine.
2. Of the 30 previous planned indicators, the reform retained only 9.
3. When assessing the activities of the enterprise, the main attention was paid to profit and profitability. A profitable enterprise could form various funds - material incentives, production development, cultural, etc.
4. Enterprises have become more independent in setting product prices.
5. In agriculture, purchase prices for products were increased, taxes from peasants were reduced, and the price of agricultural equipment and spare parts for it became cheaper.

All these reforms stimulated the production process, which led to unprecedented results. A huge number of large enterprises were built, including an automobile plant in Tolyatti, which began producing the most massive Soviet passenger cars.

Enterprises financed the social development of the country, cultural life, and used their own funds to build comfortable housing for workers. However, Kosygin’s reforms also had their weaknesses, for example, increasing prices. In subsequent years, attempts were made to eliminate these shortcomings.

Why was the further development of reforms stopped?

It would seem that Kosygin’s reforms led to the rapid and comprehensive development of the Soviet state. However, the conservative part of the government, headed by N.V. Podgorny, did everything possible to prevent the reforms from continuing. Kosygin’s activities were called the almost abusive word “voluntarism” and they returned to the tough regime of domestic politics.

The innovative minister had been quietly hated for a long time - since the times of Khrushchev; After the suppression of the “Prague Spring”, the obscurantist rulers found justification for themselves and “with a pure heart” stopped the reforms. The sharp decline in the economy that followed was masked for some time through a new source of income - oil production. However, the country was slowly but surely sliding into the abyss.

One of the reasons for the rapid curtailment of Kosygin’s reforms in the early 1970s was not only the danger of introducing market socialism instead of state socialism, but also the reduction of 30-50% of jobs in the USSR economy. One of the experiments of such “perestroika” was carried out by Ivan Khudenko on a Kazakh state farm. Two years of work with self-financing showed that out of 800 state farm workers, only 80 people were left, including 2 people who could cope with the work of the previous 110 managers. The self-supporting state farm put the fired workers on welfare at 30 rubles a month. At the same time, Khudenko’s labor productivity increased by 3 times, and wages by 2.5 times.

Kosygin’s reforms (in the West they were called “Liberman’s reforms” after the economist and advisor Kosygin) envisaged the introduction of self-financing and self-government of enterprises in the Soviet economy. The Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR drew the main ideas of such “perestroika” from the works of prominent Russian scientists of the 1920s - former Socialist Revolutionaries Chayanov and Kondratiev. During the NEP, from 1921 to 1928, Kosygin worked in consumer cooperation, and the cooperative movement at that time was the domain of the former Socialist Revolutionaries (as the developers of this program, even before the Revolution). For this reason, Kosygin was called “our Socialist Revolutionary” even in the 1970s.

Kosygin was allowed to implement only a small part of his plan, but even this small amount was enough to sharply increase the growth rate of the Soviet economy. The 8th Five-Year Plan (1966-1970) turned out to be the most successful period for the post-war Soviet economy. So, during these years, the average annual GDP growth was 7.7% (about the same as in today's China). For comparison: in the five-year period of 1975-79 this figure was 4.4%.

(Prime Minister Alexey Kosygin is in the center)

The staffing of the work collective is carried out by the collective itself. The main, initial cell is the self-supporting link, which is an integral part of the team of the self-supporting enterprise. The management and management of the farm are elected and report to the team. The management of the enterprise is carried out by a council of managers, current management is carried out by a self-supporting management unit that exists on a statutory (contractual) percentage of income. There is no labor plan or headcount limit.

Using a similar method, the experiment at the Iliysky state farm was carried out from March 1963 until the end of the year. Main results. The work in field cultivation, which 800 people could not cope with before the experiment (500 people were involved in the harvesting from Alma-Ata), was completed by 80 people. The growth in labor productivity is impressive.

The simultaneous release of more than 700 people created an employment problem. Employing 700 people is not easy in a large city, but where to find work in the countryside? No assistance was provided to the experimental farm. The farm was forced to pay the minimum wage that existed at that time - 30 rubles, as unemployment benefits. This gave rise to a social conflict: many, the majority, demanded work, not benefits. But nevertheless, the benefits fell on the economy of the experimental farm.

In Khudenko’s new household, the “office” fit into the room in which he himself lived. But houses for workers in the village of Akshiy were built with five rooms, an area of ​​over 90 square meters, with hot water and electric heating. In Khudenko's system, the visible material foundation of democracy was combined with free labor and prosperity.

At the head of the Experimental Farm there was a coordination unit of two people. The director was Mikhail Li, and the economist-accountant was Ivan Khudenko. All decisions were made collectively, at the farm council, and therefore the management level was the executive body. Managers lived on 10% of the farm's total salary. All overhead expenses of managers, as well as their salaries, were included in this amount. Lee and Khudenko were forced to cut non-productive expenses in order to earn more on payday.

In the state farms of Kazakhstan (as in general in all state and collective farms of the USSR) the administrative and economic apparatus was extremely inflated. On average, there were 110 employees of this apparatus per state farm. Within one month, the state farm needed to draw up 15 thousand different invoices, accounting sheets and other settlement documents containing 1,800 indicators just for accounting and payment of labor.

Khudenko's new system minimized unproductive costs. In the Experimental Farm, the five-year plan for production and delivery to the state, the number of employees and the wage fund, with the volume of capital investments and credit investments was placed on two pages, and the annual accounting report on its implementation was on one page.

The results of work on Khudenko’s experimental farm in 1969 were as follows. The size of the newly created product per employee is 5,140 rubles per year. In ordinary state farms in Kazakhstan - 840 rubles. The annual salary of one employee for Khudenko is 3,000 rubles, in state farms of Kazakhstan - 1,268. The numbers speak for themselves: in the Experimental Farm, labor productivity was ahead of wages, and in state farms, wages were one and a half times higher than the size of the newly created product.

In mid-1970, the experiment was interrupted, and the Experimental Farm for the Production of Vitamin-Herbal Flour was liquidated. The Ministry of Agriculture wrote that if Khudenko’s experiment was extended to the entire republic, then 40-55% of workers on collective and state farms would lose their jobs.

Similar experiments to test the “Kosygin reforms” were carried out in other sectors of the Soviet economy.

Thus, in 1967, an economic experiment was launched at the Shchekino Chemical Plant to test the main provisions of the reform, which became known as the Shchekino experiment.

The essence of the experiment was to introduce elements of cost accounting at the enterprise. The enterprise was assigned a stable wage fund for 1967-1970, and all the savings from this fund, while increasing labor productivity and reducing the number of employees, remained at the disposal of the enterprise staff. Over the two years of the experiment, the number of workers at the plant decreased by 870 people (from 2 thousand), the volume of output increased by 2.7 times, labor productivity by 3.4 times, profitability increased almost 4 times, wage costs per ruble of marketable products decreased from 13.9 to 5 kopecks. In 1976, this experiment was stopped.

A similar experiment was carried out at the Far Eastern Shipping Company. By 1975, 730 people had been released on 140 ships.

These experiments showed that after 10-12 years of Kosygin reforms in the Soviet economy, 30-55% of workers would have been laid off (depending on the industry). In particular, in the early 1970s, Kosygin’s idea of ​​​​replacing stores with supermarkets, which would have freed up to 40% of sales workers, was curtailed.

The leadership of the USSR did not understand what to do with tens of millions of unemployed people. Thus, the elders from the Politburo sacrificed progress, choosing instead stability - which lasted only 10-15 years.

SOVIET ECONOMY: WAYS OUT OF THE CRISIS

The drop in production growth rates associated with low returns on investment, the food crisis of 1962-1964, aggravated by the reformation fever of the last years of N. S. Khrushchev’s reign, led the USSR economy to a pre-crisis state. The discussion in the press, which began in 1962, of the foundations of new economic reforms developed by a group of economists under the leadership of Lieberman was curtailed. Administrative reforms replaced the necessary economic transformations. Under these conditions, technocratic business executives spoke out against Khrushchev’s economic voluntarism, rallying around their leader A. N. Kosygin, who supported the decision of the October 1964 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee on Khrushchev’s resignation.

Since 1965, economic reform began to be carried out, conceived during the Khrushchev period, but then curtailed. The economic reform of 1965 faced the same tasks as the Khrushchev reforms: resolving the crisis phenomena of the Soviet planned economy. First of all, they meant the low return on investment and unfinished construction (long-term construction), low labor productivity that lagged behind wage growth, poor quality of goods and their insufficient range, and the problem of labor resources. However, unlike Khrushchev's reforms, the reforms conceived by the new leadership were not supposed to affect the political foundations of society, without the extremes of the previous decade. The basic principles of the Soviet socialist economy were not questioned: state control over property, centralized planning, control over production indicators, etc. The core of the new political course and economic reform of 1965 was the idea of ​​long-term and gradual improvement of socialism and a course towards the stability of management structures. Radical economic reforms did not affect the social and political system of society and did not call into question the mechanism of party leadership.

The beginning of economic transformations was laid by reforms in agriculture - the most crisis area of ​​the Soviet economy. At the March plenum of the CPSU Central Committee in 1965, L. I. Brezhnev acted as a champion of reforms in agriculture. He proposed increasing investment in agriculture while stimulating labor productivity. In fact, this was an attempt to intensify agriculture. The agricultural sector of the Soviet economy was supposed to receive additional machinery, fertilizers and electricity. The total amount of capital investment in agriculture in 1966-1980. compiled. 383 billion rubles, which was more than three times more than all previous investments in the agricultural sector. A new long-term production planning system was adopted. Debts were written off from state and collective farms, purchase prices were increased, and premiums of up to 50% were established for excess sales of products to the state, as well as for their quality. For 1965-1977 purchase prices for agricultural products increased by approximately one and a half times, with almost no change in retail prices. Since 1965, the system of lending to collective farms changed, receiving the opportunity for direct bank lending, in contrast to the previous system of loans through procurement organizations.

The income tax on collective farms was also lowered, now levied on net income.

In the 60-70s. Large-scale programs of reclamation and construction of irrigation canals were proclaimed. stabilization of the exploitation of virgin lands and a special plan for the revival of non-chernozem lands in the center of Russia. The Bolshoi Stavropol, North Crimean, Karakum and other canals were put into operation. In order to increase the living standards of peasants, collective and state farms received greater economic independence, where elements of self-financing were introduced.

In 1969, 35 years after the previous congress, the Third Congress of Collective Farmers took place. A new standard charter was approved, which abolished the old system of payment by workdays and introduced a guaranteed monthly payment, while the monetary part of income increased in relation to payment in kind. The charter established the pension provision of collective farmers and the vacation system. Living standards of the rural population in the 70s. grew significantly, although it was not possible to eliminate the difference between the city and the village; up to 700 thousand people left the village every year. New programs that relied on increased capital investment came into conflict with the previous course of intensive development. By the mid-70s. economic transformations in agriculture became increasingly subsidized and extensive.

In parallel with the transformations in agriculture, industrial reform developed. An active role in its development and implementation was played by A. N. Kosygin, who became Chairman of the Council of Ministers on October 15, 1964. The transformation began with the September 1965 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee. The decisions of the plenum determined three main directions of the reform: changing targets and reporting, expanding the economic independence of enterprises and strengthening the material interest of workers in the results of their labor.

The number of planned indicators for enterprises was reduced from 30 to 9. In addition to the gross indicator (i.e., the cost of manufactured products), which previously determined production efficiency, a reporting indicator of the cost of products sold was introduced. The company was now interested not only in producing, but also in selling products. In this case, the profitability indicator of the enterprise was calculated as the ratio of profit to the amount of fixed assets and working capital. It was declared inadmissible to change the plan without agreement with the enterprise; in turn, the enterprise itself could independently distribute production within the framework of a given plan. Thus, the enterprise received relative production independence in matters of internal production planning. In order to materially stimulate production, part of the enterprise's profit remained at its disposal. Incentive funds were created at enterprises, which were used for the needs of enterprise development, material incentives for employees, social and cultural events, housing construction, etc. An increase in bonuses was provided in case of planned overfulfillment of the plan.

In 1966, the transition of industrial enterprises to new working conditions began. By the end of 1970, out of 49 thousand enterprises, the reform affected 41 thousand enterprises to one degree or another. Meanwhile, already at the very beginning of the reforms, there was a cooling towards them on the part of the party elite. At the 23rd Congress of the CPSU, held in April 1966, the progress of economic transformations was only briefly touched upon in Brezhnev’s report. A certain opposition to the reforms also came from the ministries, which did not want to give up control over enterprises even within the framework provided for by the reforms. At the same time, despite the greater independence of enterprises, the number of ministries in the late 60s - 70s. increased steadily. In the mechanical engineering industry alone, in 1965, 8 additional all-Union departments were created, and by the end of 1975 there were already 35 industrial ministries. On July 10, 1967, the “General Regulations on the Ministries of the USSR” was adopted, expanding the rights of the central authorities.

Many positive reforms, with the formal approach of ministries, became an obstacle to the development of production. An example is the introduction of a fixed payment for the production assets used, which was not revised depending on the size of profit. This measure was supposed to encourage enterprises to use their equipment more efficiently, reducing production costs. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance required payment for all available (used and unused) equipment at the time of the last audit. If an enterprise got rid of unnecessary equipment, it still paid for it until the next audit. As a result, for 1965-1985. the share of equipment replaced due to technological backwardness and wear and tear has almost halved. Serious shortcomings also lay in the rate of profit imposed from above. Ministries and enterprises continued to determine the prices of their products themselves, artificially inflating them. Only in mechanical engineering for 1966-1970. wholesale prices increased by 25-30%. The effectiveness of the State Price Committee, formed in 1965, to combat this phenomenon, turned out to be low. Another committee created at the same time (Gossnab) prescriptively determined suppliers and consumers for enterprises, narrowing the scope of their independence.

The main reason for the constant disruptions in the economy remained “departmentalism.” There was practically no serious direct connection between neighboring enterprises and organizations if they belonged to different ministries. Thus, the expansion of the allowed independence of enterprises did not combine well with the strengthening of the administrative and economic powers of departments. The lack of room to move forward made itself felt more and more. The unresolved problems that had accumulated by the end of the Eighth Five-Year Plan created serious blockages and obstacles to the introduction of new methods of planning and management, which led to a crisis situation in the leading sectors of the national economy and a gradual curtailment of reforms. Although the first two years of economic reform produced significant results, its effectiveness subsequently decreased. The reform affected, first of all, enterprises, without affecting the top of the economic pyramid: ministries, centralization of management and the administrative command apparatus. The rights of enterprises were gradually limited, the number of planned indicators increased, and adjustments to plans became more frequent. The reform faded.

I.S. Ratkovsky, M.V. Khodyakov. History of Soviet Russia

“PLAN, PROFIT, BONUS”

How to ensure maximum operating efficiency of enterprises, in which production growth would be accompanied by constant improvement of product quality? Economists have been dealing with this problem for a long time, but since the early 60s. their speeches have already acquired the character of a focused discussion. The subject of the dispute was the proposals of the Kharkov economist E.G. Liberman, made on the basis of an analysis of the experience of the Economic Laboratory of the Kharkov Economic Council and published in 1962 in the journal “Economy Issues”, and then in “Pravda” (article “Plan, Profit, Prize”). In a generalized version, these proposals boiled down to the following:

1. The modern procedure for planning the work of enterprises does not interest them in effective, high-quality work. One of the reasons for this situation is the limitation of economic independence and initiative of enterprises.

2. The task of expanding the initiative and independence of enterprises can be solved based on the use of the principle of “share participation in income”: the more values ​​​​the enterprise has created for society, the greater the amount should be contributed to its incentive fund, regardless of whether these values ​​​​were produced within the framework of the plan or beyond it.

3. The principle of “equity participation” is implemented in the form of a long-term planned standard for production profitability. The formation of standards occurs differentially in various industries and groups of enterprises located in approximately the same natural and technical conditions.

4. The use of long-term standards will make it possible to evaluate the work of enterprises by final efficiency, and not by a large number of indicators that regulate in detail the economic life of enterprises.

5. It’s not about the indicators, but about the system of relationships between the enterprise and the national economy. Significant adjustments are needed in the way production is planned from top to bottom.

6. Strengthen and improve central planning by bringing mandatory tasks only to the economic councils. Eliminate the practice of allocating tasks by economic councils between enterprises “according to the achieved level.”

7. Enterprise plans, after coordination and approval of the volume-nomenclature program, are completely drawn up by the enterprises themselves.

8. It is necessary to develop a procedure for using unified incentive funds from enterprise profits, bearing in mind the expansion of the rights of enterprises to spend funds for the needs of collective and personal incentives.

E. Lieberman's ideas represented an attempt to create a concept of “end-to-end” improvement of the economic mechanism from top to bottom - from the reorganization of central planning to the development of the economic foundations for the development of industrial self-government (the principle of “equity participation”).

The idea of ​​“end-to-end” economic reform was then developed by a number of economists. In one of the most developed versions, it was represented by B.C. Nemchinov. In his works, the idea of ​​​​translating the economy to the scientific basis of management was carried out in proposals for the construction of planned models of the national economy (models of expanded reproduction, models of sectoral and territorial social division of labor, models of planned pricing, etc.), with the help of which it would be possible to calculate various balances and optima, including the determination of the optimal mode of economic development for a given period.

The discussion quietly focused on one problem - the problem of material incentives (attracting public attention to this issue was recognized as virtually the only merit of Lieberman's speech). At its meeting, the Scientific Council on Economic Accounting and Material Stimulation of Production at the USSR Academy of Sciences recognized the “scheme of E.G. Lieberman" is in principle unacceptable, since its author, "violating the measure and necessary proportions, brings a number of correct provisions to such an interpretation that, instead of benefit, promises negative consequences."

To be fair, it should be noted that there was also a rational grain in the criticism, for example, when it came to the inadmissibility of absolutizing one or another indicator of accounting and evaluating the work of enterprises. However, the main point of the charges brought against Lieberman was different: he was reproached with nothing more and no less than an attack on the basis of the foundations of the socialist economy - centralized state planning.

WORKERS' REACTION

Enterprises in the city and region received newspapers late – at 3-4 pm. From conversations with workers who managed to familiarize themselves with the report, we can conclude that there was unanimous approval of the proposals made in the report of Comrade. Kosygina A.N.

Here are some statements.

Orlov, head of the labor and wages department of a telephone plant: It is very good that the economics of the enterprise are based on a scientific basis, and not slogans about the need to improve the economy. We will not have productivity targets set from above - but labor productivity will be the main issue in all our work.

Petukhov, operator of the charging machine of the open-hearth shop of the Chusovsky Metallurgical Plant: Previously, we were called upon to work profitably, but all this was just an appeal. No matter how hard I worked, I did not feel this profit. Now, apparently, it will be a different matter. Each of us can feel what profit is.

Information from the Perm Regional Committee of the CPSU in the CPSU Central Committee on the responses of the region's workers to the report of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Kosygin at the September (1965) Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee “On improving industrial management, improving planning and strengthening economic incentives for industrial production,” September 28 1965

The search for a new economic model was carried out by Soviet economists (L. Kantorovich, V. Nemchinov, V. Novozhilov) already from the late 1950s. The essence of the intention was to make the rigid system of unified state planning more flexible by including elements of market stimulation. The main objectives were to increase the material interest of producers in the results of their work and to change the principle of assessing work efficiency.

In 1962, a debate unfolded on the pages of the Soviet press over an article by economist E. Lieberman, which had a very characteristic title - “Plan, profit, bonus.” A professor from Kharkov proposed drawing up plans directly at enterprises within the framework of an agreed program, expanding the rights of enterprises to materially reward their employees, and linking bonus payments to production profitability. During the ensuing discussion, statements in favor of economic reform, profit as the leading economic indicator, the rejection of gross assessments, overcoming the “storming” and other negative phenomena of the Soviet economy prevailed. In the spring of 1965, Nemchinov’s article was published, in which the author proposed introducing a “self-supporting planning system.” In his opinion, the plan should have become not so much a task as a state order.

N.S. Khrushchev could, but never decided on a full-scale reform, the implementation of which began only in the mid-1960s.

In October 1964, N. Khrushchev was dismissed from all posts for health reasons. Khrushchev's successor as First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee was L.I. Brezhnev. The October Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee in 1964 decided to divide the highest party and government positions previously occupied by Khrushchev, and the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was taken by A.N. Kosygin.

A. Kosygin was tasked by the top party leadership with carrying out broad reforms in the economy, which would later be called the “Kosygin reform.”

The main goal of the reform was to increase the efficiency of the national economy, increase its growth rate and, on this basis, improve the living standards of the population.

The main principles of the reform were to provide greater autonomy to individual enterprises; transfer of enterprises to self-financing; assessing the work of enterprises not by the volume of gross output, but by realized and received profits; creation of economic incentive funds from part of the profit (10-12% of total profit); introduction of elements of wholesale trade between manufacturers, bypassing intermediaries, i.e. government agencies, accustomed to planning and distributing everything according to “limits”; increasing the role of profit in assessing the economic efficiency of their activities.

The fixed assets of the enterprise remained in state ownership, and enterprises had to pay rent to the state for them. Enterprises had to buy fuel, energy and raw materials. This was supposed to encourage directors to save resources and raw materials. It was assumed that enterprises would be freed from the petty tutelage of governing bodies; only the most general development parameters would be handed down to them from above. Mandatory targets were reduced from 30 to 9.

Thus, the enterprise received the right to conduct its business activities relatively independently and dispose of part of the profit received.

The profit received by the enterprise was divided into three funds: the production development fund, the material incentive fund and the socio-cultural and everyday development fund. Workers and employees very quickly felt that fulfilling the plan had a significant impact on the receipt of cash bonuses. A typical phenomenon for that period of time was the year-end bonus or the so-called “13th salary.” A serious incentive for workers in the context of a housing shortage in cities was the quick acquisition of apartments at enterprises that exceeded their target.

In addition, sectoral management through ministries was restored in industry (the national economic councils introduced by N. Khrushchev in 1957 were abolished), but the main link in production, as conceived by the reformers, was to become a self-supporting enterprise (independent, self-supporting, self-financing).

In 1966, 243 highly profitable enterprises switched to self-financing, the next - 7 thousand, and together they produced about 40% of the country's industrial output. At the end of the 1960s. The overwhelming number of industrial enterprises have already switched to new conditions of financial and economic activity.

The transformations also affected agriculture. In March 1965, the plenum of the Central Committee raised the problem of reforming the agricultural sector. For collective and state farms, the planned indicators were reduced. Purchasing prices increased by 1.5-2 times, and above-plan deliveries had to be carried out at increased prices. In particular, a 50% premium was introduced to the base price for above-plan sales of agricultural products to the state. In addition, debts were written off from collective and state farms, and prices for equipment and spare parts were reduced. In order to increase the material interest of collective farmers, the workday was replaced by monthly guaranteed payment in money and products according to the standards in force on state farms. In general, through economic measures it was envisaged to change the proportions of the distribution of national income in favor of agriculture.

State policy also changed in relation to personal subsidiary plots (LPH). From the restrictive period of Khrushchev it became permissive; private household plots began to be considered an important channel for the flow of agricultural products into public consumption.

As a result, already in 1966, the income of collective and state farms increased by 15%. The volume of agricultural production during the Eighth Five-Year Plan increased by 21% (in the previous five-year period this figure was 12%). For 1966-1970 the state purchased almost a third more grain than in the previous five years.

The agricultural technical park has increased. Thus, the number of tractors by 1970 increased from 1,613 thousand units (1965) to 1,997 thousand units, grain harvesters - from 520 thousand to 623 thousand units, trucks - from 945 thousand to 1,136 thousand pieces

As a result of economic transformations, it was possible to improve all the most important national economic indicators. During the years of the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966-1970), the volume of industrial production increased by one and a half times. About 1,900 large enterprises were commissioned. In general, the volume of national income by the end of the 1960s. increased by 41%, and labor productivity - by 37%. The effect of the reform in the first years of its implementation exceeded all expectations. The Eighth Five-Year Plan was called “golden” due to the fulfillment and overfulfillment of planned indicators.

However, during the “Kosygin reform”, as well as during the NEP years, the economic transformations that began were met with dull dissatisfaction from the bureaucracy that had grown after the end of Stalin’s repressions. As an example, we can cite the experiment that began in 1967 at the Shchekino Chemical Plant: it was allowed to lay off excess personnel, and distribute part of the wages of those laid off among those who remained. As a result, the number of workers at the plant decreased from 6 to 5 thousand people over two years, and product output, on the contrary, increased by 80%. The so-called “Zlobin method” in construction, named after foreman N.A., also became famous. Zlobina from Zelenograd, near Moscow: a team of builders contracted for the entire cycle of work, which she undertook to complete on time and with high quality. At the same time, the team members themselves determined the volume of daily output, the distribution of responsibilities and the amount of wages. As a result, the number of workers was reduced, labor productivity increased, and construction time was reduced. It would seem that all the advantages were obvious.

However, the progressive experience of the Shchekinsky chemical plant and N. Zlobin’s brigade was not widely used, since, according to party functionaries, the introduction of similar practices at other enterprises could lead to unemployment, which was unacceptable within the framework of the concept of “developed” socialism and the further construction of communism. The question also arose about the payment of administrative and management personnel, which was very difficult to reduce. As a result, things did not go further than experiments.

The indicators of the Eighth Five-Year Plan confirm that the reform intensified labor activity, but at the same time, in the opinion of many business executives, the revival of labor activity was then determined by a kind of “interregnum”: there were no economic councils, and the ministries had not yet gained strength and power.

Modern economists believe that in the conditions of a one-party system and a centrally planned economy, even the effective indicators of the Kosygin reform could not outweigh the contradictions that arose as a result of its implementation, which were expressed in the impossibility of a long-term combination of market and directive management levers in the USSR.

In their opinion, the reform was initially doomed to failure, and this was facilitated by a whole range of reasons:

– inconsistency and half-heartedness in the very concept of the reform. The admission of market principles into a strictly centralized planned economy, as world and domestic experience shows, gives only a short-term effect, and then the dominance of administrative principles and the suppression of economic principles occurs again. Already in 1971, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a resolution “On some measures to improve planning and economic stimulation of industrial production.” The state again began to set targets for labor productivity, whereas in the second half of the 1960s. no such rule was in effect;

– the non-comprehensive nature of the reform. Changes in the national economy were conceived, first of all, as a sum of organizational and technical measures not directly related to changes in social institutions on which the previous economic mechanism relied. There was no talk of any democratization of production relations, changes in forms of ownership or restructuring of the political system;

– poor personnel training and provision of reform. The inertia of thinking of leading economic personnel, the pressure on them of previous stereotypes, the lack of creative courage and initiative among the direct implementers of the reforms determined the half-heartedness of the reform plan and ultimately doomed it to failure;

- opposition to the reform on the part of the party apparatus and its leaders (L.I. Brezhnev, N.V. Podgorny, Yu.V. Andropov), who were afraid that the economy could get out of party control, and the reform would call into question the essence of socialism building. In the process of confrontation between reformist and conservative forces, the latter received support from the head of the CPSU L. Brezhnev. According to V.A. Kryuchkov, former head of the KGB and close associate of Yu.V. Andropov, fundamental differences also divided between Kosygin and Andropov. Andropov feared that the pace of reform proposed by Kosygin could lead not only to dangerous consequences, but also to the erosion of the Soviet socio-political system.

The reform also had negative side effects. Firstly, those enterprises for which prices were high (instrument making, defense industry) flourished, while the coal and food industries obviously became unprofitable. The second side effect of the reform was the desire of enterprises not to invest in production development, but to spend profits on increasing wages. At the same time, enterprises continued to receive government assistance and use centralized supplies.

Another reason for the curtailment of the reform was the entrenched tactics of private amendments. The old methods of petty control and guardianship of economic structures and the intervention of party and Soviet bodies in the daily life of enterprises began to return to practice.

British historian Geoffrey Hosking names his reasons for the collapse of Kosygin's reform: firstly, in order to fully take advantage of the opportunities that it opened up, enterprises had to set the price for their products themselves, but they did not receive precisely this right; secondly, for the successful implementation of the reform it was necessary to introduce new technologies into production, but in an economy where success is measured by the annual fulfillment of planned indicators, this was generally difficult to achieve.

The external reason for the actual refusal to continue economic reform was the political crises of 1968 in Czechoslovakia and a number of other countries of the socialist camp, where, against the backdrop of market reforms, a real threat to the very existence of the socialist system arose. In 1969, the “Kosygin reform” was actually put on hold. At the December plenum of the Central Committee, decisions were made in which the usual “clip” of administrative management methods was recorded: calls for the rational use of production resources, a more stringent economy regime in the national economy, strengthening labor and government discipline, etc. Although no one formally canceled the reform.

As in the late 1920s. Despite the undoubted successes of the NEP, the party leadership, in order to maintain its monopoly on all spheres of life of Soviet society, refused to introduce elements of the market, since independent subjects of economic relations showed that the paternal tutelage of the party does not help, but only hinders their further development.

Thus, the “Kosygin reform” was unable to reverse the unfavorable trends in the country’s economic development, and the efforts of the party apparatus brought it to naught. The 1965 reform ultimately showed the limitations of socialist reformism. The final nail in the reform was driven by the golden rain of “petrodollars” that rained down on our country in the 1970s, and the aging Soviet party nomenklatura, in such favorable conditions, abandoned further attempts to rebuild the Soviet economic system.

about five years and allowed us to enter the 1970s in a state of personnel stability. In economic policy, Brezhnev considered agriculture, heavy industry and the military-industrial complex to be priorities.

Kosygin reform

Back in the late 1950s, economists L. Kantorovich, V. Nemchinov, V. Novozhilov and others tried to find a model of optimal planning. In 1962, an article in Pravda by the economist Lieberman opened a debate about the role of profit in a socialist economy. Its essence was that profit was to become one of the most important criteria for the operation of enterprises. Various opinions were expressed about the need to transition to economic methods of management and revitalize commodity-money relations. In the spring of 1965, Nemchinov’s article was published, in which the author proposed introducing a “self-accounting planning system.” The idea was to formulate a plan from the bottom up

From enterprise to ministry. Essentially, the plan was to become not so much a task as a government order , and the development of the social sphere of the enterprise depended on its implementation. These radical views at the time, however, made the process of forming a plan much more labor-intensive and requiring significantly higher qualifications of ministerial officials.

The results of the discussion were summed up in September 1965 at the plenum of the Central Committee. Reform tendencies within the “collective leadership” were associated with the name of Kosygin. It was he who spoke at the plenum with a report “On improving industrial management, improving planning and strengthening economic incentives for industrial production.”

Kosygin was a representative of the technocratic reformers who emerged in the 1930s. In 1939, at the age of 35, he became People's Commissar of the Textile Industry, and in 1940-1960. with short breaks, he was the first deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars - the Council of Ministers of the USSR. He headed the State Planning Committee of the USSR, and after the resignation of Khrushchev he became Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In his views, Kosygin was an adherent of the course of liberalization of economic relations within the framework of a planned economy, which before him in different years they tried to implement Voznesensky and Malenkov. Kosygin witnessed the collapse of his ideological predecessors and, of course, never openly declared his sympathies and was extremely careful in pursuing his economic line. He considered the development of light industry a priority, which formed the basis for the stability of the social situation in cities in the context of the rapidly developing process of urbanization.

Kosygin's report proposed abandoning the system of economic councils. The sectoral principle of industrial management was restored in order to achieve “a combination of centralization of management with the expansion of operational and economic independence of enterprises.” Thus, the expansion of the scope of "grassroots planning" had to be combined with planning from the center. It was assumed that the ministries would, on a scientific basis, determine the industry development strategy and the main “directions, proportions and rates of economic development.” This provision was followed by an important practical decision: the number of mandatory planned indicators was reduced to 9 instead of 30 in previous years. Instead of the volume of gross output, the main indicator of the work of enterprises and industries became volume of products sold, which, according to Kosygin, was supposed to make production directly dependent on the consumer. It was planned to revive production by integrating into the planned and directive economy such economic levers as price, profit, credit, and bonuses.

Economic incentives were supposed to gradually strengthen self-financing: the implementation of the plan and the efficient use of production assets at enterprises made it possible to deduct more funds from profits into incentive funds. These funds, in turn, became a source for the development of production and improvement of technology, material incentives for workers and employees, for which bonuses and the “13th salary” were provided at the end of the year. From the incentive funds, the enterprise could spend money on improving working and living conditions, in particular, on housing construction.

Even with the ideal implementation of the program declared by Kosygin, we were talking about half measures, which for that time, undoubtedly, looked extremely progressive. The half-hearted nature of economic initiatives initially laid the contradictions at the heart of the reform. The peculiarity of the situation was combination of ideological control with ideas of economic reform, the core of which was technocratic values. This eclectic combination was the result of compromises at the top and predetermined the mutual adaptation of these trends in the future, becoming an obstacle to a radical solution to all the main problems of internal development.

Both by nature and due to the objective development of the situation, Kosygin was inclined to adapt and never rigidly insisted on his views. At the same time, he quite consistently pursued a personnel policy, significantly contributed to the formation of a new layer of economic managers, the distinctive features of which were a good knowledge of production, truly state-level economic thinking, the ability to understand administrative and bureaucratic intricacies and lobby the interests of their industries or giant enterprises . However, these business executives did not imagine themselves outside the Soviet economic system, although they distanced themselves from ideological issues, leaving them to be resolved by specialists.

Reasons for the failure of economic reforms

The “Kosygin reform” began to be implemented in the fall of 1965. Instead of economic councils, 29 union and union-republican ministries were created. This measure returned real economic power to the allied bureaucracy, which became a reliable support for the regime. Their union was further strengthened in 1967, when the Council of Ministers approved the “General Provisions on the Ministries of the USSR”, according to which administrative and economic powers of departments were significantly increased. This situation objectively strengthened the contradiction inherent in the reform between the independence of enterprises and the policies of central departments. In conditions where newly appointed officials had to prove themselves, the desired and already fragile balance was inevitably upset in favor of the Center. In addition, large state committees were created to coordinate areas of work at the interdepartmental level - Goskomtsen, Gossnab, State Committee on Science and Technology. The creation of Gossnab led to the previous practice when an enterprise could not freely choose the supplier and consumer of its products, which also significantly limited the declared independence of enterprises.

In the first half of 1966, 243 highly profitable enterprises, mainly in the light and food industries, were transferred to the new management system. Gradual activation of economic mechanisms during the Eighth Five-Year Plan

(1965-1970) gave a positive effect: the decline in the rate of industrial production stopped for some time, and the five-year plan as a whole became one of the most successful during the years of Soviet power . During this period, the horizontal economic ties established by the economic councils were still alive. Along with this, there were also

positive aspects of vertical management, expressed primarily in centralized investments and imports of Western equipment and technologies. The most famous example of such a policy is the construction of the Volzhsky Automobile Plant in the late 1960s - early 1970s under a joint agreement with the Italian company Fiat.

However, this was only a temporary effect. The main obstacle in the first year of the reform was the outdated pricing system, in which the coal industry, as well as food production, were obviously unprofitable. Prices in instrument making and military-industrial complex industries were clearly inflated, where profits reached up to 50%. However, the pricing system, strictly coordinated through the State Committee for Prices, reflected an ideological understanding of priorities in the development of industrial sectors, which generally did not violate the sequence adopted since Stalin times: heavy industry - military-industrial complex - other industries. Therefore, Group B enterprises were doomed to remain “stepchildren” of the Soviet economy. Another side of administrative pricing was the increase in wholesale prices, which only in mechanical engineering in 1966-1970. increased by a third. Thanks to artificially inflated wholesale prices, enterprises and entire industries fulfilled the plan based on the rate of profit, which was calculated in rubles and was one of the nine mandatory indicators of state reporting. The independence of enterprises in practice led to the fact that they planned targets were lowered in advance. As a result wages grew faster than labor productivity, which increased the budget deficit.

Ideological attitudes, departmental interests and administrative and bureaucratic decisions had a decisive and extremely negative impact on all nine basic indicators without exception.

The bet on stimulating enterprises through incentive funds has not justified itself either. Bonuses for workers occurred in isolation from the real personal contribution to the production process and were not particularly significant in material terms. The construction of housing and other “social and cultural” facilities (kindergartens, dispensaries, medical units, clubs, etc.), even with the availability of funds, was often limited by a shortage of building materials, which the management had to “knock out” in Moscow using personal connections. Funds for technical re-equipment were spent poorly.

Enterprise managers were absolutely not interested in the mass introduction of scientific and technological achievements , since it was hectic throughout the entire production cycle and was limited by the lack of materials, in other words, “it was not planned or sanctioned from above.” Therefore, the declared norm“the connection between science and production” became weak.

Despite the sharp increase in investment in agriculture, the actions of the new leadership in the agricultural sector also led to only temporary and partial success. It was not possible to achieve complete food independence of the country from imports, although for some time it weakened somewhat. In 1966, virtually no purchases of bread were made abroad, and in 1967 they were significantly below the average level. At the same time, no real “breakthrough” has occurred in this area. There were not a large number of people willing to work on private farms. Hunters did not have to return to hard physical labor. Material stimulation of the collective farm economy initially took the wrong path, since monetary rewards were not related to agricultural productivity. The introduction in the second half of 1966 had extremely negative long-term consequences for social relations in the collective farm sector. guaranteed wages for collective farmers, which was calculated on the basis of the tariff rates of state farm workers. Thus, the tenuous connection between performance and compensation was completely eliminated. Salary

collective farmers quickly transformed into a social benefit. Agriculture as a whole acquired a subsidized character.

Conservation of Economics and Management

The final rejection of the “Kosygin reform” took place in December 1969 at the plenum of the Central Committee. The decisions of the plenum recorded the usual “clip” of administrative methods of management: calls for the rational use of production resources, a stricter economy regime in the national economy, strengthening labor and government discipline and so on. In the 1970s, a clear vertical management of the economy was built, which included the Council of Ministers and the State Planning Committee

USSR, Union and Union-Republican ministries, industrial associations and enterprises. The entire system begins to function on the basis of exclusively administrative methods, reproducing the same cycle of decisions year after year, despite changes in the global economy and trying not to notice signs of stagnation.

The economic levers of managing the national economy, even in their half-hearted implementation, were finished. The reason for this was a number of factors, but the main one, apparently, was the shock of the political leadership of the USSR, experienced in connection with the “Prague spring of 1968.” The Czechoslovak crisis more clearly outlined the relationship between economic reforms and inevitable political changes in the Soviet-style system. In addition, a number of foreign policy events played an important role, strengthening the confidence of the Soviet leadership in the growing military threat from the United States. All this led in the early 1970s to the strengthening of conservative tendencies, which was quite consistent with the views of Brezhnev, who became the undisputed leader in the Soviet political Olympus.

The potential of the “Kosygin reform” is dissolved in various kinds of long-term experiments, which were based on a more or less expanded model of cost accounting. The most famous were the Shchekino experiment conducted in the late 1960s and the so-called “Zlobin method” in construction, which developed the same ideas a little later. The essence of the experiment at the Azot plant in the city of Shchekino, Tula region, was that the enterprise team achieved a significant increase in production without increasing the number of employees through the mechanization of labor-intensive workshops and manual labor. The same idea was at the basis of the “Zlobin method,” named after the construction foreman N.A. Zlobin from Zelenograd near Moscow: a team of construction workers contracted for the entire cycle of work, which it was obliged to complete on time and with high quality. At the same time, the team members themselves determined the volume of daily output, the distribution of responsibilities and the amount of wages. As a result, the number of workers and staff turnover were reduced, labor time and materials were used more efficiently, labor productivity increased, and construction time was reduced. It would seem that all the advantages were obvious. A noisy propaganda campaign was launched around the Shchekino experiment and the “Zlobin method”, special resolutions were adopted, and attempts were made to introduce the new “initiative” on a mass scale. Moreover, at some enterprises, best practices were successfully implemented: wages actually increased, and labor turnover decreased. However, progressive experience has not become widespread. He faced several major obstacles. First of all, the question arose about the payment of administrative and managerial personnel, if not at the brigade level, then at the enterprise level, which was very difficult to reduce. In addition, it is not known what to do with the workers freed as a result of intensification. Enterprise managers were afraid to take decisive steps because they were not sure that