Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The empire’s eastern peoples experienced a new, communist civilizing mission, which proclaimed the greatest good for backward peoples to be working-class liberation, national culture, and rapid economic development under state control. Colonization reappeared as well when, in the 1950s and 1960s, millions of settlers from European areas moved into Siberia and regions of Central Asia to cultivate, in enormous state-run farms, most of the remaining lands of the nomadic peoples. Colonialism within the lands of the former Russian Empire did not disappear until the Soviet Union in its turn collapsed in 1991. See also: CATHERINE II; CAUCASUS; CHRISTIANITY, COLONIAL EXPANSION; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF THE;

  COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY

  NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brower, Daniel. (2003). Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. London: Routledge/Curzon. Brower, Daniel, and Lazzerini, Edward, eds. (1997). Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Jersild, Austin. (2002). Orientalism and Empire: The North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloom-ington: University of Indiana Press. Layton, Susan. (1994). Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press.

  DANIEL BROWER

  COMINFORM See COMMUNIST INFORMATION BUREAU. COMINTERN See COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL.

  COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY

  The term command administrative economy, or often administrative command economic system, was adopted in the late 1980s as a descriptive category for the Soviet type of economic system. Throughout its history, the Soviet Union had a mobilization economy, focused on rapid industrial expansion and growth and the development of economic and military power, under the direction of the Communist Party and its leadership. This command administrative economy evolved from the experiences of earlier Soviet attempts to develop a viable socialist alternative to the capitalist market system that prevailed in the developed Western world. Thus it was built on the lessons of the non-monetized pure “command economy” of Leninist War Communism (1918-1921), Lenin’s experiment with markets under the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-1927), Josef Stalin’s “great Socialist Offensive” (1928-1941), war mobilization (1941-1945) and recovery (1946-1955), and the Khrushchevian experiment with regional decentralization of economic planning and administration (1957-1962). This economic system reached its maturity in the period of Brezhnev’s rule (1965-1982), following the rollback of the Kosy-gin reforms of 1967-1972. It provides a concise summary of the nature of the economic system of “Developed Socialism” under Brezhnev, against which the radical economic reforms of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev were directed.

  The concept of the command administrative economy is an elaboration of the analysis of the command economy, introduced to the study of the Soviet Union by Gregory Grossman in his seminal (1963) article, “Notes for a Theory of the Command Economy.” The term became common in the economic reform debates of the late Soviet period, even in the Soviet Union itself, particularly after its use by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the reform Party Plenums of January and June 1987, in his critique of the functioning of the Soviet economic system. The term highlights the fact that in such an economic system, most economic activity involves the administrative elaboration and implementation of commands from superior authorities in an administrative hierarchy, with unauthorized initiative subject to punishment.

  The defining feature of such an economic system is the subordination of virtually all economic activity to state authority. That authority was represented in the Soviet Union by the sole legitimate political body, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which necessarily then assumed a leading, indeed determining, role in all legitimate economic activity. This authority was realized through a vast administrative hierarchy responsible for turning the general objectives and wishes of the Party and its leadership into operational plans and detailed implementing instructions, and then overseeing and enforcing their implementation to the extent possible. This involved centralized planning that produced five-year developmental framework plans and one-year operational directive plans containing detailed commands mandatory for implementation

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  COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY

  by all subordinate organizations. These plans were elaborated in increasing detail as they were allocated down the hierarchy, eventually becoming direct specific commands to individual firms, farms, stores, and other economic organizations.

  The task of directive-based centralized planning in this system was made feasible by aggregation at higher levels and by the delegation of elaboration of details of the plan to subordinate levels in the administrative hierarchy. Thus administrative organs at each level of the hierarchy (central, republic, regional, local, and operational [e.g., firm, farm, etc.]) were responsible for planning, supervision, and enforcement, and engaged in active bargaining with other levels in the hierarchy to develop an agreed plan of activity that in general met the needs and desires of the highest authorities. The result of this administrative process bore the force of law and was not subject to legitimate alteration or deviation by subordinate units, although higher authorities did have the power to alter or reallocate the assignments of their subordinates.

  To work properly, this system of administratively enforced implementation of commands requires limiting the discretion and alternatives available to subordinates. Thus the system, within the areas of activity directly controlled by the state, was essentially demonetized. Although money was used as a unit of account and measure of activity, it ceased to be a legitimate bearer of options in the state sectors; it failed to possess that fundamental and defining characteristic of “moneyness”-a universal command over goods and services. Rather it played a passive role of aggregating and measuring the flow of economic activity, while plans and their subsequent allocation documents determined the ability to acquire goods and services within the state sector. Similarly, prices in the command administrative economy failed to reflect marginal valuations, but rather became aggregation weights for the planning and enforcement of the production and distribution of heterogeneous products in a given planned category of activity. Thus in the logic of the command administrative economy, money and prices become mere accounting tools, allowing the administrative hierarchy to monitor, verify, and enforce commanded performance.

  The command administrative system in the Soviet Union controlled the overwhelming share of all productive activity. But the experience of war communism, and the repeated attempts to mobilize and inspire workers and intellectuals to work toward the objectives of the Soviet Party and State, showed that the detailed planning and administration of commands were rather ineffective in dealing with the consumption, career, and work-choice decisions of individuals and households. The variety and variability of needs and desires proved too vast to be effectively managed by directive central planning and administrative enforcement, except in extreme (wartime) circumstances. Thus money was used to provide individual incentives and rewards, realizable through markets for consumer goods and services and the choice of job and profession, subject to qualification constraints. But prices and wages were still extensively controlled, and the cash money allowed in these markets was strictly segmented from, and nonconvertible with, the accounting funds used for measuring transactions in the state production and distribution sectors. This created serious microeconomic dise-quilibria in these markets, stimulating the development of active
underground economies that extended the influence of money into the state sector and reallocated product from intended planned purposes to those of agents with control over cash.

  The command administrative economy proved quite effective at forcing rapid industrialization and urbanization in the Soviet Union. It was effective at mobilizing human and material resources in the pursuit of large-scale, quantifiable goals. The building of large industrial objects, the opening of vast and inhospitable resource areas to economic exploitation, and the building and maintenance of military forces second to none were all facilitated by the system’s ability to mobilize resources and focus them on achieving desired objects regardless of the cost. Moreover, the system proved quite adept at copying and adapting new technologies and even industries from the Western market economies. Yet these very abilities, and the absence of any valuation feedback through markets and prices, rendered the operation of the system extremely costly and wasteful of resources, both human and material.

  Without the ability to make fine trade-offs, to innovate and to adjust to changing details and circumstances largely unobservable to those with the authority in the system to act, the command administrative economy grew increasingly inefficient and wasteful of resources as the economy and its complexity grew. This became more obvious, even to the rulers of the system, as microeconomic dis-equilibria, unfinished construction, unusable inventories, and disruptions of the “sellers’ market,”

  COMMISSAR

  together with a burgeoning second economy (Grossman, 1977), grew with increasing rapidity through the 1970s and 1980s. These consequences, together with the repeated failure of partial and incremental reforms to improve the situation and a growing gap in technology from the levels of the developed West, inspired the radical economic, and indeed political, reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev that soon afterward brought an end to the Soviet Union and its command administrative economy. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; MARKET SOCIALISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ericson, R. E. (1981). “A Difficulty with the Command Allocation Mechanism.” Journal of Economic Theory 31(1):1-26. Ericson, R. E. (1991). “The Classical Soviet-Type Economy: Nature of the System and Implications for Reform.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(4):1-18. Grossman, G. (1963). “Notes for a Theory of the Command Economy.” Soviet Studies 15(2):101-23. Grossman, G. (1977). “The ’Second Economy’ of the USSR.” Problems of Communism 26(5):25-40. Kornai, J. (1992). The Socialist System. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shmelev, N., and Popov, V. (1989). The Turning Point: Revitalizing the Soviet Economy. New York: Double-day. Wiles, P. J. D. (1962). The Political Economy of Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  RICHARD E. ERICSON

  COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF THE ECONOMY

  As a result of peasant and military revolts in 1920 and early 1921, Vladimir I. Lenin was forced to reverse the extreme policies of War Communism in favor of a temporary expedient, the mixed economy of the New Economic Plan (NEP). The Bolshevik Tenth Party Congress (March 1921) adopted a tax in kind on the peasantry to replace confiscations. The Congress also permitted leasing smaller nationalized workshops back to private individuals, provided they hired no more than ten or twenty workers. But the Bolsheviks retained in state hands most large-scale industry in the fuel and metallurgical sectors, mines, and military plans, along with all banking, railroads, and foreign trade. These were to constitute the “commanding heights,” which were supposed to control and guide the rest of the economy under Soviet power. They were provided subsidies from the budget to pay for wages and supplies. Many of the industrial enterprises were soon organized into trusts or syndicates under the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) for operational supervision, though many rehired former managers and experts (“bourgeois specialists”) deemed to be loyal to the new regime. By 1922 more than 90 percent of industrial output still came from these nationalized plants, mines, and transportation facilities. By 1928 industrial output had recovered the levels achieved in 1913, but further expansion would depend on new net investments, for which the state budget would be the only significant source, for the “commanding heights” did not generate sufficient profits. See also: NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; WAR COMMUNISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Nove, Alec. (1969). Economic History of the USSR. London: Allen Lane.

  MARTIN C. SPECHLER

  COMMISSAR

  Soviet government official.

  “Commissar” was the title given to the bureaucratic leaders of the Soviet Union, used from 1917 to 1946. The title and rank of commissar was also given to the military-political officers serving with the Red Army during World War II. Also known as People’s Commissars, they were the heads of the various people’s commissariats (of health, justice, education, internal affairs, and so forth), the central bureaucratic organizations that governed the Russian Republic and the Soviet Union. The commissars were also the members of the Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh komissarov-Sovnarkom, or SNK), the central organ of state power that coordinated government decisions in the Soviet republics and among the commissariats when the USSR Supreme Soviet was not in session. In 1946, when the commissariats were renamed ministries, the commissars became ministers, and the SNK became the Council of Ministers.

  OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY

  See also: COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET; SUPREME SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fainsod, Merle, and Hough, Jerry F. (1979). How the Soviet Union Is Governed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  SHARON A. KOWALSKY

  August coup. By the end of 1991 all the republics had declared their complete independence and the COME and IEC were closed down. In the future, economic ties between the newly independent states would be conducted on a bilateral basis without any central coordinating agency such as COME. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMURO-VICH; YAVLINSKY, GRIGORY ALEXEYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  PETER RUTLAND

  COMMITTEE FOR THE OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY

  The Committee for Operational Management of the National Economy (COME) and a parallel body, the Interrepublican Economic Committee (IEC), were created in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991, in a vain bid to coordinate economic policy across the territory of the Soviet Union. They were trying to pick up the functions of the government of the USSR, which had disintegrated after the coup. COME was headed by Ivan Silaev, a former deputy prime minister in the Soviet government (1985-1990) who had been appointed by Boris Yeltsin in June 1990 as prime minister of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. Silaev struggled to maintain food supplies and deal with Soviet debt obligations, while Yeltsin’s reform team, led by Yegor Gaidar, was preparing a radical reform program. Silaev resigned as Russian prime minister on September 27, 1991, after being accused of trying to empower the COME at the expense of the Russian Federation (for example, by taking control over energy supplies). Silaev then became acting prime minister of the Soviet Union-a country that had de facto ceased to exist. Together with Grigory Yavlinsky he worked on a treaty on economic cooperation between the republics, but encountered hostility from the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet and government. He tried to salvage some of the ministries of the Soviet government, whose forty thousand employees were still sitting in Moscow. The COME and IEC were founded on the assumption that some elements of the unified Soviet economic management system would be preserved, but this proved erroneous. Over the course of 1991 all republican governments had progressively ceased to cooperate with federal economic agencies, refusing to pay taxes and ignoring policy directives, and this trend accelerated after the failed

  COMMITTEE OF SOLDIERS’ MOTHERS

  The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia (CSMR) was organized in 1989 at a time when glas-nost and perestroika had led to greater information about the abuses within the Soviet military and its conscript system and created opportunities for the actions of nongove
rnmental organizations. In 1989 the mothers of 300 student-conscripts protested against their draft and lobbied successfully to change the conscription law to allow student deferments. Their successes include the granting of deferments and the early return of 180,000 students from the army to finish their studies. The Committee was also involved in seeking to end abuses in barracks life, especially the bullying of junior conscripts (dedovshchina), and in promoting the transition from a conscript system to a volunteer military. The CSMR has worked to expose human rights violations within the military, given legal and material assistance to the families of dead servicemen, consulted on legislation affecting military service, and published research on service-related deaths in the military. It operates hostels in Moscow for AWOL soldiers.

  The CSMR actively protested the First Chechen War (1994-1996) and in March 1995 organized the “March for Compassion” from Moscow to Grozny. The March drew attention to the horrific violations of human rights by both sides and sought to draw support from Chechen mothers opposed to the war. Media attention to these efforts, as well as efforts to secure the release of Russian prisoners of war, won broad international praise for the CSMR. In 1995 the committee received the Sean MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau and was nominated in the same year for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR

  Between 1996 and 1999, the CSMR continued to lobby the Russian parliament for legislation to protect the rights of servicemen, reform the military, rehabilitate veterans of regional conflicts, and provide support to the families of dead servicemen. It also supported the efforts of deserters to secure amnesty through the military prosecutor’s office.