The Russian Revolution полностью

The socialist organization of the economy begins with the liquidation of the market, and that means the liquidation of its regulator—namely, the “free” play of the laws of supply and demand. The inevitable result—namely, the subordination of production to the needs of society—must be achieved by the unity of the economic plan, which, in principle, covers all the branches of productivity.⁶²

At Lenin’s request, Larin drafted a project for a central administrative and planning agency to direct the economy of Russia. After some revisions, it was issued as a decree on December 2, 1917, which established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vysshyi Sovet Narodnogo Khoziaistva, or VSNKh).⁶³ This institution, which in 1921 would be renamed the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), was to enjoy the same monopoly in regard to the country’s economy (at least in theory) that the Communist Party enjoyed in the realm of politics. We say “in theory” because in view of the existence of the private agricultural sector and the large and expanding black market in goods, the VSNKh never came even close to controlling Soviet Russia’s economy. Operating directly under the Sovnarkom, its formal task was to “organize the national economy and state finances.” It was to prepare and implement a master plan, to which end it was authorized to nationalize and syndicate all the branches of production, distribution, and finance. According to Trotsky, it had originally been intended to make the commissariats of Supply, Agriculture, Transport, Finance, and Foreign Trade into branches of the Supreme Economic Council.⁶⁴ The council was further to take charge of the economic sections of provincial soviets, and where these were lacking, to install its own branches. In conception, the Supreme Economic Council sought to adapt to the conditions of a socialist economy Hilferding’s notion of a “General Cartel.”⁶⁵ In actuality, it turned into something much more modest.

Lenin entrusted the direction of the council to Aleksei Rykov, whom one acquaintance described as a “warm-hearted Russian intellectual,” rather like the “kindly doctors from the old-time provinces.” Others he reminded of a “provincial zemstvo agronomist or statistician.”⁶⁶ Certainly, he had neither the personality nor the expertise of a man to reorganize the Russian economy from top to bottom.⁶⁷ Born into a peasant family, he had received a sketchy education and then dedicated himself to full-time revolutionary work for Lenin, to whom he was fanatically devoted. Shabbily dressed and usually unkempt, he spoke little and slowly, a habit which earned him a reputation for forcefulness: but, as it turned out, when required to make decisions, he was quite helpless. His lack of administrative talents rendered his task, difficult to begin with, quite impossible.

The true driving force behind the Supreme Economic Council—the “Saint-Just of Russian economics”—was Iurii Larin. Although little known even to specialists, this half-paralyzed invalid, always in pain, could take credit for a unique historic accomplishment: certainly no one has a better claim to having wrecked a great power’s national economy in the incredibly short span of thirty months. He exerted a powerful influence on Lenin, who in the first two and a half years of his dictatorship listened to Larin more attentively than to any other economic adviser. Larin was always ready with quick and radical solutions to difficult problems, which earned him the reputation of an economic “magician.” His office, in a suite at the Metropole Hotel, was the place of pilgrimage for Russians with the most fantastic economic schemes: none of them was rejected out of hand, many were seriously considered, some were adopted. It was only in early 1920 that Lenin grew disenchanted with his advice and had him expelled from the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council, which until then he had dominated by the force of his ideas and personality.*