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History of the world economy - Polyak GB

35. The Economy of Russia in the Period of Transition to the Market Economy Model

35.1. Attempts to reorganize the economic mechanism

With the election in 1985 of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the USSR, a period of restructuring and a change in the socioeconomic system (1985-1990) begins. At the first stage, from March 1985 to August 1991, the process of revision of the foundations of a totalitarian political system and the planning and distribution economic system was under way in the country.

The term " perestroika " that arose in those years meant a transition from the top to the democratization of the political system and the admission of market relations in the economy. This manifested itself in the reduction of the role of the CPSU in public life, in the creation of parliamentarism, in publicity, in the weakening of centralized economic management, in the increase of the rights and responsibilities of regional authorities. All these actions of the country's leadership had a positive direction, and this is undoubtedly the historical merit of MS. Gorbachev. In essence, this meant that a variant of economic reform was implemented, when, under the regulatory role of the state, a gradual privatization of part of public property and the introduction of market relations into the economy were to take place.

This program, worked out and adopted in mid-1987, envisaged a social reorientation, transformation of the economic structure, reform of pricing and restructuring of the financial and credit system with the aim of moving to a regulated market economy.

However, once again the interests of the people were sacrificed to the struggle for power, and the economy became a hostage of politics - all the proposed stabilization programs were doomed. The central government failed to improve the economic situation - the economic crisis deepened, and the political situation in the country got out of control.

The struggle with communist ideology unfolded; Such notions as internationalism, class struggle, proletarian solidarity, friendship of peoples were subjected to special attacks. At the same time, nationalists in all the republics of the USSR on the basis of historical constructions and distortions of economic calculations tried to prove that some nations live at the expense of others' labor. In the conditions of such a multinational state as the USSR, this propaganda was of a destructive nature, contributed to the formation of a consciousness in society of the necessity and inevitability of the collapse of the state. The main role in this propaganda was played by the nationalist intelligentsia, which in fact was the ideologist and mouthpiece of the nationalist party elite and representatives of the criminal-shadow economy. All of them sought power, to achieve their narrow-group interests and were against a strong central authority that prevented them from achieving their goals. Therefore, they fomented interethnic conflicts that swept the country in the late 80s and early 90s (in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and other republics). They contributed to the collapse of the state, and party leaders and representatives of the nationalist intelligentsia emerged leaders who later became the heads of the new states created on the ruins of the USSR.

The leadership of the Union republics, territories and regions saw a way to improve in the decentralization of governance, in granting even greater rights and economic opportunities for the regions in solving local economic and social problems. At the same time, their demands were expressed in the movement for leaving a larger proportion of the national income created there than in the previous period. Naturally, this led to a decrease in the share of the centralized funds of the state.

It was required to develop methodological approaches to the solution of the problem of so-called regional self-financing, when the volume of national income left at the disposal of the region should depend on the contribution of the region to the country's economic potential. This also meant the task of muffling the dependent trends in certain regions.

However, this issue was not and could not be resolved: 1) there was a war in Afghanistan, which required high costs, and consequently, expenses for maintaining the military-industrial complex. Therefore, the state did not have the opportunity to increase the share of national income left at the disposal of the regions; 2) due to the fact that a distorted price system operated in the country (prices for raw materials were unreasonably underestimated and prices for final products were overstated), the volume of the created national income in the republics with mainly raw materials production did not reflect their true contribution to the economy of the state.

In addition, the indicators of the contribution of the republics to the economy of the state were distorted by the tax system and the procedure for levying taxes. One of the main sources of budget revenues - the turnover tax was collected mainly from consumer goods, and it was available in those republics where these goods were manufactured. In raw material republics, as a result of the policy of specialization and cooperation of production of enterprises producing goods, it was not enough, and consequently, the turnover tax was not enough for the incomes of their budgets. To ensure the revenues of the budgets of these republics, they were allocated subsidies from the union budget, which created the appearance of the dependency of these republics. In turn, this gave rise to nationalist separatists both in the regions and in the center to mutual accusations, incitement of interethnic contradictions, and the formation of public opinion about the desirability of the collapse of the USSR.

This was reflected in the struggle of the union and republican parliaments. Economically unqualified deputies who came on the crest of the democratic movement to these parliaments instead of searching for ways out of the crisis, creating a legislative base for improving the economic situation in the country, strengthening parliamentary control over the formation and use of budget funds by the government were engaged in destructive political activity aimed at opposing the center and regions .

As China's experience showed, where economic reform took place under the regulatory role of the state, this process proceeded more deliberately, efficiently and not at an accelerated pace. And in the USSR, part of the party leadership and the democratic public began to call for more rapid, radical reforms in politics and in the economy. Such sentiments were facilitated by the intensification of crisis phenomena in the economy and the erupting political crises in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Lithuania with mass protests of the population, where armed forces were used to suppress unrest. In addition, since the beginning of the 1990s, workers' strikes have swept across the country, demanding higher wages. Under these conditions, the leadership of the USSR decides on the preparation of a new union treaty, in which the expansion of the rights of the Union republics was to be reflected. However, in August 1991, on the eve of the signing of this treaty, a group of people from the top leadership of the state introduced a state of emergency in the country. The inconsistent policy pursued by the President of the USSR, MS. Gorbachev, undermined his confidence. December 8 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha in Belarus, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus BN. Yeltsin, LM Kravchuk and S.S. Shushkevich signed an agreement in which it was stated that "the Union of SSR as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality ceases to exist." Thus, independent independent states were formed on the basis of the former union republics.

They did not take into account the fact that in the conditions of centuries-old coexistence within the single state of the peoples inhabiting the USSR, a single economic space was created, a mixture of these peoples occurred (for example, in 1988 the share of interethnic marriages in the total number of all marriages of the main nationalities of the USSR was fluctuating From 7 to 38%), the change of places of residence of tens of millions of people (outside Russia in 1989 there were more than 25 million Russians, and in Russia - about 8 million from other republics of the USSR).

The consequence of this policy was not only the disintegration of the largest in the 20th century. States in the world, but also significant economic losses in each of the former Soviet republics, the need to move a huge number of people from the republic to the republic (only in the period 1992-1995, 3.8 million people officially moved to Russia, and 1 left Russia , 8 million people).