Managing Communist Enterprises: Poland, Hungary & Czechoslovakia,1945-1970
“Managing Communist Enterprises: Poland, Hungary & Czechoslovakia,1945-1970.” Philip Scranton, Rutgers University “Who has the easiest life in Poland? Mainly large enterprises. The sectoral and ministerial plans depend directly on their work. If they go short of a single screw, the minister thunders and the lightning flashes… Next, things are not too bad for the producers of export goods. Finally, an easy life is the lot of those who cheat a little.” Jerzy Burzyński, in 1965, writing about Poland’s Bytom machine-building plant1 [It was] a system that worked, more or less, but which was incapable of finding a positive solution to any of the basic problems in the latter half of the twentieth century,” Radoslav Selucký, in 1970, a Czechoslovak economic reformer2 “Those who state that we have resuscitated… the mechanisms of the market, introducing them into socialism by stealth, are wrong. The market, buying and selling, and money have always existed in a socialist economy. But their existence did not meet the needs of the situation [in 1950. Today] there are enterprises which are still enjoying an unjustified right of monopoly, which makes the managers lazy and places the customers at the enterprises’ mercy. That is why these problems must be resolved at the earliest possible moment.” Reszö Nyers, in 1969, CP Central Committee Secretary, Hungary3 Reszö Nyers saw it all, from the inside. Once a printer and a Social Democrat present at the creation of communist Hungary, Nyers served its Ministry of Domestic Commerce in the early 1950s, rose to the Central Committee in 1954, voted for the 1 Jerzy Burzyński, “Problems at the Bytom Engineering Equipment Plant,” Życie Gospodarcze (Economic Life), 19 September 1965, Translations on East European Heavy Industry, No.
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