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Occasional Paper #283 U.S. Assessments of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Economy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned

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6 Preface

8 Conference Agenda

10 Panel One: Revisiting the Estimates and Analyses of the Soviet Era

46 Panel Two: Assessments of Russian Reform Programs

74 Panel Three: Understanding the Underlying Social Aspects of Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

112 Keynote Address: The Honorable James Schlesinger

120 Panelist Biographies PREFACE

In March 2002, the Woodrow Wilson ment hoped that the March 2002 sessions Center’s Kennan Institute convened over a would begin to move the participants at dozen specialists on Soviet and Russian that meeting (and the readers of this affairs to evaluate U.S. assessments of the report) towards a shared conversation. Our Soviet and post-Soviet Russian economy. purpose was not to ask participants and We were joined in organizing and spon- readers to abandon strongly held opin- soring this conference by the Office of ions, so much as it has been to encourage Net Assessment of the United States them to partake in a single conversation as Department of Defense. a means for discerning the outlines of Debates over the quality of U.S. legitimate disagreement. As readers of this assessments of Soviet economic capacity Occasional Paper will discern, the result were among the most quarrelsome of the proved to be more successful than not. . Those debates were subse- Given the intensity of analytic quently matched in intensity by battles passion still simmering underneath the over how to understand the post-Soviet surface of American discussions of Russia, economic reforms in Russia during the we decided that we needed to do more 1990s. The purpose of this gathering and than to bring together in the same room this report was not merely to replay old various participants of debates that have battles. Rather, it was based on the endured for long years and expect that premise that how we talked about our they would talk differently to one another. assessments of the Soviet Union in the We therefore invited Russian colleagues past—and how we in the United States who had wrestled with the same issues in continue to talk about Russia—is about their own distinct context to join into our more than who was—and is—right or conversation. The result proved to be an wrong. Bitter disagreements will long exotic blend of academic and government linger over the old debates about what perspectives from both the U.S. and from happened or did not happen a quarter- Russia, and brought us face to face with century ago and over the past decade. the limitations of our ability to envision It is far more important today to radical change. As conference keynote look with a new perspective at those speaker James Schlesinger observed: clashes which are in essence highly “Almost every major change comes as a contentious debates over how best to surprise. Why is that? Because official understand complex societies. Can social views develop in institutions, and neither reality be disciplined by rigorous and societies as a whole nor institutions expect orderly research strategies and method- change. We tend to see things as continu- ologies? Is there an aspect to understand- ing on an accustomed track, and we tend ing a society which transcends collating to extrapolate from previous trends and data? Are economic conditions more current times into the future.” important than social attitudes? Does The report to follow is based on the culture matter? What role do institutions conference deliberations, presenting both play in shaping reality? When it comes to the formal papers provided by each Russia in particular, analysts have fallen author as well as summaries of the discus- into a pattern in which people of strong sions provoked by those written submis- opinion tend to talk past one another sions. I would like to thank each panelist rather than engage one another in shared for agreeing to join in this enterprise. conversation. The conference in many ways was We at the Kennan Institute and our an extension of a conversation that Igor colleagues from the Office of Net Assess- Birman and I have been having for some 6 time. I would like to acknowledge and to Institute Program Associate F. Joseph thank Igor for his inspiration and for his Dresen and Program Assistant Nicholas help in launching this enterprise. I also Wheeler, and our colleagues at the would like to take this opportunity to Kennan Institute and at the Wilson thank Andrew Marshall and all of his Center, who made this meeting and colleagues at the Office of Net Assess- resulting report possible. ment—not just for having provided the material support necessary to have every- —Blair A. one appear in the same room at the same Director time, but also for their considerable Kennan Institute intellectual support. Finally, though hardly Woodrow Wilson Center least, I would like to thank Kennan

7 U.S. Assessments of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Economy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned March 27-28, 2002 Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C.

Panel One: Revisiting the Estimates and Analyses of the Soviet Era. Chair: Blair Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute. Nikolai Petrakov, Director, Market Economy Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, . Abraham Becker, Senior Economist, Emeritus, RAND. Discussants: Igor Birman, independent scholar, Washington, D.C. Robert Campbell, Distinguished Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Indiana University.

Panel Two: Assessments of Russian Reform Programs. Chair: Blair Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute. Mikhail Zadornov, Deputy, Russian , and former Minister of Finance, Russian Federa- tion. Mark Medish, Partner, Public Law and Policy Practice Group, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP. Discussants: Peter Reddaway, Professor, Department of Political Science and Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University, and former Secretary, Kennan Institute. Anders Åslund, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Panel Three: Understanding the Underlying Social Aspects of Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Chair: Kari Johnstone, Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute. Yuri Levada, Editor-in-Chief, Russian Public Opinion Monitor Bimonthly, Moscow. Judyth Twigg, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science,Virginia Commonwealth Univer- sity, Richmond. Discussants: Arthur Miller, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa. Richard Dobson, Research Analyst, Russia, and Commonwealth Branch, Office of Re- search, U.S. Department of State.

Keynote Address The Honorable James Schlesinger, Chairman, MITRE Corporation, and Senior Advisor, Lehman Brothers.

8 9 Panel One: Revisiting the Estimates and Analyses of the Soviet Era

10 11 Another Look at the Soviet Era by Nikolai Petrakov

The enormous army of Western A Doomed Economy Sovietologists analyzing the Soviet economy The foundation for the irrationality failed to anticipate its rapid and total crash of the Soviet economy was not created and the collapse of the Soviet Union’s when the came to power in political system. My reading of the available Russia (1917), but, significantly, 10 years literature on the Soviet economy, as well as later in 1927. numerous personal contacts with Western The Bolsheviks’ War experts on the Soviet Union, have con- (1918-1921) was cruelly efficient and vinced me of this. Before 1991, not a single allowed Russia ultimately to emerge from Western analyst had predicted the cata- World War I and its Civil War with mini- strophic collapse of the Soviet economic mal territorial losses from the former system. Disputes were generally limited to tsarist empire. Through a series of bold the rate of the Soviet economy’s growth, the market reforms termed the New Eco- reliability and completeness of official nomic Policy (which contradicted Soviet statistics, and methodologies for comparing ideology), Soviet Russia was able to USSR and U.S. levels of production and emerge from the devastation of war in consumption. In short, what was discussed agriculture, transportation, and the main was the competition between the two sectors of industry. By 1926, the monetary systems. In this game, the analysts empha- system, the budget, and banking had sized the unquestionably greater dynamism stabilized. For purposes of comparison and power of the U.S. economy in particular recall that, for example, Germany had and Western economies overall. However, it is emerged from the war two years earlier clear that the discussion followed a frame- than Russia, but was unable to control work set by Soviet international economists hyperinflation for the next 10 years. and political scientists. The competition was However, the economic success of the understood as a “long distance economic Soviet economy ends at this point. It was race” between the two systems. The clinical replaced by “success” of another sort. The death of one of the systems was not consid- economy was given non-economic, ideo- ered as a possible outcome. logical, and political tasks to perform. The The reality proved to be quite USSR leadership under Stalin called for “a different. While it was not predicted, was it great leap” in industrial development. The really unpredictable in principle? I think slogans of 1927 included: “to catch up with not. A collective ‘hypnosis’ prevented the and surpass developed capitalist countries in world scientific community from evaluat- industrial production,” “to traverse in 10 years ing and drawing conclusions from many the road to an industrial society that took the telltale phenomena that were apparent on West 100 years to traverse.” (Thirty years later the surface of economic life. Now, with a such slogans were revived in China.) decade’s hindsight, I see two reasons for This idea led to a forced structural the blindness from which scholars suffered deformation of the national economy that in the years preceding the collapse of the was unprecedented in world economic Soviet economy. The first was that none of history and lasted for almost 14 years (right the critics of the numerous shortcomings up until the time the Soviet Union entered of the Soviet economic system posed the World War II in 1941). In an environment question in terms of whether such a system of martial law, income from agricultural, could survive. The second reason was a consumer goods, and services sectors was gross underestimation of the scope of confiscated and invested in the defense falsification that affected indicators of Soviet industry, and the metallurgy, machine- economic performance. 12 building, and energy sectors. The distor- 3. Extreme underdevelopment of tion between the Soviet economic sectors agriculture. In labor productivity, was entrenched at this point. While this standard of living of the rural popula- episode in the USSR’s economic history tion, degree of mechanization and has been described in detail numerous electrification, transportation, and times in the Western, as well as the Soviet, social infrastructure, Soviet agriculture literature, it was not analyzed from the was backward not merely by Western standpoint of the strategic consequences standards, but also compared to other of such a serious structural deformation. sectors of the Soviet economy. Structural changes are a necessity for 4. Extremely underdeveloped any dynamically developing economic consumer goods sector, public system. But there are limits to structural utilities, health care, education, and changes beyond which the economy loses its social security. The deformations stability and ability to survive through self- between heavy industry and the social regulation. It is clear that in the 1930s the sector were built up over the years, Soviet economy exceeded the limits of its spurred by the pressures of “socialist structural stability and destroyed its long-term industrialization,” collectivization, World viability. The deformations that determined War II, and then the Cold War. the structure of the Soviet economy and These deformations in the Soviet ensured the inevitability of its destruction economy resulted in continually decreas- may be reduced to the following four aspects. ing rates of growth (see Table 1), with so 1. Bloated defense sector. The many bottlenecks that its survival was put Soviet Union’s geopolitical ambi- increasingly in doubt. The Soviet tions led to extreme over-investment economy was collapsing under the weight in all industries directly or indirectly of its own structural deformations. This, in associated with maintaining the fact, is what occurred during its last armed forces or facilitating the decade. And here again I will quote Igor development and production of Birman: “The principal difference be- military technology. Igor Birman tween the Soviet and the Western econo- called attention to this circumstance mies is that in the Soviet-style economy in Western journals as early as 1983, there are no economic cycles and the writing: “The Western observer of the Soviet Union has difficulty Table 1 coming to terms with the proportion Mean average rate of growth of USSR of the national product and national national income (in %) resources that the Soviet rulers 1951–55 11.4 devote to preparing for war. It is this 1956–60 9.2 that makes it possible to have 1961–65 6.5 enormous military power and yet a 1966–70 7.7 weak economy.” (“The Economy of 1971–75 5.1 Shortages,” New York, 1983, p. 397). 1976–80 4.7 2. Inefficient use of primary 1981–8