Soviet Restructuring in Relation to the Chinese Reform

Abstract

In the early 1950s all states with a ruling Communist Party had adopted a homogeneous economic mechanism-that of the USSR. The Soviet 'command economy' had been constructed within a very short space of time-the single year 1930 embraces most of the essential changes- and responded to the political dictates of centralized authority. That authority was constituted by Stalin himself and it can be argued that, having assured political autocracy, he would not tolerate the persistence of economic forces which might gainsay him or undertake activities contrary to those embodied in a central plan. The forcible collectivization of the peasantry and the elimination of private small-scale industry and trade removed from the economy all those whose performance was geared to the domestic market. Soon afterwards, the same exclusion was applied to those who responded to changes in foreign markets: by 1938 a deliberate policy of self-sufficiency had reduced exports to a mere half-a-per cent of Soviet GNP (Holzman, 1963: 290).