Ceremoniously, he held up his lighter for Emil and then for himself. The blue flame was almost dissolved into the blueness of the day, and the smoke only tasted like an intensification of the hot summer air, but it was soothing. Emil breathed in a welcome numbness from it. Mokhov arranged himself on the railing in an arch of spindly black segments, and waited. He looked like an allegory of famine. When he judged that Emil had got himself back, he said:
‘Academician, the Minister has the highest opinion of you.’
‘Really,’ said Emil.
‘Really,’ Mokhov insisted. ‘He’s just a little surprised that you got so upset. If it had been someone who’s been tucked up in a college all his life – then, sure; but you’ve been in the apparat. You know how these things go. You were a staffer for the Committee on Labour, I think?’
‘Yes; under Kaganovich.’
‘Quite a pungent personality.’
‘He liked to smash telephones,’ said Emil. ‘And deal out black eyes, on bad days.’
‘And did he think well of you?’
‘Reasonably.’
‘Well then,’ said Mokhov. ‘Broken phones, the occasional left hook, the Minister’s little bit of sarcasm: you know better than to take any of it personally. It’s the way they do things. That’s all. The Minister wants you to know that you may be assured of his continuing goodwill.’
It was embarrassing how relieved Emil felt. He studied the burning end of the cigarette.
‘You know,’ said Mokhov, speaking much more lightly, even teasingly, ‘you should be grateful that it isn’t Brezhnev you’re trying to brief. By all accounts, how can I put this, he’s a man who can get out of his depth in a puddle. They say that if you tell him something he doesn’t understand he goes’ – Mokhov adopted an expression of amiable cretinism – ‘“Hmm, not really my area. I specialise more in, uh, organisation, and, uh, psychology.”’
Emil smiled warily. Now that fear was quieted, the other puppy, anger, was climbing on top. Mokhov looked at his face, and evidently failed to find there what he was expecting.
‘But why bring me all this way,’ said Emil, ‘if the Minister doesn’t want what we have to offer? I don’t understand why you’d want to carry out the reform we suggested without the part that makes sense of it.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mokhov.
‘I just don’t understand what I’m doing here.’
‘I see that,’ said Mokhov. He bent down and extinguished his cigarette carefully on the sole of his shoe. Then he lit another one. ‘Why don’t we go for a little walk?’ he said.
‘But shouldn’t we –?’ said Emil, indicating the door of the dacha.
‘They won’t need us for a while,’ said Mokhov. ‘Truly; it’s all right. Come on.’
He unfolded himself and led the way off the verandah. Security came over, but rubbery gabbling and squeaking from the walkie-talkie confirmed that they were permitted to stroll, and Emil followed Mokhov toward the avenue of trees running in the direction of the gatehouse; not the spindly pines and birches of Akademgorodok but gnarled old deciduous monsters, with canopies as thick as cauliflowers, and green gloom beneath. The air in there felt like slow-moving lukewarm water. Mokhov waited till they were out of earshot of the guards behind, and then raised his black brows at Emil encouragingly.
‘I thought there was backing,’ Emil burst out. ‘Real backing for the reform, at the top.’
‘And so there is,’ said Mokhov. ‘The Minister has spent real political capital on it. He is favour of the reform right up to the point where it collides with something more important.’
‘Which is –?’
‘Stability, of course. The Minister, being a sensible and cautious man, cares more about securing what we have already achieved than he does about any experiment that might endanger it. He agrees with you that it would nice to be richer. He would certainly like the growth rates you promise. But his priority is to preserve the disciplined functioning of our economy.’
‘Even if the disciplined functioning of our economy is inadequate to satisfy human needs? I mean the needs we already have. Grossly inadequate to the needs we will have.’
‘My experience of human needs is that they grow at the exact speed of the resources available to feed them,’ said Mokhov comfortably. ‘Take your eyes off the radiant future for a minute, and look around. Our economy has its faults but it feeds and clothes our citizens better than the large majority of the people on the planet. Look at the Indians. Look at the Chinese. Compared to them the average Russian is as rich as Croesus.’
‘And compared to the Americans? Compared to the Europeans?’
‘Ah well,’ said Mokhov.
‘You’re saying we’ve given up on overtaking the capitalists?’
‘I’m pointing out to you that the Minister and his colleagues are nervous of anything that might lose what we’ve already got.’
‘And optimal pricing falls into that category.’
‘Indeed it does.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Emil. ‘Why?’
‘You really don’t know?’ said Mokhov. ‘Look, your prices aren’t just prices. They’re policies in themselves. They’re little pieces of the plan. And yet you keep telling us that nobody will decide on them. They’ll be generated – what was your word? – automatically, by some mathematical black box we just have to take on trust. They won’t be under control, and neither will their consequences.’
Emil was exasperated. ‘This is exactly the illusion that does most damage,’ he said. ‘Do you really suppose that the consequences of bad prices are under control, just because the prices are chosen by a committee? They cause a parade of perversities that stretches all the way to the horizon!’
‘Granted,’ said Mokhov calmly. ‘Granted. But it’s up to you to prove that you’ve got a solution which wouldn’t be worse than the problem. Bad prices have consequences we know how to deal with. We can intervene; we can ease things a bit; we can react when problems arise. We know the machine. We know how the parts connect – and they do all connect, you know, they are all of a piece, the prices and the supply system and the plan targets. They interlock. And we know that the thing that stops the machine from seizing up is our ability to be pragmatic; our discretion. What do you want to do? You want to take our discretion away. You want the plan targets for ten thousand enterprises to come straight out of the computer. And then there’d be no way of correcting errors. Whatever mistakes were built into your prices would stay there, locked in for ever, multiplying and multiplying until the machine shook itself to pieces. No, thank you.’
‘But optimal prices don’t contain errors.’
‘Don’t they? They’re only as good as the data they’re based on. If I understand correctly, they’re calculated from the efficiency of the enterprises’ equipment. In other words, they depend on managers submitting completely truthful information about what their enterprises are capable of. Speaking as somebody who has been trying to get them to do just that for nearly thirty years, I have to say it strikes me as a trifle unlikely that they’ll change their ways just because you’ve sent them a new form to fill in. Assume, instead, an average degree of duplicity and self-interest, and your lovely new prices have just as many errors in them as our nasty old ones – with no way of cutting off the mischief they’ll do.’
Emil stopped walking. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips against the lids. Squares of golden light pulsed against green in his personal dark. This was not a view of the economy he had expected to have to argue against. It was so cynical.
‘Is this what Kosygin thinks?’ he asked.
‘How would I know?’ said Mokhov, smiling. ‘Probably not in so many words. But he does seem to have a lively sense that our system had better not be broken by well-meaning experiments. So he’ll give the reform a try, and he’ll invest his new power in it, but he will not take risks with the system itself. I’m afraid,’ said Mokhov, looking at Emil, ‘that if it was risk-
taking you were after, Mr K. was your man.’
‘Surely though,’ said Emil, ‘there is an urgency here. We have only a very limited window in which to achieve the growth rates required for –’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that,’ said Mokhov. ‘There’s plenty of time.’
‘But 1980 is only – wait a minute,’ said Emil slowly. ‘Are you telling me that the goals set down in the Party Programme are being abandoned?’
‘Of course not!’ said Mokhov. ‘How could we possibly abandon the idea of building communism? It would be an existential absurdity. I’m just saying, there’s plenty of time.’
Emil thought back, head spinning, to the restatements of the promise of abundance he had seen since Khrushchev fell. Perhaps they were growing more infrequent, more nominal. He had let himself think the policy must still have the passion attached to it that Khrushchev had put in, just because it was still being mentioned. But if it only remained on the books to give the new bosses a figleaf of continuity, then all his assumptions were wrong. He would have to rethink the world; which he did not feel at all inclined to do any more in the company of this malicious stick insect, who didn’t bother to hide how much he was enjoying his chance to put an academic right.
‘What does the Minister want me here for, then?’ said Emil flatly.
‘To arrange a series of articles by economists promoting the reform. Endorsements, explanations, popularisations: the usual thing. They’ll give you the details when we get back. And perhaps we should be turning round,’ said Mokhov, looking at his watch. He rotated on his axis in a swivel of black limbs and faced the way they had come.
‘Do you know what my first job was, when I got back from the war?’ Mokhov asked cheerfully, when they had been walking for a minute or two and Emil had not spoken. ‘Burning bonds. You won’t have heard about this, because it was – still is – highly confidential. But there was a decision in ’45 to simplify the finances by getting rid of all the bond certificates which had ended up in our hands, for one reason or other, during the war. I was on a rota, with some staff at the same level over at Gosbank and the Ministry of Finance, because it was going to take weeks. There was a lot of paper to dispose of. So every evening that it was my turn, a delivery van collected me from Gosplan at the end of the day, and we rode on out to one of the city incinerators where the night shift had been told to stoke up and then mind their own business, with box after box of ten-rouble bonds in the back. A thousand or so to the box. The security detail humped them in from the loading dock and I checked them off on that night’s list: war bonds, the normal mass subscription bonds from before the war, the 1938 conversion issue – on and on. Every bond that had been donated to the war effort, every bond pledged to the savings bank as security for a loan, every bond held by a dead soldier, every bond that was ever confiscated. And into the flames they went. There was a little glass panel beside the door of the furnace, so you could watch. And I did. It was hypnotic, believe me. You might expect paper to go up in a flash, woof!, like that, but it turns out that it doesn’t burn very well when it’s stacked together in bulk. It scorched and it smouldered and it ate away slowly from the edges, unevenly; just these little creeping fronts of fire, no wider than a thread, working in across the figures and the curlicues, the engravings of power stations and skyscrapers. You remember what the bonds looked like – I’m sure you had to buy enough of them. All the brown and blue and the fine print scorching away. Until there was nothing left of the stack but a kind of rack of ash, and it sank down in flakes on the incinerator floor.’ Mokhov smiled reminiscently. It was not difficult to imagine the glow from the incinerator peephole reflected twofold in his fascinated eyes.
‘Ten roubles face value,’ he said. ‘A thousand to a box. We got through a couple of million roubles’ worth a night. Burned hundred of millions in the end. Now: in theory all of that paper represented liabilities of the state we had no business disposing of. Some of it had been given over voluntarily for the sake of the motherland, true, but most of those bonds belonged to someone, in theory. The loan-holders would have p into theack their loans, the dead soldiers would have had heirs, who could have been tracked down, if we had wanted to, and told they still had a claim on the state for the roubles of income they had forgone, over the years, because we forced them to buy bonds. That’s what the bonds represented, in theory. Income not paid to workers, work done but not paid for, because there weren’t enough consumer goods for them to spend the whole of their wages on, and we had to get the liquidity out of the system somehow. Those bonds should have been going into the draws for prize money, not into the incinerator. They were promises. But we burned them anyway, because the theory was only theory, and it counted for nothing against the logic of tidying up the state budget when we could. If I ever believed that we would let ourselves be constrained by roubles and kopecks, I had it burned out of me then. Slowly,’ said Mokhov with a smile. ‘Sheet by sheet. Ten roubles at a time. That’s when I learned something which, forgive me, you too should have learned years ago, Academician. Money will never be allowed to have the last word here. It will never be allowed to be “active”. It will never be permitted to become an autonomous power.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t go for Glushkov’s scheme then,’ said Emil bitterly.
‘Ah, but that would be just as bad. You wanted money that means too much. He wanted none of it at all. But we need something to keep score with, something we can control, or how would we ever be able to declare victory? And we must always be able to do that. Cigarette? No?’
Mokhov inhaled, and blew a long thin stream of smoke out upward, toward the motionless branches overhead. They were almost back in the blaze of light at the end of the avenue.
‘Have you heard what’s happened to Glushkov’s proposal?’ he said. ‘His universal network of computers, all talking to each other? They’ve given it to the Central Statistical Administration, to “finalise”. Which means it’ll shrink and shrink. You know, Professor, you should count your blessings. For you, I foresee a shower of prizes and honours. And you have your research! Fascinating research on a subject which – who knows? – may someday be of enormous importance.’
‘Can I hope, then?’ said Emil, despite himself.
‘Oh, you can always hope,’ said Mokhov warmly. ‘Be my guest.’
Notes – V.2 Ladies, Cover Your Ears! 1965
1 Emil splashed his head with cold water: the entire occasion described in this chapter is a confabulation, designed to dramatise the disappointment of the reform economists over the limits of the ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965. Kosygin did make a point of stopping off in Akademgorodok on his way back from a state visit to Vietnam, and while talking to Kantorovich and Aganbegyan there did utter the immortal sentences ‘What have prices to do with it? What are you talking about?’ – but most of the reformers’ access to discussions over the design of the reform was through committees and reports of the Academy of Sciences, in which they struggled to make themselves heard clearly. The case against adopting Kantorovich’s prices, though, which I have put into Kosygin’s mouth and the mouth of the fictional Mokhov, is so far as I have been able to find out the probable one, compounded of shrewd realism as well as self-interest and incomprehension. And Kosygin’s character as represented here is also authentic, down to the habit of continual conteuous interruption. Abel Aganbegyan really did in fact lose his temper in the face of it, and snap ‘I don’t understand?’ back at him, with temporarily disastrous results, but not until ten years later, in the mid-1970s. See Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain. For my understanding of the technical aspects of the reform, I have used the analysis in Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR, and (by the same author) ‘Seven Theses on Kosyginism’ in Collectivism, Convergence and Capitalism (London: Harcourt Brace, 1984). There is an accessible account of the reform’s aims in Berliner, ‘Economic Reform in the USSR’. For a general sense of the economists as players in contemporary Soviet politics, see R.
Judy, ‘The Economists’, in G. Skilling and F. Griffith, eds, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). For a much more fine-grained and bitchy account, see Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR.
2 Mr K. had slipped into real puce-faced spittle-streaked raving: it had been in the interests of the Presidium majority who overthrew Khrushchev that his instability should be exaggerated, and Emil has clearly picked up some deliberately hyperbolic gossip. But the First Secretary’s temper had been getting out of control, and there had been spur-of-the-moment threats to the Red Army (see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 585–6) and the Academy (Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 616).
3 The new men exuded a deliberate, welcome calm: for the mood- music of the transition, see Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev’s Decline to Collective Leadership, translated from the French by Helen Katel (London: Collins, 1969), and Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring.
4 A peculiar and discordant piece had been published in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta: see unsigned article, ‘Economics and Politics’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 7 no. 11, March 1965; originally in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, 11 November 1964.
5 There came a reorganisation of the lacework of Party committees within all the institutes: see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited.
6 An experiment in letting clothing stores determine the output of two textile factories: for the experiment at the Bolshevichka and Mayak factories, see V. Sokolov, M. Nazarov and N. Kozlov, ‘The Firm and the Customer’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 8 no. 4, August 1965, pp. 3–14; originally in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, 6 Jan 1965.
7 ‘We have to free ourselves completely,’ he said: this technocratic speech was given on 19 March 1965, published in Gosplan’s journal Planovoe Khozyaistvo no. 4, April 1965, and reprinted in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta on 21 April 1965. Quoted in English in Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, p. 447. Kosygin’s report on the completed reform measure appeared in Izvestiya, 28 September 1965; see A.N.Kosygin, ‘On Improving Industrial Management, Perfecting Planning, and Enhancing Economic Incentives in Industrial Production’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 8 no. 6, October 1965, pp. 3–28.
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