Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1973 diary (2)
The poverty of bureaucratic planning (2)
 |
| Leonid Brezhnev (1973) |
On 9 July 2025, in our article titled “The poverty of bureaucratic planning”, we drew attention -based on Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary entries- to the acute paralysis and decay within the internal workings of bureaucratic planning in the Soviet Union. The picture that emerged from that text made it abundantly clear that the Stalinist system of bureaucratic planning had become unsustainable by the 1970s.
In Chernyaev’s 1973 diary, we learn that he attended the opening sessions of the CPSU Central Committee Plenum [*] of 10-11 December 1973, where the year’s economic situation and the plans for 1974 were discussed. As he notes the figures and details presented in the speeches of Gosplan [**] Chairman Nikolai Baibakov and Leonid Brezhnev, Chernyaev shows that the Soviet economy was not only grappling with deep productivity problems, but had also become an extremely wasteful, detached and irresponsible system -incapable of regulating itself.
According to figures cited by Baibakov, some 60-70 million tonnes of metal were wasted each year in industrial production in the Soviet Union. In terms of the total tonnage of metal-working machinery, the USSR had a capacity almost equal to that of the United States, Japan and West Germany combined. Yet when measured by the number of machines produced per tonne of metal, or by labour productivity, the Soviet economy lagged behind each of these countries. Stalinist propaganda trumpeted sheer quantities, but these headline figures served as a veil, masking qualitative backwardness. (See: “Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Production Complex: A microcosm of the structural problems of Soviet industry”)
The same pattern was evident in the relatively narrow range of Soviet export goods. Finland, despite exporting only one-tenth of the Soviet volume of timber, earned twice as much in foreign currency. The reason was obvious: the Soviets exported timber almost entirely as raw material, effectively handing the added value to others.
Disorder within the “planned” economy
The examples presented at the Plenum showed that Stalinist-bureaucratic planning was not only ineffective and wasteful in terms of labour productivity, but was also riddled with contradictions. A pipeline agreement signed with Germany had not been completed on time, forcing the Soviet Union to pay a daily penalty of $55,000.
The total value of “slow-moving” goods [***] piling up in warehouses and rejected by consumers had reached 2 billion roubles. This figure almost matched the total capital investment envisaged for light industry for the remainder of the Five-Year Plan. Goods that consumers did not want -useless goods, with very low or even zero use-value- were being churned out, yet consumers’ needs were still not being met.
The KAMAZ project [****] was an emblematic example. The cost, initially put at 1.7 billion roubles, quickly rose to 2.5 billion -and it was clear that this would not be the final bill. Moreover, all this was happening in an economy that prided itself on central and rational planning.
A system that breeds irresponsibility
The story Chernyaev recounts about the glass factory in Salavat is a near-grotesque example of bureaucratic irresponsibility. Set in motion by a decision taken in 1955, the project was pursued for years despite changing technological conditions; when the factory was completed in 1972, it turned out that the installed machinery shattered the glass instead of polishing it. The entire plant had to be melted down and rebuilt -yet it was concluded that no one was responsible.
A similar bureaucratic blindness is evident at the knitting factory in Kursk: equipped with imported machinery, the plant is operating at half capacity because workers’ housing had been “forgotten”.
Scarcity, decay and loss
A large quantity of grain from the 1973 harvest was left in open-air heaps and rotted. Losses of grain, cement, fruit and vegetables ran into millions of roubles, due to delays in packing and transport. Because of low-quality metal, construction consumed far more materials than necessary; and the amount of usable product obtained from a cubic metre of timber remained at only a quarter of the level achieved in capitalist economies.
Weaker engines, poorer materials -and the outcome is chronic backwardness, in a world capitalist system dominated by imperialist powers.
The triumph of quantity, the defeat of quality
One admission in Brezhnev’s speech is particularly striking: there is no way out of this, because enterprises profit from lying to the state. Behind the quantitative targets lie the plan, the bonus system, tradition, and a hierarchical-bureaucratic chain of obedience. Behind quality, by contrast, there are only appeals and “clever newspaper articles”.
That is why, in the struggle between quantity and quality, quantity always wins. Poor-quality goods become the norm.
The proposed solutions are all too familiar: reorganisation, committees, appeals, reform proposals “packaged more cleverly”… These recommendations, drafted by Arbatov and Inozemtsev under the leadership of Tsukanov [*****], are, in essence, just another turn of the same bureaucratic vicious circle.
Chernyaev’s question
During the Plenum debates, dozens of examples drawn from the speeches of Brezhnev and Baibakov were raised. Chernyaev, however, ends this section of his diary with a question directed not only at the Plenum itself, but at an entire era:
Have we formed some kind of inert, bureaucratic, ossified force of hopeless indifference (following the principle – just to survive a few more years), a force that will swallow anyone who tries to do anything new? If we have any people left who are capable of doing that.
Source: Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1973), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. by Svetlana Savranskaya, pp. 75–77.
[*] The term used for expanded meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), attended by the full membership of the Central Committee.
[**] The abbreviated name of the State Planning Committee, the Soviet Union’s central planning authority. It was responsible for drafting economic plans, setting targets for the Five-Year Plans, and allocating production quotas across sectors and enterprises.
[***] In Soviet planning and statistical terminology, the term referred to goods that had been produced but were not in demand, accumulated in warehouses, and could not be sold. Such goods typically included low-quality or unusable products, or items that did not match consumer needs.
[****] The KAMAZ (Truck Automobile Plant) project, one of the Soviet Union’s largest industrial investments of the 1970s, aimed to increase transport capacity through the production of heavy vehicles and to relieve infrastructure constraints across industry.
[*****] Georgiy Arbatov, Nikolai Inozemtsev and Yury Tsukanov were among the Soviet Union’s leading “experts” on economics and foreign policy during the Brezhnev era, acting as a bridge between the party apparatus and academic–technocratic circles.
