ABSTRACT

The question of whether the economic or the ideological failures of Communism are mainly responsible for its present collapse can be easily shrugged off as an example of the proverbial and futile hen and egg problem; it is indeed obvious that those two sides of the disintegration process reinforce each other. The first and paradigmatic failure of the communist economy was, of course, the so-called war communism; it was not, in fact, a by-product of civil war; it was supposed to be established as a permanent form of socialist economy. The economic history of Communism may be seen as alternating periods of dogmatic attempts to assert the full-fledged totalitarian system of production and exchange and some reluctantly made concessions to the market. In the 1970s, there were among well-placed Russian observers different views on the actual relevance of ideology to Communism.