ABSTRACT
In May 1918, Lenin wrote that socialism required large-scale capitalist engineering and planned state organization which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. For all but seven of its seventy years the Soviet economy was indeed organized cm the principles that Lenin advocated in 1917-1918: state ownership and detailed central administration. When the Soviet economy was entering middle age, therefore, the crucial issue in East-West economic competition seemed to be growth rates, and the Soviet system appeared to have the edge. The Soviet economy appeared to be on the brink of a historic departure from the framework of near-total state ownership and detailed central administration within which it had so far operated. In May 1987, Oleg Bogomolov, in an interview with Izvestiia, spoke of the desirability of introducing a variety of personal and cooperative ownership forms in the Soviet economy.
