ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the economic debates around perestroika, the decline of the political economy of socialism and the following rapid inflow of Western, liberal ideas. What happened in the five years between 1987 and 1992 can be seen as a direct continuation of the discussion of the 1960s. The concept of perestroika was not only based on the ideas of the shestidesiatniki generation, it was also a pattern familiar from the 1960s that economic journalists and free thinkers were clearly ahead of the academic economists 1 in challenging the old ideological taboos. As a result, very much as in the 1960s,
[t]he readers’ interest today has to a considerable degree shifted in the direction of socio-political journals. Articles by M. Antonov, S. Andreev, S. Zalygin, V. Seliunin are read and discussed more than works by economic scholars.
(Miasoedov and Lobova [1989] 1990: 80) During the years of 1987–1992, acrid self-criticism and urgent appeals to re-integrate into the international scientific community were typical for the self-reflection of Russian economists. In a programmatic editorial, “The Journal – for Perestroika” Gavriil Popov* (1988: 4), the then new chief editor of Voprosy ekonomiki noted that “the years of zastoi have negatively affected the progress of theory”, as “scholasticism, effectless pondering and ruthless adulation of any single practical measure of the leadership, which were praised as highest theoretical achievements”, had become main features of Soviet economic science. As today, he continued, “even new ideas are drowning in standard phrases” and demanded “a brave exchange of opinions” which should not care about “the mourners over the fate of socialism”. Fully acknowledging the allegation of “scholasticism, dogmatism and apologetics”, Alexander Auzan* (1989: 5) noted that mainly due to “a lack of civic courage and scientific objectivity which would have been needed to formulate dangerously critical conclusions about the condition and the development trends of the socialist economy”, Soviet political economists “knew only little more than the rest of society about the conditions and the real history of the economy”.