Why Doesn't Russian Industry Work?

AuthorPatterson, Perry L.

Along with Tat'iana Zaslavskaia and others at the Novosibirsk branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Leonid Kosals helped to renew Soviet sociology by pushing forward with public opinion surveys which were extremely rare in the USSR prior to the mid-1980s. As was true in other studies, the result of Kosals' surveys was a clear indictment of hitherto unquestioned Soviet policies and institutions. Why Doesn't Russian Industry Work? reports on a series of surveys conducted in 1985-92 regarding the reasons for innovation or lack thereof in Soviet enterprises. While Western readers will find relatively little fundamentally new here, and will be put off by the awkward translation, Kosal's work provides a permanent record of the sorts of grassroots complaints about industrial management which ultimately helped to bring about perestroika. By giving us detailed descriptions of workplace attitudes of "innovating" and "non-innovating" enterprises, he clearly portrays many Soviet enterprises as apathetic and stagnant. One can readily imagine the consternation with which the late Soviet leadership must have read such reports.

Having established that Soviet industry was ill, Kosals proceeds to discuss what might be done to fix industrial woes in post-Soviet Russia. In this regard, he is on target, if not original, when he notes the need for a "market for innovations" and for appropriate economic stimuli. Kosals is not particularly clear on what he intends here, however. Perhaps this is because, for him, "innovation" is a very broad category which includes both technological leaps and changes in organizational and managerial policies both at the enterprise and the national level.

Unfortunately, some of the more concrete positions which Kosals takes would not be unfamiliar to the bosses whom he helped to depose. He certainly seems to dislike many of the economic changes occurring in the transition era. The new private sector is said to "exacerbate the crisis of Russian society." Society must be on guard against "abuses of freedom" brought on by change...

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