S. G. Strumilin

ANSWER TO OUR CRITICS

Obviously the drafting of a long-range plan for a country like the USSR is very difficult. So I am not surprised that we have been criticized. But never until now did I imagine that criticism of planning was as easy as some of the speeches here would seem to indicate. I can compare planning to architectural designing. When we needed an opinion on the blueprints for the Dneprostroi, we had to address ourselves to the great specialist in that field, Cooper of the USA. He came over, studied the matter for several months, and only then gave his opinion. But our Five-Year Plan, which in scope of construction is equivalent to more than a hundred Dneprostrois, has found in this congress a good dozen Coopers who, without even studying the matter, have handed down their most definite views. How can this be accounted for? By the high qualifications of our home-bred Coopers, our own planning experts? Or because the science of planning is still in its infancy so that no special qualifications are required of a man in order to solve the most complex problems connected with planning in fifteen minutes although many hundreds of other learned specialists may have spent months working on them.

I am afraid that for many among us planning is not a science, not even an applied science, not even a sort of practical engineering which requires great experience and the corresponding feeling of responsibility for every expert pronouncement.

In planning, unfortunately, thus far the evaluation by “experts” has too often been without any scientific grounding. And therefore, in the criticism of planning we often come across “expert” pronouncements of the same value.

Nevertheless, I must say at this juncture that many of the objections raised at this conference we consider absolutely correct; we acknowledge their validity and shall guide ourselves by them in our future work.

Many have pointed out a grave defect in our work: the insufficiency, at times the complete absence, of long-range planning district by district for several economic sectors. Indeed, this is a great flaw in our planning. We fully recognize it. And because of this, we consider our work incomplete and offer here only the materials for a long-range plan and not a ready five year national economic plan. However, we do not feel too guilty in this respect because we could not possibly have prepared a long-range plan district by district without the participation of the districts. Had we taken this task upon ourselves, here in the center of a country extending over one-sixth of the world, we could have been justly accused of unprecedented bureaucratic conceit. Therefore, we immediately drew into the work all the agencies and planning bodies in various Union republics and through them the local district agencies.

Unfortunately, however, all the agencies and all the republics did not react too promptly to our appeal. I do not want to say that they were unwilling to help us in this matter. Possibly the contribution we had expected from them was beyond their means. But if they realize from their personal experience how difficult it is to prepare long-range plans even for individual economic sectors, even for individual districts and republics, they can surely imagine the complexity of producing such an all-engulfing long-range plan for the whole national economy as that prepared by the USSR Gosplan.

In any case, we are entitled to present countercharges against the planning agencies for individual branches and individual republics. Surely none of them can accuse us of having started our work without their knowledge and consent. At last year’s conference of the planning agencies we all fully agreed that joint work was indispensable to produce a long-range plan; we agreed on the forms of collaboration and set to work. But almost from the second day it became evident that each planning agency was working according to its own methods.

The USSR Gosplan, following the resolution of the congress, set to work simultaneously on the general and the long-range plan. The Russian Republic Gosplan decided that the general plan had to be completed first and therefore did not even start working on the five-year plan. I do not know how far the Russian Republic Gosplan has gone with its general plan but I am aware that its subsidiary, the Agricultural Planning Commission of the Russian Republic, adopted a position that does not seem to promise a rapid drafting of a general plan even within the boundaries of the Russian Republic. The Agricultural Planning Commission decided that a general plan was not needed, that it was impossible to foresee ten or fifteen years ahead and that the wisest thing was to limit oneself from the very outset to a five-year planning period. Now we ask: when, in view of this position of the Agricultural Planning Commission, shall we have a general plan for the Russian Republic and when would we have been able to start working on a five-year plan for the USSR had we waited for the district-by-district plans from the Russian Republic Gosplan? It is obviously impossible to speak of a planning independence of the planning agencies and of their refusal to adhere to mutually agreed upon decisions. And without such a discipline and without the active participation of the republics and ministries, an ambitious project like long-range planning for the whole economy of the Soviet Union can hardly be carried out in a very satisfactory fashion.

In view of this, whatever we have achieved in the district-by-district work can be viewed only as a preliminary working hypothesis requiring further study jointly with the local agencies.

On the other criticisms that I should like to answer, I shall first cope with the reproaches that our reports are incomplete. It is impossible to encompass the unencompassable. How could a mere two-hour report, in fact how could even an encyclopedia, answer all the questions posed by curious critics on all the prospects of our national economy five years ahead? Even without this, we have been accused of trying to foresee more than the present level of our knowledge makes possible. True, in this accusation we find an approach to planning with which we do not agree. We feel that our long-range plan must give not a sum of forecasts but rather a system for an economic policy, i.e., a system of economic tasks and directions expressed in figures. These tasks must be completely realistic in the sense that they must be realizable provided a sufficient will to realize them is exercised. However, these tasks will not be fulfilled or they may be fulfilled on a completely different scale if our regime chooses to follow a different economic policy. Thus if we end the monopoly of foreign trade, if we renounce the industrialization of the country and other such economic policies, what we would accomplish would be completely different from what is outlined in our five-year plan.

If all our planning consisted of foreseeing what is objectively inevitable, independently of anybody’s will (which is the case with the spontaneous development of the capitalist countries), then we should really have been forced to base ourselves on purely scientific forecasts. But in that case, it would have been impossible to talk about planning. It makes no sense to draw plans for the next solar eclipse or for the next capitalist crisis-they will occur without our planning; But under the Soviet regime, the point of planning is precisely to concentrate the will and efforts of the workers and the economists on certain selected objectives. That is why we disagree with our critics such as Kondrat’ev and consider that the main point in planning is not foresight but the selection of tasks and instruction on how to achieve them.

If our tasks and directives are included in the system of the Soviet economic policy, the path of economic development we indicated will be followed; if, on the other hand, our plan is rejected, we refuse to be responsible for any of the “prognostications” it may contain.

Our critics who base themselves totally on prognostication believe that those who draft plans must also be able to prognosticate whether their plans will be adopted or rejected.¹ Unfortunately, the author of this demand has yet to explain to us what methods he intends to use to obtain scientific forecasts of the probable resolutions of the Council of the People’s Commissars or of the Politburo.

We, in any case, understand our task quite differently. In drafting economic plans, we are mostly guided by their suitability and how they fit in with our objectives. There is no need for us to try and guess whether we shall be able to convince the agencies whose approval we need to confirm these plans. The guessing game as to which plan would appear the best for this or that agency is no longer planning but something else. And that would entail the renunciation of new, creative ideas since no one can tell how such new ideas are liable to be received. To put it differently, this attitude would doom planning to a sort of hopeless “me-too-ism,” not to use a stronger expression.

Each planner is a public servant and as such must defend his opinions whether or not they are shared by his superiors. Of course, it is possible that we are wrong but those who occupy other positions in the administration may also be wrong-no one is insured against error....

Now I shall examine the reservations made by V. A. Bazarov. I find in them much that is correct. But it seems to me that this advocacy of the division of labor on an international scale is somewhat premature. If we are talking about small correctives, I do not believe that anyone will argue against them. But there is too much drama in the way he presents his question. There is nothing to indicate that we are facing the ghost of cold and starvation. We should not take too seriously this sort of prognostication. There are only two ways of solving fully the problem of the international division of labor: either by bringing world revolution closer or by capitulating to capitalist encirclement. Only the first method is acceptable to us. But, of course, if Comrade Bazarov knows how world revolution can be carried out within the next five years, let him tell us. However, according to Bazarov, even revolution would not satisfy his aspirations. In that case, we had better postpone all this talk.

Now for the criticism of Comrade Gukhman. I have not found any well-founded objections in what he said. All he seemed to do was to advise us to take into account all the pros and cons (Krzhizhanovskii: “For each pro he found a contra.”)

We have tried to do this ourselves to the best of our ability. If he can navigate our planning ship better than we can between all these pros and cons, well, let him do it. In one thing, however, he is wrong. That is when he says that we do not describe the specific difficulties of the present Five-Year Plan. This shows that he has not read our report carefully. The passage he quoted referred to the problems of long-range planning in general and not to theperiodbetweenl926/27andl930/31. Had he read further, he would have found all those concrete difficulties and problems which apply to this five-year period.

I shall not bother to answer Comrade Essen, who expressed his delight here at not having gotten involved in the preparation of a long-range plan. I believe that this is a great mistake of the Russian Republic Gosplan officials and that they will feel it soon enough themselves. I would like to see their draft of the five-year plan that they must present in one month if they have not yet worked on it. (Essen: “It won’t be any worse than yours.”) If you believe that this work can be done in three days or so, I am sure it will be very good....

Now I shall deal with the criticism of Comrade Tumanov.

In some respects, he revealed his agrarian bias, which earned him a measure of Kondrat’ev’s approval. I do not doubt that he will not agree with my appraisal of him. But then all the other representatives of this deviation protest when accused of it and claim to be the most ardent partisans of industrialization. Even Comrade Shanin said that industrialization was necessary, but it should be started from the other-meaning the agrarian-end. Now if people like Shanin and Kondrat’ev wish to call themselves “industrialists” and us the “super-industrialists,” that is their personal business. But we still prefer to call a cat a cat and a rabbit a rabbit. Comrade Tumanov tried to present the compilers of the Five-Year Plan as enemies of machines, people who do not understand that a plow is better than a hoe, that mechanized labor is better than manual labor, etc. This, of course, is not serious. We do not argue against the fact that in certain districts tractors are needed, and in others harvesters, and that in agriculture, as in anything else, an increase in labor productivity is desirable. No one would argue against that. But the problem was the following: having only a very limited amount of rubles for capital investments, we had to decide where these could be invested with the maximum effect to increase the general level of labor productivity.

And at this juncture we must explain why machines are so far in much more widespread use in industry than in agriculture. The crux of the matter is that agricultural machines such as plows, drills, threshers, etc., are not in use the whole year round but only between 11 and 17 days of the entire season. Now I am asking you: this being so, how is it possible to equate machines that double the production of a worker in industry and those in agriculture? You know the answer yourselves. And this is where the roots of our argument lie. That is why we are prepared to spend much more on the mechanization of industry than on that of agriculture. And, of course, if we .are presented with good evidence that such and such a district needs, say, 100,000 tractors instead of 50,000 to cultivate so many hectares of virgin soil and that this is necessary for the harmonious development of our national economy as a whole, well, we shall not hesitate to allocate the funds. In that case, the discussion would be confined to the correctness of the estimate.

We shall content ourselves with answering briefly the criticism presented by Professor Makarov. He took us to pieces using the full weight of his high authority. Brandishing in front of us the pages of our theses, he categorically assured the congress that it was not permissible to produce such plans. But he did not feel he had to explain why it was not permissible. True, he expressed a few valuable, although no longer very new, planning rules. We have been popularizing them for a long time and are very pleased that Professor Makarov seems to have grasped them. But why should these be used as arguments against our plans? He ought to have shown after all where we went wrong in applying our own method and to what specific errors this led us. But the professor had nothing specific to say on that subject except for an unfortunate reference to Kondrat’ev’s fantastic computations about the four billion deficit in agriculture with which we have dealt earlier.

As to Makarov’s ideological criticisms of our work, they boil down to the following four points. In the first place, they assert that our insistence on industrialization is primitive. But he does not explain why it is primitive. He says that we stand for “narrow industrialism” while he stands for “industrialization in the broad sense,” an industrialization that requires considerable capital outlays for agriculture! But where are these funds to come from? Could it by chance be from the funds assigned to be invested into industry? Had he said this explicitly, everything would have become quite clear: a “broad approach to industrialization” presupposes the restriction of investments into industry. If that is the case, Makarov’s is indeed a broad approach.

In the second place, Makarov reproaches us for our sins against Marxism. I shall be happy when Professors Makarov and Kondrat’ev begin giving us lessons in Marxism, assuming, of course, that they first become familiar with this doctrine. But, alas, they are still not familiar with it. Makarov brands our approach as a “consumer’s approach” since it is from the standpoint of the consumer rather than from that of the producer. But he has failed to notice that, basing ourselves on the people, we calculate in terms of workers’ hands rather than in terms of mouths and stomachs. We pose the problem of an optimum utilization of manpower. That is the approach of a producer.

Another observation about the problem of prices. Professor Makarov announces that the price relation we planned will not be accepted by the village. This is a very strong argument. The only thing I do not know is why such statements should come from Makarov rather than from the peasants. (Makarov from the audience: “You did not listen to the peasants very well.”) The fact that the peasants supported the Soviet regime and not the parties that offered them different things proves that we have a common language and a mutual understanding. The price problem for the peasants is different from what many people imagine. What matters to a peasant is not the number of kopeks he can get for a pood of grain but the number of yards of cotton material he can buy for one pood of grain he sells. From this viewpoint we intend not to stabilize farm prices but to raise them. It can be argued that the peasant would have preferred even a great increase in farm prices. But we refuse to take this into consideration where there is no realistic possibility for such an increase. This would no longer be the approach of an economist or of a socialist but that of a peasant lover....

Makarov’s last criticism touches upon our foreign relations. He points out our isolation from the world market. If he has in mind the modest scope of our import-export trade, we should be very anxious to hear any suggestions as to how this could be improved. But even within the indicated limits our foreign trade should be adequate to realize our plan for capital investments and for the reconstruction of our economy. Now, if he means that we failed to schedule any large influxes of resources in the form of foreign loans, we wish to make it clear that this is in no way due to our refusal in principle to take advantage of such an opportunity when it presents itself. We prefer simply to keep such a possibility in mind so as not to delude ourselves.

In this respect the Five-Year Plan of the Supreme Council of the National Economy was much bolder than ours when it introduced into its balance such hypothetical items as foreign loans. But then, when assigning the resources by branches, the Supreme Council very generously assigned all the resources from foreign loans to transportation while reserving the national resources for industry. How the comrades of the Supreme Council regard our five-year plan is not too clear to me. From Comrade Ginzburg’s speech, it may be inferred that our differences could be easily resolved. But when I listened to other representatives of the Supreme Council such as Comrade Sabsovich, it sounded to me as if neither our nor their five-year plans were any good. Now if that was the case, I do not see on what basis we could agree. To me, Sabsovich’s pessimism seems exaggerated. He said he would have liked to see the past achievements taken into account more. So would we. But our Five-Year Plan, as is, is based on rates of development in agriculture and other branches that are unprecedented in the capitalist world, rates which our ideological friends from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture consider unrealistic. We do not agree with them. I am convinced that in our planning we have kept a sound safety margin. But wouldn’t it be better to keep it that way?

Now for the principle of full priority in planning advocated here by A. M. Ginzburg. I think it is a good principle when not abused. We have had quite a number of experiences of this sort. We have proclaimed: “all for transportation,” “all for fuel,” etc. But what often happened was that when we managed to pull the tail out, the nose sank in; when we pulled the nose out, the tail sank into the mud. And we are afraid that our flanks will sink into the mud when we give full priority to the center and vice versa. Whatever it may be, we have a chain between all our districts and branches of production and such priorities may break the chain and then it is bound to hit somebody on the head. And speaking about a system of priorities, we must never forget the principle of proportionality....

“Otvetnashimkritikam,” in Ocherki sovetskoi ekonomiki. Resursy i perspektivy (Essays in Soviet economics. Resources and perspectives) Moscow-Leningrad, published by the USSR Gosplan, 1928, pp. 476-498. The “Answer to Our Critics” was the concluding speech delivered by Strumilin at the Second Congress of Planning Agencies of the USSR.

1. “If a given system of measures was adopted and later was not carried out, this indicates that its assumptions were unrealistic, i.e., the prognosis concerning the probable tendency of the measures was erroneous.” This is the way Professor N. D. Kondrat’ev ends his piece “Planning and prognostication” in Puti sel’skogo khoziaistva, no. 2, 1927.