Lev VOLODARSKY


Translated from the Russian by Jane SayeT Designed by Ivan Karpikov
Лев Володарский
СЧЕТ ПАМЯТИ.
ЗАПИСКИ ЧЛЕНА ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВА На английском языке
© Издательство «Прогресс», 1983 English translation © Progress Publishers 1983
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
4702010200—454
без объявл.
В
014(01)—83


CONTENTS
A Note from the Author 5
Bread Comes Before Anything Else 9
“Whose Name Is Not a Word but a Banner”
The Hotel on Nevsky Prospekt 48
“YCL Squadron” 66
Code Number—“OS 6” 74
A Feat of Labour and Spirit 91
At “Voznesensky’s School” 103
Fate’s Crossroads 118
The Reliable Figure 134
The Statistically Average Person? 145
My “Keys to Life” 171
We Need a Common Language 183
Our Point of View 202
Afterword 215


AT “VOZNESENSKY’S SCHOOL”
All my life I have been surrounded by good people, people for whom a striving for knowledge, the need to advance and improve themselves were the rule. Among these people who exerted a major influence on me, and to a certain extent became examples for me, I would like to pick out, in particular, Nikolai Voznesensky. I consider myself very lucky that I encountered him several times in my life, both directly and indirectly.
Infinitely devoted to his country, people and the Communist Party, a man of tremendous knowledge and fantastic ability to work, he was an excellent leader and organiser, both demanding and attentive, always ready to give assistance.
His direct influence on me began when I was working as a Gosplan commissioner, and continued when I was transferred from Leningrad to Moscow. Counting the time when I read the first works by this famous economist and considering that the skills I acquired from working with him I find useful to this day, the period of his influence covers virtually all my working life.
At fifteen a YCL leader; at sixteen already a Communist; at 32 a recognised research economist; at 34 the head of the country’s economic headquarters—
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USSR Gosplan; at 37 First Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR; at 39 a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; at 43 a member of the Politbureau of the Party Central Committee: such were the landmarks in Voznesensky’s biography.
To me it seems worthwhile to judge a person from the contribution he has made to the life of the country than to look at his personal characteristics. It is my conviction many times proved in practice, that the true role of a foresighted statesman may be assessed according to qualities that go beyond the personal frame.
For me, the measure of a person has always been the extent of his interest in his society, I am sure that anyone who compares his everyday actions with the interests of society and the people deserves deep respect. Voznesensky was just such a person.
I recall that, right at the beginning of 1941, there was a conference in Moscow. A group of comrades, including myself, were given the task of preparing its draft decision, precisely formulating in it the chief guidelines for the future work of the USSR Gosplan commissioners.
We drew up the draft carefully and considered the final version to be complete. But a day later Voznesensky proved to us all that the document was far from perfect. Our definition of the commissioners’ functions and tasks did not include variants taking into account the specifics of the various regions of the country. Voznesensky was disappointed that we had not considered the organisational aspects of transport links between regions in sufficient detail. A few months later we saw how right he had been: the war
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ke out with nazi Germany and the immediate niass evacuation of citizens and equipment Was re-
4UVVhen we were discussing the draft, Voznesemkv
turned to me and asked: y
“How could you, Comrade Volodarsky, a Candidate
0f Economics, have failed to take this into consid-
0»
erationr
“Actually, I’m not a Candidate of Economics, but that in no way excuses me,” I replied, since I had not yet defended my thesis.
Voznesensky reacted instantly:
“Not a Candidate yet, but you will be. And a D. Sc., too, if you understand correctly the extent of your responsibility before the people. Examine yourself in everything you do according to the highest standards.”
I had known and heard a lot about Voznesensky in Leningrad. In early 1935 Zhdanov asked for Voznesensky to be sent to Leningrad to head the city planning commission. His request was granted, and among Leningrad economists the news was met with approval.
Once Voznesensky arrived, the members of the planning commission could hardly ever be found at their desks—they were always in workshops, at public amenities enterprises, on building sites, at tram garages, at factories, or in shops—each according to his own field. Many of them really began to penetrate the economic life of the city for the first time, feeling it not only through columns of figures, directives and documents, but in all its nuances and contradictions. This is what the new head wanted from his subordinates,
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As head of the USSR State Planning Committee. Voznesensky began with the same delicate and complicated matter—the selection and training of staff; he sought experts with initiative, with a flexible and efficient way of thinking. He made these demands on any worker, whatever his post.
In order to turn the socialist planning bodies into militant headquarters for checking on the fulfilment of the national economic plans, Voznesensky put such highly-qualified experts at the head of Gosplan that they could converse a level with the heads of ministries (people’s commissariats, as they were then called). The Gosplan directives were distinguished by a thrifty approach to the possibilities of both each individual region and the state as a whole. Economists began to talk about “Voznesensky’s School”.
The “school” confirmed its vitality by rapidly transferring the economy of the huge country on to military lines when nazi Germany attacked the USSR.
In December 1942, it was suggested that I go to Moscow. It did not take me long to get ready—my possessions consisted of a small suitcase with essentials and a couple of books. My departure was delayed by the weather—for ten nights in a row I went to the airport only to return in the morning.
Phone calls on behalf of Voznesensky came every day, and sometimes he even rang personally to ask why I had not yet left.
I explained.
On New Year’s Eve I left for Moscow. By mid-day I was in Moscow and two hours later Voznesensky received me. His first question was whether I had had
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1 я
^nutted I had had neither breakfast nor jUjich- 1 asked someone to show me the canteen. lunc*1’ ^943 sitting in my office at USSR Gos-
I saV^sat there until about 3 a.m., reading papers
pla*1- \ \i(ig of my family. At about four o’clock in
I went to my hotel then called “Asto-
the now “Berlin”, and spent the rest of the
ria t »s night there. I ate a sandwhich and went
New Iе*1
t0Qn^ in 1943 was I allowed to go to Sverd- in the Urals, where my wife and family had ° since being evacuated, in order to bring them took to Moscow.
When I arrived in Sverdlovsk I found out that, the day before, they had already left for Moscow, so we had passed each other on the way. The same evening I had to take the train back. I could imagine how my family would feel when nobody met them at the station. But, as it turned out, I need not have worried. Colleagues from Gosplan received the telegram giving my family’s arrival time and met them, helping them to get to Third Meshchanskaya Street, where we had been given a flat. They had brought in some food and a few essentials, and made something to eat.
When I arrived in the capital a couple of days later, I came back to a virtually “lived-in” home.
There was a lot of work to do and I saw little of family. Now, almost forty years since that spring 1943, a lot has, of course, been erased from my whh OI7> a lot has been forgotten. But my meeting тУ dear ones after the long, difficult period Ration then brought me new strength and is ШУ most treasured memories.
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* * *
Working in direct contact with Voznesensky, we all passed through his same strict “school”, where the main subject was exactingness. From his subordinates he demanded thoroughness and everything they coidd give. He had a perfect knowledge of economic proportions, the correlations between industries and types of output, and believed that we should look at all things broadly and, when solving partial problems, should always co-ordinate them with the general tasks involved in developing the country’s economy, taking both inter-regional and inter-industry interests into account.
He would not accept a project unless the author could prove convincingly, with specific calculations and computations, not only the partial, but also the overall benefit to be derived from it. Initially I was concerned with fuel-supply problems. Whenever I reported to Voznesensky on a possible Gosplan decision, I always took with me a sheet of calculations going beyond the particular issue.
Voznesensky never brought pressure to bear with his authority, never imposed his own view. He set tasks in the form of the conditions of a precise problem; the solution and choice of methods he left to his subordinates. He gave calm but not indifferent approval of successful work, making it clear that a good piece of work carried out by subordinates is an honour for their head.
Once asked whether figures did not tire him, he replied that, while words make it possible to communicate with one another, figures allow one to communicate with time. Tq foresee and embody an
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idea in calculations, and then make it reality: this was the attraction of figures for Voznesensky.
In 1943, still long before the victorious end of the war, Gosplan elaborated a plan for restoring the national economy in regions liberated from nazi occupation.
Some of our comrades thought that efforts and means should be concentrated on restoring industry, while housing could wait till the end of the war. When Voznesensky heard such views, he would make a dry and firm objection: “The war has caused the Soviet people inexpressible difficulties. Yes, they could survive even worse. But what they have survived is enough. We must think about the peaceful future. And tomorrow the Soviet man must both work and live under normal conditions.”
He insisted that the maximum possible funds be allocated for restoring housing and that a special day- to-day accountability be instituted—the Gosplan commissioners had to report every five days on how many people had been moved to new or repaired houses.
During the restoration of the national economies of the liberated regions, the Government set the task of not simply recreating what had existed before, but also of considering this as a reconstruction process making it possible, in addition to attaining the prewar level of production, to iron out the defects that had existed before the war in the location of productive forces. We were to locate large enterprises close to raw material sources and, where possible, duplicate these sources. When restoring towns and villages, their old lay-out was to be reviewed, taking into account the prospects for development, and the geo-
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graphical and climatic specifics in each individual case.
The material loss inflicted on the Soviet people by the war came to an astronomical sum—hundreds of billions of roubles. Hundreds of towns and over 70,000 villages were razed to the ground. About 25 million people were left homeless.
The nazis bombed and burned almost thirty-two thousand industrial enterprises, sixty-five thousand kilometres of railway track, and four thousand one hundred railway stations—and this is a far from complete list of the losses to our economy. The total expenditure on the war and damage to enterprises, co-operatives and the population in the course of it amounted to 1,890 billion roubles (according to the old price scale).
And twenty million Soviet lives were lost during the war. Apart from those who died in battle, this figure includes thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens who were shot, hanged, or strangled in special mobile murder vehicles. Gas chambers, the deliberate spread of infectious diseases, monstrously cruel experiments carried out on people—under the plan for exterminating the Soviet people—this was all methodically carried out by the nazis on temporarily occupied territories and in their notorious concentration camps.
I served on one of the commissions determining the extent of the destruction to the economy and culture of the regions of the USSR that suffered under the occupation. To this day I cannot forget some of the facts that we had to study at that time In the Leningrad Region alone, over 172,000 peaceful citizens were murdered or tortured. In the Crimea
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almost 150,000 people were crowded on to barges, dragged out to sea and sunk. At Baby Yar, near Kiev, the nazis shot over 100,000 men, women, children and old people. On May 8, 1942, in the Byelorussian town of Lida, 5,670 inhabitants were stripped naked, herded a hundred at a time into a pit and shot down by machine-guns. Many were buried alive.
The nazis mercilessly exterminated children. They killed them together with their parents, in groups and singly. In two months, in the city of Lvov, eight thousand children were killed in the Yanovsk concentration camp. At the resort of Teberda five hundred children being treated for tuberculosis of the bones were murdered. Not a single town temporarily occupied by the enemy got away without hundreds of the peaceful population falling victim.
As a child I used to think it strange that such strong, courageous people as Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Kirov hated war. I wondered why even our legendary military commanders—Voroshilov, Budyonny and Blucher spoke against war. Surely this was a contradiction? After all, the simplest thing is to defeat the enemy, and then there would be no more war in the world. Later, when I studied the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, I realised that it is not those who benefit from human slaughter and themselves unleash it that are left behind on the battlefield.
An ineradicable hatred for war became my credo when, together with all other Soviet people, I was forced to drink from its bitter cup. I shudder when I remember the war—not because I am cowardly. I am no hero, but neither am I a coward. It is simply that I immediately see before my eyes the most ter-
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rible thing of all—the death of innocent people, old people, women and children, from shelling and hunger.
We triumphed over what seemed to be an insurmountable enemy. We overcame the destruction. We fed the hungry. But what statistician could calculate the creative potential lost during the war, the potential in those twenty million dead?
Those in the West who spread the lie concerning the Soviet military threat are deliberately avoiding the truth. The Soviet poet Evgeny Yevtushenko has written an excellent poem entitled “Do the Russians Want War?”. I am convinced that every Soviet person would willingly sign his name to this poem.
But I have strayed somewhat from my account of Voznesensky.
He always managed to do everything on time, however much work he had to shoulder. He did not like the “silent majority” and always, when making a decision, asked everybody’s opinion personally. Those who held a view differing from his own were asked to speak and support their attitude. Then, if their conclusions did not strike him as being weighty ones, he would himself speak, giving a clear and well- founded explanation of where, in his opinion, his opponent’s error lay.
However significant and deep certain facts may seem, he always stressed, in themselves they were nothing unless perceived in their interconnections and it was understood that a change in the order ot the facts and related actions usually produces a new result, and one that is fundamentally new.
Voznesensky dealt with the problems of scientific forecasting, based on a knowledge of the objective
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laws governing the development of the socialist national economy, from the scientific, production, and social angle; the creation of a Unified Power Grid and transport system for the whole country; he attached considerable significance to credit and costaccounting as levers and stimuli for a growth in labour productivity. Considering cost-accounting as a vital instrument of the planned socialist economy, Voznesensky stressed its role as the most effective form of control and accounting in the production, exchange and distribution of output.
Proceeding from Lenin’s instructions on the transforming role of socialist planning, Voznesensky implemented flexible planning, taking maximum account of the practical possibilities of those who were to put the plan into practice.
Under his leadership, the state programme was elaborated for introducing and mastering new technology, a programme that gave a glimpse of the distant future. For instance, it raised such major issues involved in the development of the USSR’s national economy as the creation of new iron and steel and non-ferrous metallurgy centres, the modernisation of rail transport, the construction of the Baikal- Amur railway, and the organisation of a fuel base in the northern European regions of the USSR.
The realisation of programme was put off far into the future by the advent of war.
Impetuous, intolerant of indifference and sitting on the fence, Voznesensky wanted to know exactly what each of his associates was capable of, the business and moral qualities of each of them. He could not stand poor preparation of documents, but valued and supported people who were knowledgeable and
8—1970
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thorough- I think there was probably only one reason for his exactingness and sometimes even sharpness— a deep concern for the matter to which he had devoted himself, the highest professionalism.
In spite of his stern temper, Voznesensky was unusually easy to appease; he had a quality that is of extreme importance for a leader—he could forgive and forget. He never bore malice, but was open, direct and honest—and these qualities won over all
those who knew him well.
Working by his side provided me with important
lessons in a responsible attitude to statistical material and an understanding that accurate, realistic and scientifically substantiated planning of the national economy required not only accountability on time, but also a high standard.
Once, when checking statistics on the death rate, Voznesensky noticed that the “cause of death” of one man had been given as “died from hunger . Considering that he was giving the graph a quick look through to check that the overall accounting was correct, it would not have been surprising if he had passed over this single case. But, in fact, he arranged a business trip to the place where the deceased person had lived. When he got there, he was proved right in thinking that the cause of death given had been a false one. Continuing his checks on original documents, Voznesensky discovered a mass of flagrant infringements and errors. The considerable amount of work, initiated by this one case that bad aroused Voznesensky’s suspicions, resulted in a thorough report to the Government on measures to #mPr°ve registration of the population.
Qn one occasion, Chairman of USSR Gosplan rang
tl4


the Head of the Central Board for National Economic Accounting:
“Do you happen to have Lenin’s works on hand? he asked.
“Yes, I do,” came the reply.
“Then take the Central Statistical Board’s census and read me the letter of August 16, 1921 aloud, please,” said Voznesensky.
The perplexed official at the other end of the line began reading aloud: “. . . the chairman or head of the CSB must work in closer contact with Gosplan, according to the direct orders and tasks set by the chairman of Gosplan or its presidium... For practical work we must have figures, and the CSB must have them before all others. . .”
“Well, do you agree?” Voznesensky asked.
“With what?”
“With Lenin’s letter! With the fact that the figures given to Gosplan must not be out of date. Come over here immediately for a serious talk.”
Voznesensky managed to get the statisticians to provide Gosplan with current figures on the main production indicators. During the war, on Voznesensky’s insistence, accounts came in every day. After the war, current accounting was unified and the CSB now provides the directive bodies with weekly reports on the state of affairs in the country.
I recall how, one late February evening in 1943,
be summoned me and said:
I suddenly seem to have a couple of hours free.
And we have hardly had a chance to have a quiet
ta|k since you arrived from Leningrad. If you don’t mind..
* did not, of course, object.
8*
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We talked for over three hours. Voznesensky told me about the fine points of planning under wartime conditions, advised me to support and implement any rational idea, however tiny, that might lead to something in the national interests.
“We have a mighty weapon in our hands—economic planning. We must use it skilfully, carefully and, most important, remember its long-term effects. I want you to be thoroughly familiar with it.”
I often recall Voznesensky’s words, especially about the long-term effects of our plans.
He loved literature and followed its development closely. Once, after considering an important document, Voznesensky suddenly asked me:
“Have you read Azhayev’s book Far from Moscow?” “Yes, I have, I liked it very much.”
We held similar opinions of the work. The conversation then went on to the writings of Ilia Ehren- burg and Nikolai Tikhonov’s poems. We talked about the fact that the war theme would produce many wonderful works, that a recognition of its difficulties, adversities and losses could not but stimulate writers and poets. Glancing at his watch, Voznesensky said: “Not only writers and poets, but us economists, too. After the war, our experience and creative impetus must create an economy that will make any aggressor stop in his tracks. And that will mean war is impossible.”
I have already mentioned Voznesensky’s strictness, and I, too, got the rough end of it on several occasions. At times, in my opinion, not completely fairly. At the same time, I could not but see and understand that Gosplan’s Chairman reacted excessively as a consequence of his superhuman work load and the
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colossal responsibility he shouldered. Maybe, for this reason, my memories of wounded pride are very vague. But certain moments will never be forgotten.
I was awarded the Order of the Red Star. When I returned to Gosplan after receiving the order I found out that Voznesensky had summoned me. I went to him immediately. There were already some visitors in his room, but he asked me to come in. Then, apologising to the comrades, he took me by the shoulder, led me to the window and with a certain youthful excitement exclaimed:
“What a beautiful order! I am delighted!”
From the instances I have related it might seem that Voznesensky singled me out for attention, virtually favouring me, but this was not so. He never singled me out from among the other Gosplan workers. And he helped many of them, always being sincerely pleased when the work of one of them received particular recognition.