Word: pravda
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Some two years ago, Kharkov Professor of Economics Evsei Liberman startled the Soviet establishment with a Pravda piece urging a switch from rigid, centralized Marxist planning to Western-style profit guidelines for factories. As Liberman saw it, factories would produce only what retail stores could sell. The proposal was more pre-revolutionary than revolutionary, and it touched off a storm of protest from orthodox Marxists...
...Pravda cocked an eyebrow recently at the Great Sewing Machine Scandal. A decade ago, the Soviet Union was short on sewing machines, so Marxism's planners pressed the "on" button. Immediately factories began competing to see who could turn out more sewing machines faster. Result: Russian seamstresses are awash in a sea of treadles and bobbins. "We have more than 150,000 machines accumulated here," complained a worker at the Podolsk Sewing Machine Factory, "and still we are making thousands of them every...
...Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, a government and party blat in Soviet Central Asia, vented its spleen on factories that produced fur hats too inferior to capture customers. One plant was fined $12,000 when it was discovered that only half its output of fur hats and other clothing had been inspected, and of that percentage fully one in five garments proved defective...
...papers waxed indignant over the state of the Soviet toy industry. "Toys are serious business," bellowed Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Tanks, armored cars, planes and armored trains, rifles and Tommy guns have almost disappeared," the paper said. The blame for this lamentable situation was laid to Nikita Khrushchev, who allegedly did not want to encourage warlike feelings among children. Pravda, on the other hand, called attention to unsold stocks of toys ($180 million worth in 1963), blamed central planners for misconstruing the public taste. "These monsters of plush, pâpier-maché, wood and stainless steel are costing the state...
Whether the newspaper outcries will be followed up by bolder moves toward decentralized planning remains to be seen. Less easily remedied, though, would be another complaint aired in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Writing from Leningrad, an engineer identified as L. Svetlanov heretically demanded the utmost in decentralization: individual freedom and "live spontaneity" in daily life. Deploring the "rehearsed informality" of Soviet society, Svetlanov described a typical "poetry night" in a Moscow cafe. "After the poets are through reciting," he wrote, "they sit at a separate table and talk animatedly among themselves. A couple of autograph hunters approach timidly. The jazz band plays...