Word: stalinist
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Even on a lesser scale, economic sanctions have usually backfired. Moscow's attempt to elbow Marshal Tito into line in 1948 only forced the Yugoslavian Communist leader to turn to the West for trade-and drove him further from the Stalinist camp. The Organization of African Unity's solemn pledge to boycott all South African goods has been a joke: Zambia gets at least half its consumer products from Johannesburg, and the government-owned airline of leftist Mali serves South African oranges to its passengers...
...Realism. The need for drastic economic change became painfully evident in the mid-1950s, when Stalinist-tailored war economies - with their stress on heavy industry to the exclusion of consumer desires - began to cause widespread discontent. Yugoslavia was the first to move, after its break with the Kremlin in 1948, introducing a system of decentralized planning and establish ing "workers' councils" as co-managers of its factories. In 1956, Poland's "bread and freedom" riots in Poznan triggered reforms that - on paper, at least - far outdistanced Yugoslavia...
Soon even Moscow - in the voice of Evsei Liberman - was talking of "in centives" and the "profit motive," a green light to the East bloc that soon set Hungary, Bulgaria and even the Stalinist states of East Germany and Czechoslovakia to thinking about reform. Out of earshot of the West, economists began discussing things that the West would understand: bonuses and reinvestment, free prices and the need for incentives, even the accumulation of wealth-once a heretical thought under "egalitarian" Communism. Quite independently of one another, the prophets of profit began coming to the same conclusion: rigid Stalinist-style central...
Soviet reinvestment-on building the machine tools (and weapons) that the Soviets needed. Stalinist-minded Czech central planners (called "oxen" by many Czechs) blithely pumped billions of kroner in subsidies into moribund enterprises in order to make their master plans come true on paper. By 1963, Czech economic growth, which had been booming at 8% in 1949, had skidded to nothing-indeed, it actually was in decline, an unheard-of event in a planned economy...
...effect on Jan. 1. These include such nuts-and-bolts matters as the exact level of taxation to be charged on enterprise profits, the exact proportion of bonuses, the exact changes in various wholesale prices arising from the end of subsidy. They may not succeed: the "oxen" with their Stalinist axes have cut down reform before and may stall it again before the New Year rolls around...