Did the later Soviet Politburo depend only on CIA economic figures?

by tim_mcdaniel

Some years ago, I read a statement that in the 1970s or 1980s, the Soviet Politburo realized that internal economic figures were totally unusable, so they used only CIA economic estimates in their planning.

It was some source that appeared at the time to be at least plausible, but I don't know now what the source was. For all I know, it could have been anything from Time magazine to a Viktor Suvorov book. My searches were fruitless, but perhaps my Googlefu is weak. Also, it feels to me rather like an urban legend:

  • it reinforces listeners' beliefs (anti-Soviet ones, in this case)
  • it provides deep / secret knowledge
  • how would anyone know?

Did anyone recall hearing or reading of such a notion? Is there any evidence pertaining to it?

ROBOTNIXONSHEAD

I think the place to look on this would be Mark Sandle's 'Brezhnev Revisited', as it has an excellent chapter on late Soviet economic estimates, Or Alex Nove's 'An economic History the USSR'. Unfortunately I don't have access to my copies of either at the moment, but I'm sure some PDF-fu could find some info on this.

Smilin_Dave

I've not heard that before, I've actually heard an almost opposite variant which was that Yuri Andropov was aware of the 'real' economic figures because of his KGB ties - I think Dmitri Volkogonov made that claim though I've not seen much to endorse it.

It seems pretty unlikely to me. For a couple of reasons:

  • It was not as though the party-state got all its figures from one place, there were several departments, institutes and academics that reported on this type of thing using different methodologies.
  • If the Politburo thought their internal reporting was rubbish they would have changed how it was done rather than rely on a foreign intelligence agency. It isn't as though the Soviet economy never changed the way it did its accounting over its history, and a lot of experiments with different measures etc.
  • The Soviets would have been aware that the CIA's own estimates were partly guess work. The CIA had it base its estimates on what was available to them and then adjust based on assumptions. No matter how defective reporting in the economic system might have been, the state would have had access to more complete data.

Source-wise:

  • Steven Rosefielde "The Illusion of Material Progress: The Analytics of Soviet Economic Growth Revised" - academic journal article from 1991 that gives good insight into the challenges the CIA faced in evaluating the Soviet economy, and where they might have gone wrong. Also highlights some other estimates.

  • For some texts that cover the efforts of Soviet academics to present counter-orthodox views of the economy I would suggest Slava Gerovitch's "From Newspeak to Cyberspeak" and Abraham Katz "The Politics of Economic Reform in the Soviet Union". The Gerovitch book is much more recent but can be a bit difficult to get a handle on at times (a lot of it is about the use of language and narratives rather than 'guy X proposed this which meant Y in practical terms'). Katz covers a number of streams of 'liberal' economic thought in the Soviet Union.

  • The previously suggested Mark Sandle's "Brezhnev Revisited" is indeed pretty good. There are two older compilation texts Archie Brown and Michael Kaser edited that get much more into the nuts and bolts, capturing the various economic experiments in terms of planning and metrics during the mid 1960s, 70s and IIRC early 1980s.