Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

Slava chose a good time to submit the plan, three months after Gorbachev came to power and a full two years earlier than the original June 1987 plenary session's passage of the "Law on State-Owned Enterprises".

At this time, Gorbachev had just finished the April Plenum and put forward the slogan of accelerating development strategy, but the word "reform" was not yet used—reform as a program was not formally put forward until the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February 1986.

This means that Gorbachev is currently searching for a program; he knows change is needed, but he doesn't know where to change to. During this period, his economic advisors are also fighting amongst themselves.

Agambegyan advocated for a more thorough marketization, Ryzhkov advocated for a steady planned reform, and Tikhko advocated for technology upgrading to drive development (he was the main one who proposed the accelerated development path).

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If this plan had been made three months earlier, Gorbachev would have been too busy consolidating his power to look at it; if it had been made a year later, Gorbachev's program would have been largely finalized, making it difficult to incorporate anything new.

The second half of 1985 was a truly favorable window of opportunity for Slava.

Ryzhkov, a seasoned and cunning veteran, has been working in party affairs for decades. His writing skills far surpass those of Slava. This kind of person is extremely shrewd; he can cleverly integrate his own objectives into materials that best suit the leader's wishes.

So when Gotti saw this plan, he was overjoyed. This plan, "submitted by Prime Minister Ryzhkov," perfectly matched the reform narrative he was building:

Democratization, autonomy, the human factor, the self-improvement of socialism...

Every keyword he repeatedly used in 1985 can be found in this plan!

"Great! Very good! Excellent!" He was overjoyed and immediately handed it over to his team of economic advisors.

"However... approving the proposal immediately after submission would raise suspicion, especially since it's Ryzhkov's proposal. That old man is getting a bit too close to Ivanov, which is a bit dangerous—"

I think we should form a committee to thoroughly 'discuss' the details and create a better version tailored to me.

The plan thus flowed from the General Secretary's desk to the think tank composed of economists—a veritable constellation of brilliant minds.

Abel Agambegyan, an Armenian economist, was the director of the Institute of Economics at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Nikolai Petrakov, representative of the market faction at the Central Institute for Economic Mathematics;

Stanislav Shatalin, one of the main drafters of the 500-day plan.

These individuals represented different directions of reform within the Soviet economics community, ranging from moderate planned reforms to radical marketization—but under Gorbachev's coordination, they were temporarily placed in the same team to serve the same goal:

To find a path for the General Secretary's reforms that is economically feasible, politically feasible, and ideologically justifiable.

At the same time, Ryzhkov, in his capacity as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, approved pilot programs in several state-owned enterprises in three regions.

As for the specific pilot implementation work?

Of course, it was handed over to Slava!

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The first thing Slava did after receiving the pilot assignment was to find people.

When he was the secretary of the agricultural department in Amur Oblast, he didn't like to ask higher authorities for personnel. He preferred to find local cadres who had done practical work at the grassroots level, understood factory operations, and had enthusiasm and judgment for reform.

After traveling around Ukraine, he settled on a name: Mikhail Vladimirovich Krasovsky.

Krasovsky is 38 years old. His elders participated in the Great Patriotic War, and after retiring from the army, he has been working at the grassroots level. He is currently the deputy secretary of a district committee in Vinnytsia Oblast.

Before becoming deputy secretary, he had also served as deputy director of a food processing plant—an engineer by training, with experience in both factories and the Party system, an interest in information technology, and, more importantly, a quality extremely rare among grassroots cadres in the Soviet Union:

He will admit that he doesn't understand.

While it's a major no-no for an amateur to direct an expert, we've seen far too many cases like this in the Slava League.

From factories in Leningrad to cotton fields in Tashkent, every cadre was trained to give something that sounded like an answer in any situation, even if he knew nothing about the problem.

Krasovsky was different. When Slava asked him, "How do you think a workers' council should operate in a sugar factory?", he replied:

"I'm sorry, Comrade Ivanov, I haven't thought it through yet. I think I need to go and see the actual situation of the factory first, or at least do some research."

"Good, the Party and the people need good cadres like you, you're the one!"

Slava made the decision on the spot.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

In early August, Slava and Krasovsky began a project that would be significant in the history of reforms in the Soviet Union—

The study examines Lenin's original ideas about worker management and Soviet democracy, and then attempts to extract some aspects that can be applied to Ukrainian factories.

This is no easy academic task. The fifty-five volumes of Lenin's Collected Works occupy two whole rows on the bookshelves of the Vinnytsia Regional Committee Library, and the expression on Lenin's bust on the cover is slightly different in different editions.

Some were serious, some were resolute, and some looked like they were angry with a Menshevik.

Krasovsky began turning to Volume 34. That was a work from 1918, the first year after the establishment of Soviet power, and all the core debates about worker supervision, labor discipline, and one-man rule versus collective management were concentrated in this volume and the adjacent volumes.

"In 1917, the slogan of the October Revolution was 'All power to the Soviets.'"

Slava sat in the library one afternoon and gave Krasovsky a guided reading, surrounded by books and notes covering the table.

He had learned some of this knowledge in the world before he traveled through the internet and documentaries, and after arriving in this world, he had further lessons from Andropov.

"But from the beginning of 1918, the Soviets were quickly sidelined by the party organization. This process was very fast - after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1918 and the elimination of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party in the same year, only the Bolsheviks remained in the Soviets. After the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, the Party's Organization Bureau began to systematically appoint the heads of local Soviets - in form, the Soviets elected chairmen, but in reality, the party decided who could be the candidates."

By the early 1920s, this pattern had solidified and remained unchanged.

"But didn't Lenin know at the time that this was undermining the Soviets?" Krasovsky asked an intuitively good question.

"Of course he knew, because the Soviet Union was in its most dangerous period at that time. In 1917, 14 capitalist countries intervened militarily in the Russian Civil War, while we were still in the midst of our own civil war."

You know about War Communism back then; we paid a heavy price to drive the capitalist coalition out of Soviet Russia.”

During the civil war from 1918 to 1921, all decision-making required extreme centralization and speed. Local Soviets were directly replaced by revolutionary military committees in the front areas, and in the rear by emergency committees of party committees at all levels.

Grain requisition, troop mobilization, factory militarization... these things could no longer be accomplished through Soviet debates.

War Communism turned the entire country into a military camp.

"In April 1918, Lenin proposed the one-man leadership system and Taylorism in his article 'The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power,' because he found that workers' committees were ineffective in managing factories—the workers' education level was too low, their organizational experience too limited, and the civil war demanded rapid centralization of all decisions. He wrote a passage in that article—"

Slava turned to the marked page and read it aloud:

"Calculation and supervision—this is the main thing necessary for the first stage of socialism to regulate the normal activities of communist society... Socialism cannot be conceived without comprehensive state calculation and supervision."

When the Bolsheviks seized power, industrial workers made up only a few percent of the population in Russia, and a large proportion of them died in the civil war or were absorbed into the party and government organs!

Therefore, by 1921, the "dictatorship of the working class" could no longer find many proletarians—a considerable number of workers had become Red Army soldiers, Cheka cadres, and chairmen of local Soviets.

PS: Even Russia, which had a relatively high level of industrialization, faced this problem, let alone Lao Zhong, who was still in an agricultural society at the time. Therefore, the strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside, seizing power by armed force, and carrying out a worker-peasant revolution was in line with Lao Zhong's situation at the time.

In 1921, this hollowing out made any form of workers' democracy paradoxical: you wanted workers to be in charge, but the truly skilled workers were either dead or in government positions, leaving behind a new workforce of rural migrants to the cities, with low levels of education and organization.

Lenin was facing a country that ruled in the name of the working class, but the working class as a conscious political entity was in grave danger.

Under these conditions, the Party organization will almost inevitably replace the class it was originally meant to serve. This is a problem that Trotsky, Bukharin, various left-wing oppositions, and even the reformers of the Gorbachev era repeatedly tried to solve, but none of them were able to.

“Lenin began to reflect in his later years,” Slava said, closing the book.

“After his first stroke in 1922—less than a year before he had completely lost his ability to speak—he dictated a series of documents that would later be known as his ‘political testament’.”

You can find these things in Comrade Khrushchev's "secret report" after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which contains a lot of criticism of Comrade Stalin. As for whether the so-called "Lenin's dictated political testament" now being presented is authentic or has been manipulated by Comrade Khrushchev, that's a matter of opinion." Slava shrugged.

"In short! In those documents he said that the Party and state organs were 'largely remnants of the old organs,' only with a different name."

Lenin also said that the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection Office, originally intended to supervise bureaucrats, had ultimately become bureaucratized itself. In his famous work, "Better Less, Better," he almost desperately called for a complete overhaul of the supervisory system, and in his "political testament," he specifically warned Stalin that he held too much power and suggested removing him from the position of General Secretary.

We will not discuss the last part for now, because after Lenin's death in 1924, this 'will' was suppressed by the Politburo and was not made public until Khrushchev's secret report in 1956.

If I ever visit my mentor, I'll definitely ask him how much Comrade Khrushchev altered in his will.

P.S.: We still don't know exactly how much of Khrushchev's personal agenda he included in his will.

Slava paused and looked at Krasovsky, who was quickly jotting something down in his notebook.

"It was too late by then, there was no time left. His health deteriorated rapidly, he was paralyzed on one side of his body, and the system he had built—one-party system, prohibition of factions, cadre appointment, Cheka... had become a self-operating machine, and Stalin was the most skilled operator of this machine."

As for the tools Lenin wanted to use to correct course—the Politburo's public disclosure of his will and the mobilization of party forces—these all had to go through the party's organizational system, which was already in Stalin's hands.

"So Soviet democracy only lasted such a short time?"

"It survived for some time politically, but as an economic governing body—it was virtually nonexistent. There was a window of about eight or nine months from October 1917 to the summer of 1918, during which it may have had some initial vitality, but that was the end of it."

There was no other way; at that time, 14 countries sent a coalition to intervene in the Russian Civil War, and the Soviet regime was on the verge of collapse, so how could it care about this? After the war, there was an opportunity to put it back on track, but...

Lenin died at the most critical moment.

What Slava wanted to restore never truly existed.

They are not restoring the past, but completing the unfinished work of their mentor!

"Don't be discouraged. Just because something never existed doesn't mean it can never exist. Electric lights didn't exist for tens of thousands of years before they were invented, did they?"

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The actual implementation of the reforms began in early July, with two light industrial factories in Vinnytsia Oblast selected as pilot enterprises—a textile factory and a sugar factory.

Slava deliberately chose light industry over heavy industry. Light industry enterprises are relatively small in scale, their products are geared towards consumers rather than the military, and they are less sensitive to national strategy. In such enterprises, if problems arise with the experimental worker committees and oversight mechanisms, the impact is controllable.

The key is that if it succeeds, ordinary consumers will quickly feel the effects. When citizens buy better fabrics, they will know that the reforms are working.

After receiving the pilot assignment, Krasovsky's first action was to spend a week in the factory, going down into the workshop and standing next to the machines with the workers to watch how they operated them, queuing up for meals with them in the canteen, and listening to them cursing the factory director and party secretary in the corridor of the toilet, as if no one was listening.

A week later, he returned and submitted a report to Slava:

One-third of the textile factory's equipment consists of old machines from the 1960s. Spare parts are in short supply year-round, and the average monthly wage for workers is 180 rubles, but the combined bonuses of the factory director and several workshop foremen are several times that of the workers.

The factory's Party Secretary and Director disliked each other, but they cooperated seamlessly when it came to falsifying production figures for their superiors.

The situation was slightly better for sugar mills, but the core problem was similar—the supply of raw material sugar beets was subject to the delivery schedule of collective farms, which was determined by planned targets rather than the actual production cycle.

As a result, every autumn, some of the sugar beets would rot at the factory gate because the processing line couldn't handle them. In other seasons, the processing line would be idle because there was no raw material.

What do the workers do when the processing line is idle? They clock in, collect their wages, and then skip work to go out and have fun.

It's too free.

When Andropov was in office, he could send people to bring the workers back to the factory to work. After Andropov left, Chernenko abolished this policy, and the workers were able to go out and play again.

After reading the report, Slava said, "The classic Soviet problems: lack of transparency, distorted incentives, and a mismatch between supply and demand... Do you think the workers' council can solve these problems?"

"It's difficult! But at least one problem can be solved—letting the workers know the true state of the factory's operations."

The workers nowadays know nothing. They don't know how much the factory is losing money, where the profits are going, or why their wages aren't increasing while the factory manager's bonuses are.

We put the data on the table so everyone could see it, so at least the workers knew what they were voting for when they voted.

"The premise is that the data is true."

"Therefore, it needs to be paired with OGAS. The workers' committee can access the data generated by the information system. If the factory manager wants to manipulate the numbers, he has to get past the system."

Slava nodded.

This was exactly his idea when designing the whole scheme: information transparency is the prerequisite for multi-faceted supervision; without the data support of OGAS, any supervision mechanism is just a rubber stamp.

Workers' committees are not a panacea, but they can at least answer a question that the Soviet system could not answer for seventy years in a specific enterprise:

Who will supervise the supervisors?

Only the people.

However, he remained cautious about the effectiveness of this plan, and he specifically wrote in a letter to Director Nian:

"My concern is not the plan itself, but how Gorbachev will use it."

He'll certainly like the rhetoric of this plan—the talk of democracy, autonomy, and worker participation—but in practice, he'll definitely do what I don't want him to do.

First, he would grant too much autonomy to the enterprise too quickly, and the corresponding oversight mechanism would not be established in time, resulting in the factory manager becoming an uncontrollable little Hitler.

Second, he would make enterprises responsible for their own profits and losses without reforming prices. In an environment where price signals are completely distorted, making enterprises responsible for their own profits and losses is like letting a blind person drive.

Third, he will simultaneously launch political reforms, which will deplete his political capital, ultimately leaving him unable to obtain sufficient resources to advance either economic or political reforms.

This plan needs someone willing to patiently work on it for ten years to succeed, but Gorbachev is someone who wants results tomorrow.

Director Nian's reply was brief: "Well said, I completely agree. But do you have a better option?"

No.

The real tragedy was that no one in the Politburo in 1985 could find a better choice than Gorbachev.

Historically, Gorbachev's "Reform and New Thinking" in 1987 and the "Law on State-Owned Enterprises" passed by the plenary session in June of the same year both aimed to make enterprises operate independently, assume responsibility for their own profits and losses, raise their own funds, expand the power of factory directors, establish collective labor committees, reduce mandatory planning, introduce contractual relationships, and gradually loosen prices.

On the surface, this is the standard packaging of market socialism + industrial democracy.

He particularly liked to find legitimacy for himself in Lenin's words; in his speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1987, he quoted extensively from the early Lenin and Bukharin.

But then the problem arises:

He maintained a dual power structure, which resulted in neither side functioning properly.

For his proposed market-oriented enterprise reforms to be effective, the chain of command had to be severed, allowing enterprises to truly face the market and contracts. His "State-Owned Enterprise Law" nominally accomplished this—enterprises gained autonomy. However, he simultaneously retained the ministerial system and the State Material Supply Commission, allowing them to continue issuing "state orders."