Economists and Politics

This chapter examines the rapid shift in the late 1980s from the goal of building communism to the embrace of market-oriented reforms, through the lens of the political evolution of reform economics. The critical reassessment of Stalinism, initiated by the party leadership as part of a broader debate on socialism, allowed publications to criticize forced collectivization, the state ownership of social property, and the alienation of workers and peasants under Soviet state socialism. Within this moral discourse, shestidesiatniki (Sixtiers) intellectuals revived Lenin’s concept of the NEP as a model for democratic market socialism, contrasting it with Stalin’s “deformed socialism.” This reference to Lenin and the NEP catalyzed discussions on property reform and the role of the market in the Soviet Union. A significant development of the period was that the CPSU and its organs lost their monopoly on ideological discourse and decision-making after the announcement of glasnost and political reform. Some reform economists emerged as prominent public and political figures, engaging in debates in the press and parliament, while others actively participated in social movements of peasants and entrepreneurs, advocating for increasingly radical reforms, including a complete abandonment of socialism in favor of “universal values.”