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23 A Different Kind of Perestroika What, then, did Sakharov think the reform of the Soviet Union required? How, if at all, did his proposals and prescriptions evolve from 1987 to 1989, and how much did they correspond to what Gorbachev was enacting concurrently under the aegis of perestroika? On the Soviet economy, Sakharov’s views became more radical. In 1987 and through most of 1988, as Gorbachev proposed reforms that modified economic relations without changing the economic institutions themselves—such as allowing individual enterprises limited freedom in how they functioned but with the state continuing to own them—Sakharov was largely silent, focusing his attention on other matters.1 But in December 1988 he spoke out forcefully. In an interview with Zora Safir, a reporter for the Voice of America, he proclaimed that “without a market economy and without competition...economic restructuring is doomed to difficult times ahead and to a lack of effectiveness.”2 Two months later, in an interview he gave to Moscow News, Sakharov stated that the substantive purpose of his candidacy for election to the Congress of People’s Deputies was “to deepen and further perestroika” and that in furtherance of that objective he favored “a free market for labor, the means of production, raw materials, and intermediate products.”3 In addition, collective and state farms that were inefficient should be dissolved immediately, and industries shown to be nonprofitable “should be either leased out or sold to shareholders”; of those that were left, the largest should be broken up into smaller ones “to encourage capitalism and to eliminate monopoly pricing.”4 Sakharov’s endorsement of capitalism, which he reiterated in the platform he formulated on behalf of his candidacy, was obviously something Gorbachev could never accept.5 For the general secretary, economic reform—indeed, reform of any kind—should not exceed the limits imposed by the socialism he espoused. Certainly the laws on industrial and state enterprise Gorbachev announced in late 1986 and the reforms the Central Committee plenum considered in June 1987 fell far short of what Sakharov would advocate eighteen months later.6 The question remains, however, what Sakharov actually meant by “capitalism.” Significantly, he did not call for a free market per se, only for a free market for labor. Similarly, he did not call for the complete dismantling of the collective farms, only for the dismantling of those that were unprofitable. 1. Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 279. 2. Interview with Zora Safir, 6. 3. Andrei Sakharov, “For Peace and Progress,” Moscow News, February 5, 1989, 8. 4. Ibid. 5. “Programma A. D. Sakharova,” 6. 6. Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 279; Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, 10. A Different Kind of Perestroika 355 Nor did he call for the denationalization of state property.7 Rather, what Sakharov seems to have envisioned, at least for the immediate future, was a mixed economy in which state-owned and privately owned enterprises competed vigorously with each other, in much the same way they were meant to do in the 1920s under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). As Sakharov stated explicitly in June 1989, there should be “a pluralization of the economy so that all forms of property will finally become legally and economically equal.”8 But the neo-NEP Sakharov advocated was really the NEP in reverse. Instead of evolving toward socialism, as the Bolsheviks thought the original NEP would do, this new mixed economy would evolve toward capitalism—a nonrapacious and regulated form of capitalism—in which there would be no monopolies to curtail competition, and much of the cradle-to-grave security to which the Soviet people had grown accustomed would be preserved.9 In this respect it is significant that in his memoirs , in the context of describing convergence—which for Sakharov remained the point at which all ongoing historical processes come to an end—he stated that economically it entailed “a market and competition.”10 Sakharov’s belief that this humane capitalism could be achieved in the Soviet Union through a process of evolution, without a formal mandate from the government or any other institution in society, was notable for what it suggested about socialist systems that sought to transform themselves into capitalist ones. The kind of transformation Sakharov advocated was the opposite of what the Soviet Union initiated in the 1920s and 1930s and of what other countries experienced at other times in the twentieth century. He proposed the...

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