Novosibirsk Report

NOVOSIBIRSK REPORT

The Novosibirsk Report was a document that helped provide the technical background for Gorbachev's perestroika policy.

The document that became known as the "Novosibirsk report" was written by Tatiana Zaslavskaya for a conference that was held in the western Siberian city of Novosibirsk in 1985. The organizers of that conference had a limited number of copies of her report made for participants in the conference. Within a short time, however, copies of the report were handed over to Western journalists in Moscow, ensuring that the document would become widely known and hotly debated. Communist Party officials sharply reprimanded Zaslavskaya and Abel Aganbegian, the chief organizer of the conference, for the unorthodox conclusions that she had offered. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the kind of thinking found in Zaslavkaya's writings was endorsed by the highest leadership of the Party–state regime. Zaslavskaya became one of Gorbachev's advisers, the head of the Soviet Sociological Association, and a member of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. She has become a legendary figure among Russian sociologists.

Zaslavskaya's report for the conference in Novosibirsk in 1983 was of great significance in Soviet intellectual history because it challenged principles that had been fundamental to the social sciences since they were imposed by Josef Stalin in the 1930s. Stalin had asserted that in a socialist society, in contrast to capitalist society, there was a basic consistency between the forces of production (including natural resources, labor, and technology) and the relations of production (the mechanisms of managing the economy). Zaslavskaya argued that in the Soviet Union, the level of technology and the skills and attitudes of the workforce had undergone enormous change since the 1930s, while the centralized institutions that managed the economy had changed very little, setting the system up for crisis unless basic changes were made. Stalin had also authored the doctrine of the moral and political unity of Soviet society, based on the assumption that there were no fundamental conflicts among classes or groups in the USSR. Zaslavskaya pointed out that there were groups with a vested interest in resisting changes in the system of management of the economy, and that reform would arouse conflicts among groups with mutually opposed interests. She also repudiated the habit of regarding workers as "labor resources" analagous to machines, and called for greater attention to the "human factor" in production, which would require consideration of the values and attitudes of workers, including their desire for a form of management that would give them greater independence. Zaslavskaya's reasoning provided the background for the drive for radical restructuring of the Soviet system, though she assumed that reform would take place within the framework of a socialist economy.

See also: perestroika; zaslavskaya, tatiana ivanovna

bibliography

Zaslavskaia, Tat'iana I. (1984). "The Novosibirsk Report." Survey 28(1):88–108.

Zaslavskaia, Tat'iana I. (1989). A Voice of Reform: Essays by Tat'iana I. Zaslavskaia, ed. and intro. Murray Yanowitch. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Zaslavskaia, Tat'iana I. (1990). The Second Socialist Revolution: An Alternative Soviet Strategy, tr. Susan M. Davies and Jenny Warren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Alfred B. Evans Jr.