Paper by Stanislaw Pomorski
‘Restructuring of the economy’ (perestroika ekonomiki) has recently made an impressive career as a phrase of the Soviet political parlance. It was thrown with great intensity at the delegates to the XXVII Congress of the CPSU as well as at the members of the party Central Committee convened for its June 1986 Plenum. The Soviet public has been showered with the phrase on an almost-daily basis, and Gorbachev was even campaigning for it on the streets of Soviet towns.
Obviously one cannot significantly restructure the Soviet economy without altering the status of its basic entity—the state enterprise. The importance of the enterprise has been, apparently, appreciated by the General Secretary who told the XXVII Congress:
In the final analysis, everything that we are doing to improve management and planning and to reorganize organizational structures is aimed at creating conditions for the effective operation of the basic element in the economic system—the association, the enterprise.
About four months later, in one of his major restructuring speeches, the General Secretary told the Central Committee members that a new law ‘on the socialist enterprise’ would be drafted and put into effect ‘in the shortest possible time.’ One of the recent Pravda front page editorials repeated the promise. Thus, there is every reason to believe that something is being prepared and should be out soon. The question is what it is and whether it will change the status quo in any significant way. There is no way of knowing for sure, of course, before the new enterprise law and patterns of its inplementation are available for examination. Nonetheless, a glance at the past record of Soviet economic reforms as well as an assessment of the intentions of the current leadership can give us tentative, if uncertain, answers.
About the Author
Stanislaw Pomorski. Distinguished Professor of Law, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey School of Law, Camden. Master of Law 1956, Doctor of Law 1968, University of Warsaw, Poland.
Citation
61 Tul. L. Rev. 1383 (1987)