Planning of Manpower in the Soviet Union

A collective study of how the Soviet Union planned the use of its labour force, written by specialists and translated for readers abroad.

The structure is set out in the contents: Y. Dubrovsky introduces, K. Aslanyan covers the organisational principles of planning, L. Berry and G. Perov handle economic planning proper, and further chapters deal with the methods of ensuring full employment and the rational use of manpower.

Its interest is that it describes a genuinely different arrangement from the outside in. The argument running underneath is that capitalism is structurally incapable of planned full employment - that a reserve army of labour is not a malfunction of the system but a condition of it - and that a socialist economy, owning its own means of production, can therefore treat the employment of its labour resources as a problem of administration rather than of the market. Whether or not one accepts the frame, what follows is a detailed working account of how the machinery was supposed to operate: the balance of labour resources, the planning of training and of recruitment, the distribution of workers between sectors and regions, and the handling of seasonal and rural labour.

For a reader trying to understand how the Soviet economy actually allocated people to jobs, this is one of the plainest technical descriptions available in English, written by the planners rather than about them.

Translated by S. Vechor-Shcherbovich.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.