Scientific and Technical Revolution

A book about efficiency by a man who had spent his working life inside the machinery of Soviet planning, written at the moment that machinery began unmistakably to run down.

S. A. Heinman was a professor and leading researcher at the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and a specialist in the economics of technical progress - one of the technicians of growth rather than one of its priests. Where the companion volume on this theme spoke in sixteen voices, this speaks in a single professional voice, and that is its interest: not the doctrine sung by a chorus of academicians but the doctrine as an economist tries to make it add up.

His subject is how new technology actually enters production - the structure of investment, the renewal of plant, the organisation of research and its distance from the factory, labour productivity, the specialisation and concentration of industry, and the material intensity of Soviet output. The detail is specific and technical, and much of the data on the Soviet economy's own performance is not easily found elsewhere in English.

The most valuable thing about it is how much of the shortfall Heinman is honest enough to record, in the very act of denying it means what it means.

The dating can be trusted: he quotes the Twenty-Sixth Congress as the newest word, cites the completed results of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, and reaches forward to the guidelines running to 1990, with his own statistical series closing in 1977.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.