Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Fixed price systems made it impossible to ascertain real costs, to respond to needs or to adapt to resource constraints. Administrators at every level were frightened of taking risks and innovating, lest they reduce aggregate output in the short term. In any case, they had no incentive: they were secure in their posts no matter how incompetent, thanks to Brezhnev’s well-known preference for the ‘stability of cadres’ (the watchword from 1971 onwards). Meanwhile, in order to make sure that they would meet targets set from above, factory foremen and managers took great pains to hide reserves of material and labour from the authorities. Waste and shortage were thus mutually self-sustaining. The predictable effect of such a system was to encourage not just stagnation and inefficiency but a permanent cycle of corruption. It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism.