From 1928-1973 the economy of the Soviet Union grew faster than the rival USA. After that there was a slowing down of progress. In 1986 new leader Gorbachev blamed the slowdown on Brezhnev and started a program to bring market forces into the industrial and agricultural economy. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp expressing the hope that the restructuring will succeed uses a great deal of traditional Soviet iconography. The whole point of the restructuring however was to redistribute from the lazy worker to the profit bottom line of the still state owned enterprise. The operation now had to make enough to pay salaries, full employment be dammed. The effort failed, but imagine if had worked. The full power of the authoritarian state was utilized to get more out of and pay less to the worker. A hoped for workers paradise becomes paradise for management.
Todays stamp is issue A2731, a five kopeck stamp issued by the Soviet Union on May 5th, 1988. It was a two stamp issue in the same denomination this promoting economic reform and the other political. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used or unused. 5 kopecks is now worth .065 of an American penny. A pretty poignant example of why the reforms couldn’t work. 5 kopecks wasn’t covering the cost of sending a letter yet the system worked. Suddenly raising the postage rate to meet and beat expenses required hyper inflation and a deep decrease in demand.
There was some debate inside the Soviet Union about why things became stagnant after 1973. The obvious answer was the 1970s oil shocks that saw a large increase in output being redirected to cover energy cost, a situation shared with the west. The Soviet reformers of the 1980s had different ideas. They began calling workers work shy, lazy and drunk. They say this was allowed to happen as leadership was old, grey and out of touch. For older, grey leaders like Brezhnev and Chernencko it was an easy slur.
Gorbachev gave a speech at Togellati to describe his economic reforms. Togellati was the site of one of the biggest car factories in the world. Now employment and output is down over 80 %, the factory is owned by Renault/Nissan and most exports go to Kazakhstan, which didn’t use to be exports. The idea was that GOSPLAN in Moscow would stop mapping out production and resources, but that the enterprise after filling any government orders could sell as much as it wanted for whatever it could. The government would no longer cover shortfalls but still get any profits.
The results were just disastrous. GDP in the old Soviet Union declined 64% over the 11 years after this stamp. A few oligarchs got rich but the average worker was impoverished. Even life expectancy, which peaked at 69 in 1988 dropped to 64 in the early 2000s. In 1991 Gorbachev was deposed and the Soviet Union broke up. It would be 2004 before Russian GDP exceeded pre restructuring levels. The GDP in Russia is now more than twice the old levels but wealth is much more concentrated.
Well, my drink is empty. I will pour another to toast my fellow drunk, lazy, work shy workers out there. Our leaders should be at least trying to make our lives paradise. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2021.