II
THE SOCIOECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT

4
Organizing Leningrad's Science and Industry

For our economic network [Leningrad and the northwest of the Russian Republic], there simply is no other way. Demographic conditions will not permit us in the foreseeable future to count on an inflow of additional workers, on whose account production has extensively expanded in the recent past.
—N. I. Chikovskii, 1985

Technology and Development

We saw in Part 1 how, since the early 1950s, planners in Moscow and Leningrad have implemented a development strategy for Leningrad that relies heavily on economic specialization and technological innovation. This vision of the city's economic future highlights Leningrad industry's reputation as an innovator and a producer of high-quality goods and compensates for regional labor shortages. National and local Communist Party pronouncements, along with industrial investment patterns throughout the entire post-Stalin period, demonstrate the Leningrad economy's growing reliance on technologically sophisticated industrial production (frequently defense-related) in such economic sectors as shipbuilding, machine construction, and precision-instrument making.

As noted earlier, initial attempts in Leningrad to implement this new economic vision quickly foundered on demographic constraints and labor shortages. As new labor-management schemes were incorporated into the daily industrial life of the city, local administrators wrestled with vexing organizational and institutional dilemmas confronting their new industrial order. Local planners envisioned specialized industries dependent to a large measure on interenterprise and intersectoral cooperation. Traditional Soviet organizational and institutional barriers militated against such managerial flexibility and cooperation. Accordingly, Leningrad politicians and. managers were

forced to turn to the center to obtain the support necessary to remove the barriers and thereby advance the city's economic performance.

By the mid-1960s, Leningraders had begun to confront the issue of how best to organize production-research and development cycles. Drawing on their own experience, as well as that of their colleagues elsewhere, many Leningrad leaders sought to devise new organizational schemes to link the city's 300 or so scientific research institutions and 40-odd institutions of higher education directly together with its nearly 500 industrial enterprises.^[1]

At first, these organizational efforts focused on merging industrial establishments through unified managerial interenterprise production associations (proizvodstvennye ob"edinenie ) linking management sites.^[2] Later, Leningrad managers created interenterprise/research-institute scientific-production associations (nauchno-proizvodstvennye ob"edinenie ) to bring entire R&D cycles under single managerial systems incorporating both production and research.^[3] By the early 1980s, under the leadership of Grigorii Romanov, the Leningrad party organization took the effort one step further, bringing pressure on the USSR Academy of Sciences to reorient the research agendas of the academy's Leningrad research establishments toward the needs of local industrial production by establishing a Leningrad Scientific Center.^[4] Finally, in the mid-1980s, Leningrad political leaders concerned with the innovation process once again directed their efforts toward the production end of the research-design-production cycle. In 1984, for example, regional party First Secretary Lev Zaikov launched a new program of technological innovation at the workplace.^[5] This much ballyhooed "Intensification-90" campaign was endorsed by Mikhail Gorbachev immediately on his elevation to the Central Committee's general secretaryship, and contributed to Zaikov's later promotion to a Central Committee secretaryship.^[6] Zaikov's skills as an administrator and his interest in technological innovation also undoubtedly played a role in his subsequent appointment as Moscow party chief.^[7] Similarly, it became the central focus of Iurii Solov'ev's first secretaryship and may have been pivotal to his elevation to candidate member status on the Politburo.^[8] Still, for a fuller understanding of Zaikov's and Solov'ev's innovation campaigns, one needs to look back three decades to the period during which the overall Leningrad development strategy took shape.

The Legacy of the 1950s

In the early 1950s Frol Kozlov, when he was still serving as regional party second secretary, had first expressed concern over the inadequacy of existing organizational frameworks for the promotion of technological innovation. Initially, local leaders working in consulta-

tion with central institutions established an economic development strategy for the city and region that encouraged increased reliance on technologically intensive forms of industrial production.

After experimenting with various innovations intended to improve management of the urban workforce, Leningrad officials began to advocate new organizational forms to facilitate the interinstitutional cooperation so necessary for production innovation. Managers and other specialists won the approval of municipal and party officials who, in turn, obtained permission from central institutions in Moscow to try out new forms of industrial organization, such as the interenterprise production associations. After a successful test period, Leningrad managers experimented with a variation on the associational format by creating interenterprise scientific-production associations that incorporated scientific research institutes. This new organizational approach now dominates the local R&D scene. Moreover, Leningrad experience with both forms of associational management provided an institutional prototype for similar innovations throughout the Soviet Union. Finally, innovation efforts during the mid-1980s became more concerned with the introduction of existing technologies into the production cycle than with the development of new technologies. The remainder of this chapter will examine the distinct phases in the development of the series of innovation-oriented reforms that led to the incorporation of technological innovation into the city's general plan for the period 1986–2005.

Kozlov and Innovation in Leningrad

After graduating from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Frol Kozlov spent much of his early career away from Leningrad.^[9] During the late 1930s, Kozlov made a name for himself as the successful chief engineer of the strategic Izhevsk Metallurgical Plant in the central Russian city of the same name. Born in a village outside of Riazan', another provincial central Russian town, Kozlov's time in Izhevsk meant that he was returning home from Leningrad. By 1940 Kozlov had become the Izhevsk city party committee's first secretary, a post he would leave in 1944 to move to defense production work with the Central Committee in Moscow. Throughout this period Kozlov was deeply involved in the defense sector. As a reward for his wartime efforts, he was elevated to second secretary of the Kuibyshev regional party committee in 1947, returning briefly to the Central Committee in 1949.

In Chapter 2 we observed that Andrei Zhdanov's major rivals to power in Moscow, Georgii Malenkov and Lavrentii Beria, set in motion a large-scale purge of Zhdanov protégés in Leningrad and elsewhere following Zhdanov's death in August 1948.^[10] Before the end of March 1940, several leading Zhdanov associates, including Central Committee

Secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov and Leningrad regional and city party First Secretary Petr Popkov, were removed from their posts, never to be seen again.^[11] By late summer, Joseph Stalin had engineered the appointment of a new Leningrad regional party first secretary, Vasilii Andrianov, who set about dismissing scores of leading regional, city, and factory party and government officials.^[12] Beyond Leningrad, Zhdanov associates in Moscow and Gorky also fell victim to the Leningrad Affair.^[13]

As part of his effort to gain control over the local party organization, Andrianov placed several non-Leningraders in critical staff positions, including Kozlov. After his brief interlude with the Central Committee in 1949, Kozlov assumed control of the prestigious and powerful party organization at Leningrad's Kirov Metallurgical Plant. The Kirov plant and its party organization had provided a base of operations for supporters of previous Leningrad party leaders, including the assassinated Sergei Kirov, the now disfavored Andrei Zhdanov, and the recently purged Aleksei Kuznetsov.^[14] Therefore, Kozlov's reassignment from a national post in Moscow and a regional one in Kuibyshev to the factory position in Leningrad represented an important political promotion, despi'te its apparently lower-ranking position on organizational charts. Kozlov's star continued to rise when, in 1950, he assumed the first secretaryship of the Leningrad city party committee. Just two years later, Andrianov appointed Kozlov to serve as his second secretary on the Leningrad regional party committee.

Kozlov quickly became a visible presence in Leningrad political life, using his public appearances to set forth a new vision of Leningrad's economic future.^[15] That image was deeply influenced by his own career experiences and preferences. Kozlov considered technologically intensive defense-related industrial production of the sort he had supervised during the war as the key to Leningrad's future prosperity.

Shortly after Stalin died in March 1953, Andrianov was demoted, dismissed, arrested, and apparently executed, for his role in the Leningrad Affair. Kozlov replaced the destroyed regional party first secretary and assumed control of the Leningrad party organization.^[16] Under Kozlov's leadership, a new economic development strategy took shape. Economic development in the city and region favored specialized (in both resource demand and product), technologically intensive (as opposed to labor-intensive) industry that depended on the introduction of new technologies to enhance productivity and develop fresh product lines, and that could draw on the coordinated effort of local factories and research establishments. The Leningrad economy became ever more specialized, with traditional light industry languishing.^[17] This development formula sought to push the city's production record ahead of that of other Soviet industrial centers, without undue reliance on massive infusions of scarce labor reserves.

Kozlov built on his Leningrad power base to gain national promi-

nence. In February 1957 he became a candidate member of the party's Presidium, as the Politburo was then called, and a full member the following June. He prudently sided with Nikita Khrushchev during the pivotal events leading to the defeat in June–July 1957 of the "Antiparty Group"—Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich.^[18] Then, from late 1957 until 1958, he served as chair of the Russian Republic's Council of Ministers, a post he left to become first deputy chair of the USSR Council of Ministers. Kozlov retained this last post until the early signs of an ultimately fatal illness forced his resignation. Meanwhile, he became a senior Central Committee secretary with full Presidium (Politburo) status between 1960 and 1964. Despite his earlier ties with Khrushchev, however, Kozlov emerged in time as a leading spokesman for party officials resistant to Khrushchev's attempts to restructure national economic and Communist Party institutions.^[19] Kozlov died in January 1965, only three months after the collective leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny, and Leningrader Aleksei Kosygin had overthrown Khrushchev in a Kremlin coup.^[20]

Early Science-Industry Integration

The Leningrad party organization sought and obtained from central planners additional stipulations covering technological innovation from the city's 1951–1955 Five-Year Plan.^[21] Precisely how this goal was achieved is lost from the public record. However, in 1951 Kozlov was able to enunciate the broad outline of a new centrally approved development strategy for the city at the tenth city and eleventh regional party conferences.^[22] The policies proclaimed at these gatherings brought greater unity to a series of activities in Moscow and Leningrad alike, which encouraged the union of Leningrad's scientific and industrial establishments.

By late 1952, for example, both the regional and city party committees had organized departments to supervise the management of research and educational institutions. Further special discussion of technological innovation in the city took place at a citywide conference convened by the Leningrad city party committee during Kozlov's tenure as that body's chief executive. The conference brought together 727 leading scholars and captains of industry to examine various means for promoting technological innovation in the Leningrad economy.^[23] In regard to all of these activities, the scanty available evidence indicates that the initial impetus for this development strategy originated in Leningrad, although approval from central institutions in Moscow was evidently gained quite early in the process. We do know for sure that, by June 1955, the Communist Party's Central Committee had officially endorsed this strategy.^[24]

Soon, multifaceted efforts were made to expand the scope and

nature of cooperation among Leningrad's research and industrial establishments. Initially, institute directors and factory managers pursued traditional contracting arrangements. By 1954, for example, the Leningrad Technological Institute had signed 57 contracts with local enterprises to advance innovation.^[25] Three years later, even Leningrad State University—an educational institution further removed from the R&D cycle than most of the city's research organizations—had entered into more than 80 direct research contracts with major industrial enterprises.^[26] Unfortunately, the public record tells us little about the content of these projects, although Soviet authors of the period viewed their existence as important.

At the outset of the 1960s an intricate web of interinstitutional research and technological contracts involved many local research and production centers.^[27] Most of these agreements specified task assignments. The limited nature of these original compacts, however, inhibited the more far-reaching forms of cooperation required to achieve broader developmental objectives. The search for more extensive linkages between research centers and production facilities eventually merged with local attempts to introduce industrial production associations, a form of industrial organization that had been initiated elsewhere but would be quickly molded to meet Leningrad needs.

Industrial Production Associations

The industrial production association came into existence at a time when Nikita Khrushchev had destroyed the power of the central industrial ministries by replacing them with regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy ).^[28] In this policy climate one of the association's primary objectives became the integration of autonomous production units engaged in similar activities. Once the industrial ministries were reestablished in 1965, advocates of economic reforms, such as Premier Aleksei Kosygin and others, supported institutional arrangements that would enhance managerial coordination across ministerial boundaries.^[29] One such arrangement, the industrial production association (ob"edinenie ), formalized previously existing relationships by bringing under a single managerial hierarchy enterprises engaged in the manufacture of components through to finished products.

Industrial production associations eventually grew to encompass enterprises subordinate to a variety of institutional and geographic hierarchies. Their integrative capacity proved both an asset and an encumbrance. In an economic and political microclimate like Leningrad's, where development policies had been predicated on interbranch and interinstitutional cooperation, local managers encouraged this new organizational format. Elsewhere, however, associations were vulnerable

to the machinations of disgruntled and insecure ministerial officials seeking to maintain their own autonomy. Although the association format originated elsewhere, it gained an immediate foothold in Leningrad, perhaps because of a local capacity to coordinate innovation across various interinstitutional (e.g., ministerial) boundaries.

The first production association was organized in L'vov in 1961, linking several local light-industrial establishments under a single organizational format.^[30] A year later the same approach was used in Leningrad heavy industry. The first Leningrad production association combined four related enterprises into LOMO, the Leningrad Optico-Mechanical Association.^[31] Only three years after LOMO's creation some 130 local enterprises had been joined together into 30 similar production associations, a faster rate of consolidation than found in other Soviet industrial centers. LOMO has subsequently grown into one of the largest, most prestigious and powerful production establishments of its type currently operating in the Soviet Union. The movement to establish production associations continued in Leningrad for years afterwards. By 1978, the city's 210 associations accounted for 80 to 90 percent of all its industrial production as opposed to nearly half of national industrial output.^[32] The extent to which associations controlled local industry was unprecedented for the USSR, and remains so today.

To appreciate the singular success of production associations in Leningrad, we should recall that Kozlov's development strategy relied heavily on economic specialization and concentration, as well as technological innovation. By bringing scores of plants and factories under unified managerial systems, the associations enhanced the possibilities for both specialization and innovation planned from above. As smaller peripheral enterprises were absorbed by the new associations, the range of production activities changed markedly. A production shop that previously served a number of clients came to serve only one—its parent association. Possibilities for technological innovation could theoretically be exploited more efficiently as a relatively small number of conglomerates—the 200-odd associations—developed coordinated innovation plans for hundreds of production facilities.

This intense industrial centralization in Leningrad becomes ever more apparent at the level of the urban district (raion ). For example, by the 1980s, Evgenii Mikhailov, then first secretary of the city's important Vyborgskii District party committee, reported that just 13 industrial and scientific-production associations accounted for 80 percent of the area's total industrial production.^[33] Of those 13 associations, six had party committees with the full rights and responsibilities of district party committees, thereby presenting multiple challenges to the authority of Mikhailov's own district party committee (raikom ).^[34] To demonstrate that Vyborgskii was not an aberrant case, we note that 12

associations produced 90 percent of the industrial output of the Zhdanovskii District, 11 associations accounted for 80 percent of that of the Kirovskii District, and 10 produced 95 percent of that of the Leninskii District (all in 1980).^[35]

Receptivity to Innovation

The production associations emerged simultaneously with the socioeconomic planning procedures (discussed in Chapter 6). This congruence was not coincidental. The success of socioeconomic planning depended on the existence of planning units sufficiently large and powerful to control a maximum number of social variables. Given the considerable degree to which local political and industrial elites staked their reputations on the success of socioeconomic planning, the advocacy among those elites of managerial centralization was almost inevitable. Shortly after the associational format had first been tried in L'vov, socioeconomic planning efforts helped create an imperative for managerial consolidation.

Conversely, creation of new organizational hierarchies cutting across traditional sectoral divisions, such as Khrushchev's sovnarkhozy and the industrial production associations, generated an institutional environment in which multifaceted, integrated socioeconomic planning became plausible. Both the regional economic councils and the production associations established interinstitutional forums that fostered integrated approaches to production planning. The convergence of reforms, along with the legitimation of industrial sociological research, strengthened the credibility of some form of socioeconomic planning.

Finally, both sets of reforms—production associations and socioeconomic planning—were initially implemented at many of the same enterprises. Anatoli Kirsanov, the Kalininskii District's party first secretary, has observed that the very first socioeconomic planning experiments were conducted at two of the city's first industrial production associations (LOMO and Svetlana).^[36] This coincidence of innovation has several complex explanations. Party and state officials in Leningrad and Moscow considered those enterprises to be sufficiently prestigious as to serve as model sites for one set of reforms that were prominent candidates as testing-grounds for other innovations. Because of their previous reputations, these enterprises attracted some of the best-trained and most flexible managers. Once enterprises were anointed for innovation sites by higher party and state authorities, they retained managers with proven reputations as innovators, while other pro-innovation managers replaced more recalcitrant cadres. Thus, each set

of reforms reinforced the other, producing an institutional climate that was more conducive to innovation than the Soviet norm.

Receptivity to innovation did not end with acceptance of policy changes, but led to interest in technological change. In Leningrad, local party officials at the time saw the establishment of associations as a critical step in their successful implementation of far-reaching managerial innovations.^[37] This view was widely shared by a number of political and economic leaders around the Soviet Union, who remained resistant to more radical economic reform packages based on the decentralization of managerial decision-making or the introduction of limited price-related mechanisms into the national planning procedures. The industrial association thus came to be the form of innovation favored by leaders such as Leningrad's own Grigorii Romanov, who opposed more market-oriented approaches to economic reform. The industrial production association was a managerial reform that called for more centralization, not less. This point is an important one. Leningrad's region-oriented centralized managerial structures (i.e., managerial authority is concentrated in middle-level institutions rather than either in the ministries in Moscow or in individual enterprises) stand in opposition to more market-oriented reform packages that have emerged as dominant under Mikhail Gorbachev. Leningrad nurtured organizational forms that were intended to be activist in that they required leadership by a new set of institutions on the periphery but, at the same time, were profoundly conservative in that they preserved a centralized bureaucratic ethos. When Romanov's bid for national power was crushed in 1985 by the Gorbachev juggernaut, such centralizing reform packages fell by the wayside. Nonetheless, the Leningrad experience of the 1960s and 1970s continues to offer an important alternative economic vision to that of either Brezhnev's ministry-oriented approach or Gorbachev's focus on quasi-market enterprise reform.

Despite the kudos given the early production associations—at least as initially conceived in L'vov, Moscow, and elsewhere—they did not begin to address the question of precisely how new production technologies could be developed in the first instance. The initial reorganization efforts discussed thus far focused primarily on the production cycle rather than the R&D cycle. Leningrad managers soon addressed this oversight, by modifying the initial association concept to produce a Leningrad hybrid—the scientific-production association.

Scientific-Production Associations

The scientific-production association differs from the earlier production association in that it incorporates scientific establishments as well as production units into a single managerial system. In other

words, industrial research institutes, design centers, and laboratories in a given production sphere could now merge with factories and shops active in the same sector. The scientific-production association thereby integrated R&D and production cycles much as the production association had brought together related production activities. This innovative managerial form proved itself particularly well suited to the Leningrad economy.

By the late 1960s, four industries were preeminent in the Leningrad economy: machine construction, instrument making, radio electronics, and shipbuilding. The four together produced 16 percent of local industrial output, as opposed to only an 8 percent share of national industrial production.^[38] Each depends on the ability to incorporate scientific and technological advances directly into the production cycle.^[39] Consequently, the very structure of the local industrial establishment encouraged Leningrad elites to advocate associational reforms designed to encompass entire R&D cycles.

Indeed, Leningrad's first four scientific-production associations—the Plastpolimer, Elektroapparat, Elektrokeramika, and Bum Mash scientific-production associations—were formed as early as 1968 and 1969.^[40] By 1976, there were some 36 scientific-production associations in the city, linking production lines with more than 100 scientific and design centers. Nearly a decade later in 1985, associations of all kinds drew on the efforts of 500 industrial enterprises and 150 scientific research and design centers.^[41]

For its part, the Leningrad scientific community welcomed attempts to integrate its research with the needs of industry. Over the years following removal of the headquarters of the USSR Academy of Sciences to Moscow, Leningrad-based research has evolved, shifting its center of gravity toward applied as opposed to basic research.^[42] Despite the disruption accompanying the academy's move to the capital, Leningrad has remained the nation's second most important scientific center.^[43] This hold on "second city" status among Soviet scientific centers generated a dramatic expansion of the city's scientific capacity in the late 1960s. Between 1965 and 1975, the local labor force employed in science and science-related endeavors increased by a phenomenal 94 percent, five times the rate of growth of the Leningrad labor force as a whole and several dozen times the increase in the Leningrad industrial workforce.^[44] By the early 1970s, a full quarter of the entire Leningrad labor force was employed in the scientific sector, broadly defined.^[45] This workforce represented 12 percent of all scientific workers employed in industry throughout the Soviet Union.^[46]

Many of these changes have been chronicled by Leningrad social scientists. According to some of this work, at the beginning of the 1970s the Leningrad scientific labor force was tilted heavily toward applied

disciplines.^[47] The relatively high qualifications of scientific workers engaged in research to meet the needs of local industry were also seen as conducive to innovation.^[48] Studies found that in Leningrad, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the scientific workforce had become a focal point of female employment.^[49] Such research noted further that because the mix of disciplinary skills and skilled support staff was combined with the presence of major educational institutions and research centers, it produced a uniquely favorable environment for scientific research.

Igor Glebov and Ivglaf Sigov confirmed the importance of the local scientific infrastructure in later work examining the economic and social functions of the knowledge industry in the development of major cities.^[50] Glebov and Sigov pointed to the existence of Leningrad's far-reaching library, computer, and information infrastructures as a primary reason for the city's continued leadership in Soviet science. For example, the city played a critical regional role in the creation of the national State System of Scientific Technical Information—an information network established by the USSR State Committee on Science and Technology to collect, process, store, and disseminate foreign and domestic technical data and research results.^[51] Leningrad's social science community has also contributed to the creation of a national information system in the relevant branches of the social sciences and humanities.^[52]

To summarize the discussion of this point, the local Leningrad scientific community offered a unique set of assets and opportunities for programs to enhance cooperation between science and industry. Moreover, the city's scientific community underwent one of its most vigorous growth periods just as the associational reforms were being put into place. The early formation of scientific-production associations linking science and industry is not at all surprising in light of (1) the strong support among local political elites for associational reforms, (2) the needs of key Leningrad industries for technological innovations, and (3) the expansion of a scientific infrastructure already oriented toward applied research.

Typical Associations

For a better sense of the organization and function of the associations, it may be useful to recount briefly the histories of three rather different Leningrad scientific-production units that have many of the most prominent features of this new organizational framework.

The Leningrad Elektrosila Electro-Machine Building Association traces its institutional genealogy to the prerevolutionary Siemens & Shukert Dynamo Plant.^[53] By 1922, the new Soviet government had

reorganized the Siemens & Shukert plant into Elektrosila, which immediately became known for a leading role in industrial innovation. By 1956 Elektrosila had established its first factory-based laboratory facility, an installation that was organizationally subordinate to the Leningrad branch of a major industrial research institute. In 1960 both that laboratory and the entire Leningrad branch institute were absorbed into the Elektrosila hierarchy. Nine years later, Elektrosila research facilities obtained organizational autonomy in the factory's hierarchy, a status that was retained in 1975 when Elektrosila was transformed into a scientific-production association linking all the stages of the research-development-production cycle. At present, Elektrosila's research institute is responsible for applied research, design, and development related to the production of turbines and generators.

The association's research facilities have become heavily involved in power-station development, including major research efforts on behalf of the Soviet Union's nuclear power industry. To a considerable degree, then, the Elektrosila association functions as the Soviet equivalent of Westinghouse or General Electric. It has continued to build on its Leningrad base to assume a major national and even international presence. Its prominence within the Soviet economy continues to be reflected in its leading role in developing Siberian hydroelectric resources, its sale of products to more than 75 countries, including Canada, India, Brazil, and Syria, and its long-sustained direct ties to the USSR Academy of Sciences and leading institutions of higher education.

For Leningrad, the urban presence of Elektrosila's central administrative, research, and production facilities helps establish the region's importance as a national economic center. The association's success, predicated to a considerable degree on its ability to integrate R&D with production, advances local interests by promoting Leningrad's role as a primary center of Soviet innovation. Nurturing of its research capacity by local political support for technological innovation helps defend Leningrad's regional economy, within the context of a centrally directed political economy.

The Plastpolimer Scientific-Production Association, a second Leningrad giant, shares many common development patterns with Elektrosila.^[54] Like Elektrosila, Plastpolimer has always been a major innovative center within Russian and Soviet industrial life. Having evolved from a production facility that dates back to 1719, the association claims a lineage beginning with Peter the Great's orders to build munitions plants. Two centuries later, a new Soviet administration shifted the plant's focus from gunpowder toward plastics. By 1932, its main research branch, the Scientific Research Institute of Polymer Plastics, had become the first Soviet research institute devoted to plastics.

Various linkages between research and production were largely informal, however, until the period 1956–1962, when more formal contractual relations were established between the Plastpolimer research facilities and the burgeoning Soviet chemical industry. In 1969, various plastics and chemical research and production units in the Leningrad area joined to form the present-day association, which is the Soviet leader in developing and producing polyolefins, polystyrols, and fluoro-plastics.

Headquartered in Leningrad, Plastpolimer operates a sprawling network of factories and laboratories stretching as far as Erevan in Armenia and Novosibirsk in Siberia. If there were a "Fortune 500"-style list of Soviet "corporations," Plastpolimer would be near the top. As is true of Elektrosila, its presence in the city advances local economic interests. The two associations have become so powerful in their respective economic sectors that central institutions in Moscow cannot ignore their needs. Operating in a metropolitan economy, however, neither Elektrosila nor Plastpolimer can dominate the local scene in a way that would threaten to turn Leningrad into a company town.

The third scientific-production association, the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Metrology , represents an alternative model of institutional development whose production capacity evolved within a research environment.^[55] Established in 1893 as the Main House of Weights and Measures, the institute has long led the conversion of the Soviet Union to international standards of weights and measures. The research facility's presence promoted the development in the city of a local precision-instrument industry. At the outbreak of World War II, such plants as Kalibr, Gosmetr, and Manometr guaranteed Leningrad's position as the primary center for this increasingly important industry.

With the establishment of the All-Union Committee on Standardization in Moscow in 1930, the industry's center of gravity began to shift to Moscow. By the 1950s, Leningrad's dominance of precision-instrument production had waned, resulting in several reorganizations of local research and production facilities. From this nadir, however, Leningrad precision-instrument making began to expand once more, led in large part by the research center, which doubled the number of its laboratories while increasing its research staff from a low of just 100 in 1928 to 550 employees by 1955, and 1,500 in 1971. That year various production facilities merged under institute control to form the current scientific-production association. In the case of precision instruments, the city's scientific traditions have thus sustained local industry through some rough periods. The existence and eventual expansion of research facilities provided the necessary context for further economic development. The willingness of local Leningrad elites to promote the

merger of research and production facilities protected this vital sector of the city's economy. Local endorsement of associational reforms helped sustain economic development.

This discussion of the Elektrosila, Plastpolimer, and Metrology scientific-production associations illustrates many general themes in the evolution of Leningrad R&D management. Their histories document the continuing effort of local managers to gain control over the activities of related but semiautonomous research units in their jurisdictions by creating unified managerial structures. This long-standing tendency toward institutional centralization reflects similar trends among the ministries and economic planners in Moscow. A primary underlying assumption appears to be the notion that bringing all R&D under a single roof will inevitably reduce or redress traditional disincentives for innovation.

The USSR Academy of Sciences' Leningrad Scientific Center

As noted earlier, the drive toward integrated research-production management may also be seen in local support for attempts by the Academy of Sciences to unite all preexisting Leningrad operations within a single Leningrad-based scientific center. Along with wartime evacuations and losses, the prewar transfer of the Academy of Sciences' main administration to Moscow depleted Leningrad of many of its leading researchers and weakened its institutional base within the national academy structure.^[56] By the mid-1950s, the relocated academy had spawned a dozen republic-level academies of sciences, as well as an embryonic network of regional scientific centers, including the prestigious Siberian Division based in Novosibirsk.^[57] Two decades later, nearly every autonomous republic had an academy "scientific branch" integrating a series of research functions under local management.^[58]

Meanwhile, Leningraders had only a handful of academy research facilities (e.g., institutes, laboratories, libraries, archives), most of them mere "Leningrad branches" in the hierarchy of Moscow-based research institutions. This long-standing subordination, by which Leningrad facilities were subdivisions of Moscow research institutes, placed many decisions concerning critical personnel, research, and resources in the hands of institute directors in charge of major academy installations in the capital. Such a state of affairs meant that Leningrad's local political officials had less than direct or total control over the academy's Leningrad operations. Admittedly, however, many in the city's scientific community preferred having the general political oversight function lodged with officials far away in Moscow rather than situated virtually next door in Leningrad itself.

By the mid-1970s, Grigorii Romanov had taken considerable interest in the state of the academy in Leningrad. In 1975, acting at Romanov's prompting (at least according to anecdotal evidence), the academy merged existing Leningrad divisions, as well as sections of a half-dozen Moscow-based social science research centers, to form the Institute of Socioeconomic Problems.^[59] Very soon thereafter, Leningrad party officials began to agitate for a similar arrangement in the natural sciences so as to ensure that academy research would better serve the interests of local industry (and of political leaders such as Romanov).^[60] As the seventies closed, Leningrad politicians were lobbying to upgrade the local presence in the academy structure, thereby recapturing some of the status lost when the academy moved to Moscow during the 1930s.

This advocacy for improved status not unexpectedly encountered bureaucratic opposition within the academy itself. To gain greater autonomy, Leningrad research centers would have to sever their longstanding affiliations with Moscow institutions, and the Muscovites naturally resisted such proposals. The academy began to relent, however, responding to pressure from an ever-more-powerful Romanov and other Leningrad-based politicians to hold local scholars accountable first and foremost to the Leningrad party organization. Considerable unofficial and unpublished evidence points to Romanov's major role in this effort. His growing stature in the national Communist Party hierarchy undoubtedly assisted the efforts of Leningraders to seize control of their local institutions. In 1979, the entire academy structure in the Northwestern RSFSR (see Map 1) was placed in the jurisdiction of a new Leningrad-based interagency coordinating council.

The new body quickly established 14 specialized subcouncils to coordinate all research in Leningrad (both the city and the region), as well as in the Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Novgorod, Murmansk, and Pskov regions and in the Karelian and Komi autonomous republics.^[61] The new coordinating council did not limit itself to the Academy of Sciences, but publicly declared its intention to direct all research activities in the natural, technical, and social sciences carried out within its jurisdiction by all research centers, regardless of their institutional subordination.^[62] In an article appearing in Pravda on August 4, 1981, Romanov emphasized the role of the council in coordinating the relationship between scientific research and economic production.^[63] Thus, Romanov made it clear, as he did again in the party's leading ideological journal, Kommunist, that Leningrad science must serve Leningrad industry.^[64] Finally, just weeks after Romanov had left Leningrad to join the Central Committee's Secretariat in Moscow, the Academy of Sciences, acting at the behest of the Central Committee, announced the formation of a new Leningrad Scientific Center, responsible for all academy activities in the Northwestern RSFSR (see Chart 4).^[65]

The establishment of the academy's Leningrad Scientific Center

Chart 4.
Research system of the USSR Academy of Sciences
and the Academies of Sciences of the Union Republics.

marked a new stage in the relationship between Leningrad's scientific and industrial communities (and one not necessarily welcomed by scholars concerned with basic research). Based more fully on local control than was true of previous academy arrangements in Leningrad, the center declared its primary objective to be the advancement of local economic production. In published interviews appearing at the time, the center's chief executive, Academician Igor Glebov, noted that the new organization would seek to direct all research (not just that of the academy) toward the more efficient utilization of research results in production. Glebov reported that the center had incorporated 14 academy scientific councils and 31 research institutes operating within the Leningrad region, while its presidium included the 80 full and corresponding members of the academy resident in the region.^[66] The center also anticipated moving the bulk of its operations to Shuvalovo, a new satellite community on the city's northern outskirts.

Romanov, Glebov, and, later on, Lev Zaikov repeatedly observed that the center's research branches must link scientific research with economic production so as to enhance opportunities for technological innovation in local industry.^[67] In this regard, the creation of the Leningrad Scientific Center is yet another stage in the continuing effort of local political elites to control and maintain the city's economy as a leading innovative center in the national economic system.

In February 1985, on the eve of Konstantin Chernenko's death, Romanov returned to Leningrad to present his election speech to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet ward in the city's Smol'ninskii District.^[68] The address, which turned out to be his last major public appearance in the city, stressed the need to quicken the pace of technological innovation in Leningrad industry. He offered perhaps the most precise formulation of the Leningrad Scientific Center's role in that effort, pointing to the development of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences as a model to be emulated in Leningrad. Romanov's references to the Ukrainian academy are noteworthy, for that institution had reoriented much of its research effort around applied research designed to enhance the republic's economic potential.^[69] Significantly, one of the first major institution-building efforts of the new Leningrad Scientific Center was the formation of a new Institute of Information Sciences and Automation just one year later, in March 1986.^[70] This theme of the center's role in linking science and industry has been frequently repeated since.^[71]

The history of the founding of the academy's Leningrad Scientific Center, as well as the development of local scientific-production associations, illustrates long-standing themes in the Soviet approach to R&D. As Thane Gustafson has pointed out, these are that (1) science is the source of most worthwhile innovations; (2) industry is a source of most obstacles to innovation; and (3) the solution is to give scientists direct control over production facilities.^[72]

The "Intensification-90" Campaign

In July 1984, First Secretary Lev Zaikov informed the Leningrad regional party committee that he had just been invited by the Central Committee to report on the activities of the Leningrad party organization in planning fundamental economic and social development throughout the Leningrad region for the periods 1985–1990 and 1985–2000.^[73] In preparing his report for the Central Committee, Zaikov continued, he would pay particular attention to the role of technological innovation in increasing productivity throughout the Leningrad region. Indeed, he concluded, automation and computerization would be the foundation of local economic growth for the next two decades. At the same time, the then regional party second secretary and soon-to-be city party committee first secretary, Anatoli Dumachev, informed the RSFSR Supreme Soviet that existing labor shortages in the city dictated that all increases in the production of Leningrad industry over the next three years could take place only through technological innovation. In Dumachev's view, Leningrad managers had no choice but to follow the example set by their American and Japanese counterparts and force extensive automation and innovation.^[74] The available data support this intense concern over labor shortages.^[75]

Zaikov's speeches heralded a new stage in the efforts of Leningrad elites to spur technological innovation. This "Intensification-90" campaign, as it became known because of its goal of automating the Leningrad economy by 1990, quickly gained momentum as Leningrad politicians stressed the program's origins both in the emergence of the scientific-production associations and in the establishment of the academy's Leningrad Scientific Center.^[76] Such proclamations correctly viewed "Intensification-90" as a logical extension of earlier Leningrad innovations. Moreover, local elites identified the city's labor shortages as a driving force behind the innovation campaign.^[77] Soviet cities with less acute shortages could well have been less hospitable to such a massive computerization drive.

However valid these elements of the official position on the program's origins may be, such statements ignore or purposefully obscure differences between this innovation drive and previous campaigns. As we have noted, the development of scientific-production associations and the founding of the academy's Leningrad Scientific Center were both moves that reflected the view of science as the source of most worthwhile innovations. In contrast, the "Intensification-90" campaign focuses first and foremost on the ability of industry to adapt managerial systems to technologies that already exist. This accent in the most recent program falls on the management side of the innovation equation. It is important, therefore, to review precisely what Zaikov and others sought to accomplish with "Intensification-90."

Following Zaikov's report, in August 1984, the Central Committee approved the "Intensification-90" program with the explicit intention of utilizing the Leningrad experience as a prototype for similar efforts elsewhere.^[78] The goal was to involve representatives of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan ), the State Committee on Science and Technology, the RSFSR Council of Ministers, and the USSR Academy of Sciences in a joint effort, under the direction of Leningrad party leaders, to reduce manual labor through the automation and computerization of production lines and front offices. Approved with considerable fanfare a few days later by the Leningrad regional party committee, the specific program objectives soon emerged in the local press.^[79]

In interviews published at the time, and in subsequent public appearances, Academician Glebov identified the campaign's goals as computerization of management, production, and design at all levels of the Leningrad economy; the creation of integrated computerized systems rather than the continued accumulation of mismatched components of such systems; a drive for energy conservation; and general support for nuclear power programs.^[80] The initial computerization effort, Glebov repeated, would take place at 336 enterprises representing 99 ministries and institutions and employing more than 660,000 people. Ultimately, by the time of the program's final stages in 1990, Glebov concluded, there would be 5 totally automated plants, 69 automated shops, 152 integrated production complexes, 137 flexible production systems, 187 automated management systems, 232 integral lines of communications, and 160 other mechanized sites.

"Intensification-90" immediately gained the trappings of a major Soviet campaign, as program publicists added all the traditional bells and whistles. Articles appeared almost daily in the Leningrad press for well over a year praising this or that innovation initiative undertaken in connection with "Intensification-90".^[81] More significantly, Leningrad's party chief, Lev Zaikov, began using the opportunities presented by the innovation drive to advance his own political position.

The Emergence of Lev Zaikov

Zaikov's rise to local dominance following Romanov's elevation to the Central Committee's Secretariat had been rather unpredictable. A graduate of the Leningrad Engineering-Economics Institute, Zaikov established his reputation as a dynamic and effective manager, eventually rising to the general directorship of an unspecified (though probably defense-related) scientific-production association by the mid-1970s.^[82] He was appointed chair of the Leningrad city soviet in 1976, and by the end of the decade was serving as a member of the Commission on Foreign Affairs of the Supreme Soviet's Council of the Union.^[83] From the time he began his career as a lathe operator in 1940

until his assumption of the Leningrad regional first secretaryship in 1983, Zaikov apparently held no major Communist Party post. With this general background, his interest in managerial innovation and economic efficiency is hardly surprising. In less than two years, Zaikov had joined Gorbachev's Secretariat in Moscow, where he assumed responsibility for defense industries and later became first secretary of the powerful Moscow party organization. His meteoric rise was facilitated by the successful promotion of the "Intensification-90" campaign in Leningrad and nationally. That promotion also generated economic resources for the city and its leaders to draw on.

Within days of the Central Committee's endorsement of the "Intensification-90" campaign, Zaikov published an article in Pravda stating its goals.^[84] From that point forward, Zaikov's major addresses have stressed the innovation theme.^[85] National publications publicized the program as well.^[86] Finally, Leningrad politicians utilized opportunities afforded to them by various republic and national meetings to praise "Intensification-90."^[87]

Gorbachev Comes to Town

Zaikov, a skilled manager with extensive practical experience, fit the initial mold of the new "Gorbachev Man." This image was strengthened by Gorbachev's visit to Leningrad in May 1985,^[88] which was the new leader's first major foray outside of Moscow following his ascension to power. At first glance, this maneuver appeared to have been aimed at Gorbachev's chief rival of the period, Grigorii Romanov. This interpretation is bolstered by Romanov's own removal from the Politburo in July of that year.

Gorbachev's visit was extensively covered in the Soviet print and electronic media, and included stops at the Svetlana Electronic-Instrument Making Association, the Bolshevichka Sewing Association, Elektrosila, the Leningrad Metallurgical Plant, and the Kalinin Polytechnic Institute.^[89] At each institution, as well as in Gorbachev's focal appearance before a meeting of Leningrad party activists, the new general secretary dwelled on the advances made by the Leningrad economy in the area of technological innovation, particularly under the "Intensification-90" campaign.^[90] In his address to city party activists, Gorbachev reviewed all he had seen during his visit, stressing the positive impact of "Intensification-90" on local economic development. He noted that the Central Committee was pleased by the program's success, observing that the Leningrad party organization always played an important role in the formulation of national socioeconomic policies. The party's leadership endorsed the latest efforts in Leningrad to enhance labor productivity through scientific-technical progress, particularly in

the area of computerization in management. Hence, the "Intensification-90" campaign served as a model to be emulated elsewhere.

Gorbachev's endorsement was followed by Central Committee approval a month later during a plenum that also saw the elevation of Zaikov to the Secretariat.^[91] Shortly after Zaikov's departure from Leningrad to assume his new post in Moscow, his successor as regional party first secretary, Iurii Solov'ev, devoted the preponderance of his initial speech in that post to the "Intensification-90" campaign.^[92] By year's end, the city party first secretary, Anatolii Dumachev, similarly chose to use the "Intensification-90" campaign as the focal point for his report to the twenty-fifth conference of the city party organization.^[93] Meanwhile, local bookstores established special displays of materials relating to the campaign, an exhibit showing off its achievements opened in Moscow, and, at the behest of the Central Committee's Secretariat, the local party organization organized seminars for party leaders and economic managers from around the Soviet Union to learn more about the "Intensification-90" campaign.^[94] Finally, the "Intensification-90" program was incorporated into the 1986 general development plan for the city and region.^[95] Regional party Secretary Pavel Mozhaev and city party committee First Secretary Anatolii Dumachev also reported in December 1985 that the campaign, with its concomitant emphasis on increased economic specialization and centralization, had formed the keystone for the 1986–1990 regional and city five-year plans.^[96] Moreover, Iurii Solov'ev chose to highlight the program upon his elevation to candidate member status on the national party's Politburo.^[97] As with the effort to develop scientific-production associations, Leningrad's "Intensification-90" advanced both the economic resources and the power of the local leaders. By the time of the twenty-seventh party congress in early 1986, the program had once again secured Leningrad's image as a national leader in technological innovation.

Problems Persist

Despite the apparent success of the "Intensification-90" campaign as a vehicle for promoting the political interests of Leningrad leaders, it is worth remembering that the successful adoption of a development strategy at the local and national levels is not the same as that program's successful implementation. By October 1986 both regional party First Secretary Iurii Solov'ev and Central Committee Secretary Lev Zaikov were beginning to sound more cautious in their evaluations of the program's impact.

In response to queries from local party propagandists, Solov'ev observed that innovation programs based on managerial reorganization can have the effect of increasing the bureaucratic apparatus without increasing productivity.^[98] Consequently, he reported that the Leningrad

party organization was disbanding the association managerial structure in food industries in an effort to reduce administrative overhead costs by 20 percent, thereby reversing the policies of the sixties and seventies that had embraced centralization as facilitating innovation. Shortly thereafter, Solov'ev informed the Leningrad regional party committee that the region's critically important machine-construction industry was failing to meet various innovation goals.^[99] The reasons for this failure were complex. At the core, Solov'ev argued, was the resistance of managers to drawing on the latest innovations generated by the scientific community. He concluded by suggesting that the "Intensification-90" campaign was a necessary means for breaking down such resistance. These sentiments were repeated by Solov'ev again just eight months later. In the interim they were echoed by city party First Secretary Anatolii Gerasimov, who in various reports to the city party committee suggested that technological innovation and enhanced labor productivity were proving more difficult goals to obtain than the architects of "Intensification-90" had ever before been willing to acknowledge.^[100]

During an October 1986 speech to voters in Leningrad's Moskovskii election district, Lev Zaikov offered a more comprehensive review of the successes and failures of the "Intensification-90" campaign than did either Solov'ev or Gerasimov before or afterward.^[101] Zaikov began his remarks by observing that Leningrad's political leaders had long been interested in strengthening the ties between science and industry. He proposed that a cardinal restructuring of society was required, and that the future well-being of the Soviet population lay with the economy's ability to perfect the research-development-production cycle. Further managerial reform was necessary to ensure that the Soviet economy's innovative capacity increased.

Zaikov also contended that the Soviet Union's current economic situation demanded varied responses. To begin with, Soviet scientists should work with their colleagues from other socialist countries to improve the industrial innovation process. Workers should also become involved to a greater degree in the factory innovative cycle, while the legal rights of enterprises to act as autonomous units should be expanded. By extensive restructuring of their bureaucracies, municipal agencies should attempt to reduce the bureaucratic drain on local industries. Finally, said Zaikov, the innovation problem must be viewed as, above all, a human problem.

For Zaikov, Leningrad's "Intensification-90" program provided a comprehensive format for action along all these fronts. For this reason, he viewed Leningrad as one of the Soviet Union's leading innovative centers. Despite the failure of local industries to meet all the campaign's goals, Zaikov suggested further, Leningrad was well situated to assist

the entire Soviet economy as it struggled to come to terms with the innovation process.

In reviewing various attempts to enhance Leningrad industry's innovative capacity, we must remember that these programs have only been partially successful, by the standards of the world economy. Although we do not have adequate data to evaluate the efficiency of local industry in comparative terms, on the basis of what we do know, it is difficult to believe that Leningrad's factories could compete openly with those of Western Europe, North America, and Japan. As Zaikov suggested, however, within the context of the Soviet economy the 35-year effort to improve relations between the city's scientific and industrial communities is noteworthy. This core of experience provides one of the single best models in the USSR today for helping national politicians and planners understand how they can develop comprehensive strategies for dealing with the research-development-production cycle. In this last regard, the political significance of the policies discussed in this chapter may be greater than their actual economic impact.

The political impact of strategies to link science and industry transcends the careers of Leningrad politicians. Economic accomplishment has dominated Soviet politics for decades. In its most recent manifestation, the issue of economic performance has become focused on the question of innovation. Soviet reformers and conservatives—as well as Western commentators—increasingly attribute the lackluster economic performance to a perceived inability of the economy to foster innovation. Gorbachev's response to this innovation challenge has been to nurture the development and implementation of market-oriented economic mechanisms. Should these reforms take hold, the argument goes, enterprises will become more responsive to changing needs in their environment, thereby prompting a greater receptivity to innovation.

The Leningrad approach to the innovation question emphasizes centralization of managerial decision-making, rationalization, and streamlining of organizational lines of command so as to force existing institutions to operate more efficiently. Implicitly, the approach advocated by Leningrad politicians from Kozlov through Romanov to Zaikov has offered a counterpoint to the more market-oriented reform efforts of an Aleksei Kosygin during the 1960s and a Mikhail Gorbachev today. Direct research contracts, production associations, scientific-production associations, and even the "Intensification-90" campaign constitute a conservative alternative in that such mechanisms need not undermine the traditional authority of central planners, necessitate a significant redistribution of resources away from traditionally favored heavy ("Group A") industries, or present a direct challenge to the supervisory authority of Communist Party officials over economic management. The Leningrad approach to economic development thus offers

an antimarket perspective that has informed national political discourse throughout the post-Stalin era.

Science and Industry: An Overview

For four decades Leningrad leaders have vigorously pursued an economic development strategy intended to reorient the Leningrad economy around technologically specialized industrial production. This effort has fostered increased investment in industry, a phaseout of light industry, and enhancement of technological innovation through strengthened ties between science and industry. Ultimately, Leningrad elites have sought to preserve their city's historic role as an innovative producer of high-quality industrial goods and as a leader of such specialized industries as precision-instrument making, machine construction, and shipbuilding. These policies have helped sustain the city's economic growth, thereby advancing the interests of several Leningrad political leaders. The resulting increase in the power and status of an influential politician, in turn, supported some of the initiatives discussed here—for example, we saw how Grigorii Romanov apparently prompted the Central Committee to instruct the USSR Academy of Sciences to establish its Leningrad Scientific Center.

The pursuit of Leningrad's postwar development strategy has rested in large measure on fostering new and more effective linkages between scientific research and industrial production. Technological innovation has been a major objective in Leningrad throughout the Soviet period. Confronting increasingly extreme labor shortages as early as the late 1950s, Leningrad managers actively sought new production techniques to increase labor productivity. Consequently, different and at times competing strategies have emerged over the years to bind the research-development-production cycle more tightly.

During the 1950s, leading Leningrad research centers entered into contractual relationships with major industrial enterprises. By the 1960s, an intricate web of interinstitutional research and technological contracts linked most major research and production centers through task-specific agreements. Within a few years, Leningrad researchers and managers attempted to broaden the range of their cooperation beyond assignment-oriented agreements. Local elites pursued the integration of autonomous but related production units engaged in similar activities. Not surprisingly, Leningraders enthusiastically encouraged the formation of inter-enterprise production associations in the hope that such a new organizational format might foster innovation. A decade later a vast preponderance of Leningrad economic output was being produced by a relatively small number of integrated production associations,

which were themselves at the pinnacle of industrial empires stretching across the Soviet Union.

Managers continued to confront difficulties in implementing innovation programs. More specifically, factory administrators demanded innovations adapted to the needs of their individual plants. Local elites responded by formally merging production and research units to form scientific-production associations. Leningrad was particularly suited for such programs of integration. On the industrial front, the city's economy had come to be dominated by a handful of sectors that relied heavily on infusions of new technologies for productivity increases. With respect to the scientific community, the city had long been a major national center for applied research. Sponsored by senior local political elites, the consolidation of production and research units into unified scientific-production associations moved forward swiftly, building on this preexisting base.

The prewar transfer of the Academy of Sciences' main administration to Moscow had left Leningrad's remaining academy research facilities in an ambiguous bureaucratic status. Converted for the most part into local affiliates of Moscow-based research institutes, Leningrad's research centers often served the interests of the national capital's scientific community. In 1979, the academy's hierarchy responded to growing political pressure from Leningrad, organizing an interagency council to coordinate research efforts throughout the Northwestern RSFSR. Five years later, the academy built on that foundation to establish its Leningrad Scientific Center, an institution that immediately proclaimed its primary mission as the continued integration of local research and production programs.

Production associations, which united production facilities under single management, and scientific-production associations, which united entire research-development-production cycles under single management, shared with the Leningrad Scientific Center a common set of organizing assumptions, the most important being the notion that technological innovation could be fostered through enhanced contact between scientists and managers. This principle also underlay Lev Zaikov's subsequent initiatives in support of technological innovation—namely, the "Intensification-90" campaign, which provided for the computerization of Leningrad industrial management and the automation of core production facilities by 1990. Its goals conformed with the development strategy first set forth 30 years earlier by Frol Kozlov and pursued by Leningrad political and economic elites ever since. These goals have had a deep and lasting impact on the shape of the local economy, and hence on the shape of the city's social and even physical face.

Unlike previous efforts, however, the "Intensification-90" campaign emphasized the full utilization of existing technical capacities

as much as the creation of new capacities through R&D programs. Leningrad elites had formulated an organizational model of technological progress that stood in opposition to market-oriented reform programs. Not surprisingly, some national politicians such as Lev Zaikov argued that "Intensification-90" become a model for innovation programs nationally. Thus, the program was subsequently emulated throughout the Soviet Union. Finally, the "Intensification-90" campaign was fully integrated into the 1986–2005 Leningrad general plan.

The emergence of an economic development policy predicated on innovation, together with an evolving pattern of policies designed to implement that policy, offers an opportunity to explore how local politicians and managers in the Soviet Union, at least in the case of Leningrad, maneuver behind a screen of bureaucracy to shape their city's future economic, social, and physical development. The efforts to integrate entire research-design-production cycles under a single managerial umbrella point to one of the various means employed by Soviet urban leaders to adjust central policies and constraints so as to foster new opportunities for their communities to grow, within the context of a centrally planned economy. With this observation in mind, it is time to look at policies that focus on managing the city's workforce.

5
Educating a New Workforce

Most of the qualified workers in the city at the outbreak of the war had been evacuated, many never to return. Those workers who stayed behind had their educations disrupted. Postwar migrants to town were largely unskilled. A severe decline in the skills of the local labor pool was a major price of the war. Something had to be done.
—Vladimir Polozov, 1984

Industrial Modernization

Only five and a half months before Stalin died, Frol Kozlov, then second secretary of the Leningrad regional party committee, strode to the podium of the tenth Leningrad city party conference and declared: "The fundamental content of the work of the Leningrad party organization is to mobilize laborers in the struggle for technological progress."^[1] With these words, Kozlov proclaimed a fundamental principle of a new approach to Leningrad's economic development: the doctrine of ascendent technological innovation.

As we have already seen, Kozlov's endorsement of technological innovation has been repeated by every successive Leningrad political figure of any consequence, with language more enthusiastic than even the usual glowing Soviet litany of praise for science and invention. Indeed, an unquestioning belief in technological progress constitutes a core value in the city's development strategy, a program that features a reorientation of the Leningrad economy around increasingly specialized and sophisticated industries.^[2] Leningrad party leaders have consistently praised and vigorously pursued an economic development strategy rooted in the expansion of communications and interchange between science and industry.^[3] Moreover, production statistics reveal a relative decline in the city's production capacity in light industry.^[4]

The end result, as we have emphasized, has been a sustained effort over at least three decades to concentrate the city's industry in specialized, technologically intensive, and high-quality spheres of heavy-industrial production of the sort represented by machine construction, shipbuilding, precision-instrument making, and radio electronics.^[5]

On the positive side, this policy of economic specialization and innovation encouraged the modernization of many of the city's most important industrial establishments.^[6] Leningrad factories are demonstrably among the most productive and efficient in the Soviet Union, particularly in such vital industries as radio electronics, optics, manufacture of precision machine tools.^[7] Yet, at the same time, Leningrad's share of total national investment has declined steadily throughout the postwar period. Its all-time high was achieved in the Soviet period during the Third Five-Year Plan (1933–1937), when its share was 4.6 percent of national investment funds, from which it declined to 1.9 percent during the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1956–1960), and on down to only about 1 percent during the Ninth and Tenth Five-Year Plans (1971–1975, 1976–1980).^[8] Moreover, several traditional Leningrad industries in light-industrial sectors (those relegated to "Group B" status by state planners) developed at a slower rate than they had previously. Light-industrial production in Leningrad also expanded at a slower rate than the same industries did nationally.^[9]

As we look back across the past three decades or so, there seems to be an air of inevitability in the gradual and sustained redirection of the Leningrad industrial effort. Such an interpretation, encouraged by local political rhetoric, would, however, overlook the innumerable difficulties encountered in attempts to reorient the local economy around a few priority sectors, bringing together both science and industry. These difficulties were the focus of Chapter 4, and they inspired two additional sets of labor policy innovations that will be discussed in this chapter and the next—professional-technical schools and socioeconomic planning.

Modernization and Workers

As we have already noted, World War II marked a momentous demographic watershed in Leningrad history.^[10] During the first 18 months of the city's siege by combined German and Finnish forces, Leningrad's population plummeted by two thirds.^[11] After the war, rural in-migrants and demobilized soldiers replenished the lost population, but the new residents on the whole were less educated, skilled, and disciplined than their prewar predecessors. Consequently, by the mid-1950s, Leningrad's population approached its prewar level, but the new postwar population and workforce were qualitatively different from and

inferior in capabilities to those of prewar times. In the labor market, Leningrad had lost its competitive edge over many other provincial industrial centers.

At the time, Leningrad's senior political leadership apparently was either neglectful of or ill informed about the city's evolving character.^[12] In the Leningrad press of the period, one finds strong endorsements of development strategies predicated on technologically sophisticated production processes. This imprimatur suggests massive ignorance among Leningrad's leaders of the demographic changes that had, in fact, taken place during the 1940s.

Factory managers could not ignore this transformation of their workforce as easily as could planners and politicians. Confronted with a divergence between the needs of the programs being promoted and the active vocational skills of a working population that was not up to the tasks required by those programs, Leningrad industrial managers and factory party officials began advocating measures to alter either the plan or the workforce.^[13] Searching for strategies to maintain the plan and improve the workforce, Leningrad officials soon responded on two fronts. First, the city's political and economic leadership began advocating the massive expansion of the city's factory-based vocational education centers, to retrain experienced workers and educate local youth to fill new factory positions. Second, they began encouraging industrial-oriented sociological research.

The efforts on both fronts paid off over the next decade. An extensive network of vocational education centers transformed the city's education system, and eventually served as a model for a thorough reorganization of primary and secondary education throughout the Soviet Union during the spring of 1984. Meanwhile, the local sociological research community focused its studies to a considerable degree on issues of factory life and worker motivation. These studies supported a policy consensus that came to be shared widely among the Leningrad academic, managerial, and political leadership: namely, that factory managers needed greater flexibility in developing production plans, deploying workers, and creating a local social infrastructure to support productivity. As we shall discuss further in Chapter 6, the resulting attempt to integrate social and economic indicators into factory production plans led to the creation of a system of plant, urban district, city, and regional socioeconomic plans throughout the Soviet Union.

By the 1980s, we can clearly identify Leningrad's skilled and well-educated workforce as a major component of the city's competitive edge over most other Soviet industrial centers. An economic development strategy has come to fruition based on the dominance of a handful of very specialized—within the Soviet context—technologically advanced and critically important industrial sectors, primarily in heavy industry. When evaluated according to its stated goals, this approach to local

industrial and economic development has proven dramatically successful. The city and region are of indisputable importance to the country's overall economic effort. Success was largely attributable to innovative measures taken in the 1960s and 1970s to restructure labor-management relations at factories throughout the city. That restructuring, in turn, was a consequence of changing approaches to secondary and adult education.

Khrushchev's Educational Reform

In April 1958, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, leveled a blistering attack on the Soviet Union's education system.^[14] Addressing the thirteenth national congress of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), Khrushchev, seeking to combat negative attitudes toward physical labor that had emerged among postwar youth, recommended making admission to higher education easier and reducing education-enforced social stratification.^[15] More specifically, the following September he proposed that continuous academic education, from primary schools through institutions of higher learning, should incorporate compulsory work programs into their normal curricula, thereby reducing the national commitment to academic training.^[16] By November 1958, however, the Central Committee appeared to have put considerable distance between its institututional stance on this subject and that of its first secretary.^[17] Nevertheless, in December, some eight months after Khrushchev's initial onslaught, an educational reform took effect that, though watered down, did increase the hours devoted to polytechnical education at every stage of a student's academic career. An 11-year program incorporating vocational as well as academic training was projected to replace the traditional ten-year primary and secondary general school.^[18]

In July 1959, the Council of Ministers responded to passage of the final reform legislation by establishing a new ministerial level State Committee for Professional and Technical Education, to coordinate programs operated by the councils of ministers of the various union republics (state committees being responsible for activities that cut across the jurisdiction of several ministries).^[19] Subsequent statutes in May 1961 and March 1962 created a network of republic-based professional-technical schools (professional'no-tekhnicheskoe uchilishche , PTU, in the singular) to absorb students completing the obligatory eight-year general school program. Urban PTUs theoretically became tied to future employment sites—a linkage strengthened further in 1966, 1969, 1972, and 1974—offering students four- to five-year secondary education programs combining school with on-the-job training at future employment sites.^[20]

For example, the curriculum for lathe operators, metalworkers, and instrument makers at a secondary-level PTU during the mid-1970s devoted two thirds of total instruction time to vocational training (46.6 percent, on-site production instruction; 4.9 percent, special technologies; 4.6 percent, physical education; 3.4 percent, primary military training; 2.6 percent, examination of materials and machine-building technology; 2.4 percent, drawing and design; 1 percent, labor and production economics; and 0.8 percent, tolerances and measurement), while one third was spent on more traditional academic subjects (7.8 percent, mathematics; 7.1 percent, physics; 5.4 percent, history; 5.1 percent, Russian language and literature; 4.7 percent, chemistry; 1.5 percent, social studies; 1 percent, biology; 0.9 percent, geography; and 0.4 percent, astronomy).^[21] This combination of job-site experience and general academic training offered a more comprehensive educational experience than many workforce training programs in the United States and, despite difficulties at times in classroom implementation, produced a better reputation for vocational education as a means for preparing students for careers as skilled workers than has generally been the case in the United States. Indeed, as British sociologist Mervyn Matthews has observed, by the mid-1970s the network of vocational schools had grown in size and complexity well beyond Khrushchev's initial legislative vision.^[22]

Vocational education was hardly new to the Soviet Union, or to Leningrad for that matter. An extensive network of short- and long-term training programs had emerged during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1940 these special secondary-level technical schools (tekhnikumy ) and primary schools were frequently attached to factories, an institution of this sort being called a plant-factory school (fabrichno-zavodskoe uchilishche , FZU).^[23] These schools were consolidated under the central control of a new Main Administration for State Labor Reserves at that time.^[24] After the war, the importance of vocational training declined in relation to academic specialties, despite a presumption on the part of the worker's state and the leading agency of the proletariat, the Communist Party, that vocational training was ideologically superior. During the brief interlude between Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's educational reform in 1958, officials in Latvia and elsewhere experimented with programs designed to lure graduates of the ten-year general schools into vocational trades.^[25] Against the background of these latter tests, Khrushchev moved to reconstitute Soviet primary and secondary education.

As the level of work skills and general education rose nationwide, vocational education had lost its attraction to many Soviet youth. In Leningrad, the overall erosion of vocational programs had taken place somewhat earlier than elsewhere.^[26] During the academic year 1939/1940, for example, factory training centers (FZUs) enrolled only 15,000

Leningrad youths, as opposed to 55,000 in 1931/1932. By 1982, however, the enrollment figures at the 145 somewhat analogous Leningrad PTUs would jump to over 330,000 annually.^[27] To understand this dramatic reversal, we need to return to the period surrounding Khrushchev's educational reforms of 1958.

Leningrad Responds

In the available Leningrad press, there seems little that differentiates the discussion of Khrushchev's proposed reorganization of primary and secondary schools from the discussion found in other Soviet publications of the period.^[28] Leningraders supported the introduction of a vocational component into the current school curriculum, but so did nearly everyone else, in one form or another. Formal interviews and informal discussions with Leningrad social scientists in early 1984 revealed, however, that the national educational reform in 1958 had come to be perceived as a turning point in that city's faltering commitment to vocational training. Thus, for really the first time it had spurred debates among local leaders about the critical relationship between the shape of educational curricula and the region's ability to meet the labor demands of local industry.^[29] To determine whether this perception of the relationship between national and local events was well founded, we need to consider the state of the Leningrad industrial workforce in the late 1950s. We can then discuss the nature of the subsequent educational effort in greater detail.

As we noted earlier, the city's recent demographic transformation had diminished Leningrad's competitive edge in the national industrial labor market. While metropolitan Leningrad remained one of the most highly populated and urbanized regions in the Soviet Union, the gender, age, and occupational structure of the population did not match the economy's needs. The city's economic development strategy was directed primarily toward heavy industry, whereas the local population was now predominantly female. The population was also aging, and a rapidly increasing number of pensioners had to be supported by the working population. High rates of female participation in the labor force contributed to low birth rates, as did inadequacies in child care and in medical and housing facilities. Despite these conditions, many senior local planners, and nearly all national planners, failed at the time to recognize the growing gap between the city's demography and the dominant pattern of economic development.^[30]

Within less than a decade, however, nearly all local and most national politicians were emphasizing labor shortages whenever they discussed the Leningrad economy. For example, in a 1966 campaign speech for his USSR Supreme Soviet seat from a Leningrad district, the

party's Central Committee secretary, Aleksandr Shelepin, acknowledging a labor shortage in Leningrad, urged employers to hire fewer workers and fully supported the efforts of local officials to deal with the problem in a forthright manner.^[31] A year later, during the RSFSR Supreme Soviet election campaign, Kirill Mazurov, then first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, came to the city to speak to his Leningrad constituents and repeated Shelepin's positions of the previous year.^[32] Meanwhile, in 1963, an article by the chiefs of the Leningrad city party committee's industrial transportation and ideological departments appeared in Sotsialisticheskii trud pointing to a general need to stabilize the local workforce and to do so by developing and fostering a sense of pride and responsibility among all workers.^[33]

In the first half of the 1960s, numerous other speeches and articles complained about labor shortages in Leningrad. The main point is that, by the mid-1960s, the tone of Leningrad economic discussions had changed markedly from the previous decade. Leningrad social scientists such as Vladimir Polozov point to the 1958 educational reform as the single most important event of the period influencing the direction of the discussion of economic and labor issues in Leningrad.^[34] Moreover, at least in Leningrad, support for the initial educational reform proposals, with their strong orientation toward manual labor, quickly translated into support for vocational reform programs.

The data available in the West can neither demonstrate nor discount contentions such as Polozov's. Given the characteristics of the Leningrad workforce, however, and the ambitious development programs being pursued by local planners and politicians, we can only assume that the issue would have arisen at some point in some other guise, even if Khrushchev had never launched his attack on the Soviet educational establishment in 1958. In any event, if Polozov is correct, one should expect vocational education to play a particularly prominent role in Leningrad's efforts to manage the local workforce, and this has indeed been the case for the past quarter-century.

Vocational Education Ascendant

During much of this period, Leningrad politicians gave more vigorous and consistent official public support for vocational education programs than national leaders did.^[35] In fact, many Leningrad leaders came to view vocational education, which offered job skills such as welding, drafting, and bookkeeping, as preferable to traditional academic education oriented toward general introductory training in the humanities and natural sciences.^[36] As a result of such policy preferences, Leningrad vocational education programs have outpaced similar curricula elsewhere in the Soviet Union in (1) the speed with which

new professional-technical schools have been established, (2) the pressure on parents and pupils alike to channel career aspirations into polytechnical professions, (3) the linkages created between professional-technical schools and future employment sites, and (4) the number of students enrolled in vocational programs. By the early 1980s, the Leningrad party organization viewed the vocational school as the city's central institution for secondary-level education.^[37] In 1984, this distinct emphasis on vocational training over traditional academic secondary education that was expressed so clearly in Leningrad came to serve as a model for national educational reforms of that year.^[38] The possible retreat from the 1984 reforms under discussion as this volume goes to press in no way negates the impact of the Leningrad experience on previous policy decisions.

In a pattern that is repeated throughout our various policy studies, scientific research institutions played a critical role in the development of a distinctive Leningrad approach to primary, secondary, and post-secondary adult vocational education. In 1960, the Moscow-based USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences opened its Scientific Research Institute of General Adult Education in Leningrad (see Chart 5).^[39] The new institute immediately began research on professional training for adults, quickly establishing its reputation as the Soviet Union's premier center for the study of advanced vocational education. Three years later, the State Committee for Professional and Technical Education created its own research institute to examine secondary vocational education.^[40] This committee, like the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences before it, chose Leningrad as the site for its All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Professional-Technical Education.

Little is known about the decisions leading to the placement of both research centers in Leningrad. Undoubtedly, many factors influenced the final determination, one of which must have been the intense interest of the city's party leaders in vocational education. Whatever the reason for the final choice, making Leningrad the home of two of the USSR's leading research institutions that were perfecting professional training techniques gave Leningrad's leaders access to a powerful resource for restructuring local education. By the mid-1970s, both institutions employed a combined total of more than 300 researchers. Moreover, the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Professional-Technical Education also housed the Soviet Union's leading research library on vocational education. In any event, installation of both centers in Leningrad clearly reflected the local interest in vocational education by providing invaluable technical support for local politicians and also reinforced local efforts to expand vocational education.^[41]

In moving to implement their programs at the secondary-school level, Leningrad educators did not stop at scientific research. By 1965, already 82 professional-technical schools had opened their doors to

Chart 5.
Structure of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.

more than 35,000 Leningrad students. Over the next 15 years, the number of schools grew by 75 percent, and the number of students attending those schools increased by 158 percent.^[42] It took more than voluntarism on the part of parents and students to achieve this expansion of Leningrad's vocational education programs. Considerable pressure—both positive reinforcement and negative coercion—has been applied to Leningrad children and parents alike.

On the positive side, massive youth rallies—like that held at the mammoth Lenin sports-concert complex in October 1982—brought together thousands of local youth to hear city politicians extol the virtues of vocational education.^[43] Exhortations like this were and are repeated frequently, and the goal of fostering a "healthy relationship to labor" among area youth has become a constant theme in the public addresses of leading Leningrad political figures.^[44] Moreover, negative pressure has also been employed, as Leningrad students have been systematically discouraged from pursuing academic educational goals. For example, on the eve of the 1983 citywide admissions tests to Leningrad institutions of higher learning, a front-page feature article in the city's leading daily newspaper, Leningradskaia pravda , informed applicants that a vast majority of those seeking admission to institutions of higher learning would fail their examinations.^[45] Therefore, the article continued, applicants would be well advised to consider career and educational opportunities that were more readily available through vocational institutions.

Some Leningraders complain privately and with considerable passion that many parents were compelled to send their children to vocational schools upon completion of the standard eight-year general school curriculum, thereby foreclosing numerous career opportunities and ruining lives in a society where a degree from an institution of higher education is a ticket to success. For horrified parents, enrollment of their children in vocational programs precluded receipt of a full general secondary-school degree, thereby eliminating chances for post-secondary education and access to prestigious managerial and academic posts. Vocational education became synonymous in many Leningrad households with the closing down of opportunities for social advancement.

Although we have no direct published evidence of overt coercion by Leningrad educational or political officials, in June 1981 the address of regional party First Secretary Grigorii Romanov to the twenty-fifth regional party conference stopped just short of openly advocating coercion to increase vocational-school enrollment.^[46] In that hard-hitting speech, the first secretary noted with considerable satisfaction that graduates of professional-technical schools accounted for more than half of the workforce of all local labor collectives. "It is the task of party

organizations and pedagogical collectives," Romanov exclaimed, "to persistently inculcate in students the ability to find their bearings in present-day production."^[47] Left unstated, though implied throughout, is a suggestion that such goals can and will be achieved through the forcible enrollment of Leningrad teenagers into vocational education programs.

Whether furthered by coercion or encouragement, Leningrad vocational programs have produced a generation of highly skilled workers. The key to this accomplishment is to be found in the relationship be-tween vocational schools and future potential employers. During the 1970s, vocational programs in Leningrad and elsewhere in the Soviet Union have become more tightly linked to individual factories.^[48] By 1980, students enrolled at Leningrad's professional-technical schools received free room and board, as well as a daily wage based on effort on a factory production line.^[49]

At one vocational school (no. 105) third-year students were fully integrated with work brigades of the Main Leningrad Construction Administration—Glavleningradstroi.^[50]Leningradskaia pravda's educational correspondent reported that such relationships between future employment sites and vocational schools are pivotal to the success of vocational programs, even at such relatively new schools as the three-year-old vocational school no. 137.^[51] Elsewhere, in discussing the connections between school no. 147 and the Skorokhod Association, as well as school no. 6 and the Izhorsk Factory Association, the city's morning paper reported that although students frequently have slightly lower production norms than full-time workers, the gap gradually narrows as a student moves toward graduation.^[52] This report concluded that vocational students are able to move directly onto the production line precisely because they have become accustomed to the rhythm of industrial labor. It concluded that such accommodation results from the direct relationship of successful vocational schools, such as nos. 147 and 6, with factories, such as Skorokhod and Izhorsk.

Thus far we have seen that Leningrad vocational education programs outpaced similar curricula elsewhere in the Soviet Union in the speed with which schools were established, the pressure brought to bear upon parents and pupils alike to channel career aspirations into industrial professions, and the linkages established between schools and future employment sites. Perhaps most important of all, Leningrad remains noteworthy in the proportion of students enrolled in vocational education programs, particularly at the secondary level. By 1984, approximately 40 percent of all Leningrad secondary-school students completing eight-year general-school programs entered professional-technical schools, a rate of entry that remains unsurpassed elsewhere in the Soviet Union.^[53] In all, at that time, 211 city and regional voca-

tional schools were offering training in over 300 industrial specialties and trades.^[54] These educational patterns in Leningrad were serving as a model to be emulated throughout the nation.

Educational Reform Returns

In spring 1984, major revisions in primary and secondary educational programs were discussed in the Soviet Union. Both the draft proposals published in January 1984 and the final resolutions approved that April by the Supreme Soviet and Communist Party Central Committee remain strikingly similar despite one of the most extensive public-policy discussions in recent Soviet history.^[55] In the final analysis, the 1984 reforms seek to accomplish many of the goals first enunciated in 1958 by Nikita Khrushchev: for example, an increase in vocationally oriented education and a concomitant decline in academic training. In this respect the recent reforms more closely approximate the goals Khrushchev set forth in April 1958 than did the enacting legislation in December of that year.

Six major provisions stand out among the measures recommended by the 1984 reforms:^[56]

1. Nine years of compulsory education will be required of all students in both rural and urban settings.

2. A complete primary and secondary school program will require 11 years instead of 10 (the additional year of instruction being gained through a rollback in entry age from seven to six).

3. All educational programs, beginning from a pupil's first year of primary school, will offer vocational orientation curricula, with graduates of a nine-year program becoming eligible for entrance into a professional-technical school (40 percent of all ninth-year students being targeted to enter three-year vocational programs).^[57]

4. The number of classroom hours devoted to academic instruction will be reduced, to provide greater opportunity for vocational training.

5. The school day will be extended through day-care and supervised study programs, thereby reducing the need for parents to leave work early to care for school children during after-school hours.

6. Vocational programs will be devoted to the needs of local industries and not to those of the overall national economy (a relationship to be strengthened by direct linkages between professional-technical schools and local factories).

Several of these objectives have been based explicitly on the previous practices of Leningrad vocational education programs, especially those emphasizing professional-technical over traditional academic skills, reducing the number of classroom hours devoted to academic subjects, extending school hours, and establishing institutional ties between district schools and industrial enterprises. Leningrad vocational schools have also been particularly active in pursuing computer training.^[58] These features of the final reform would appear to confirm the contention of the director of Leningrad's professional-technical school no. 127, who told delegates to the twenty-sixth Leningrad regional party conference in January 1984 that the Central Committee openly and extensively drew on Leningrad's experience during the preparation of the draft reform.^[59] The director's observations were echoed by USSR Deputy Minister of Education Vladimir Korotov during an interview on Radio Moscow's domestic service, as well as by Leningrad Supreme Soviet delegate Boris Zhuravlev in an address to the USSR's leading legislative body.^[60] If implemented in full, the 1984 reform would have shaped the skills of the Soviet population as it enters the twenty-first century. The reorientation and rebuilding of an education system as large, diverse, and complex as the Soviet Union's does not take shape around any single set of experiences. Nonetheless, Leningrad's primary education and, even more so, its secondary education have long provided a de facto model for those who advocate vocation-oriented curricula.

The Leningrad Approach Goes National

To sum up, returning to the era of Khrushchev's initial proposals for educational reforms, we note again that Leningrad's industrial managers and Communist Party officials were then confronting a profound difference between the needs of an economic development policy that assumed complex work skills, on the one hand, and a working population that lacked the requisite skills to fulfill those needs on the other. Seeking strategies to maintain the development policy by ensuring the necessary skills, Leningrad elites began advocating the creation of an extensive network of factory-based vocational education centers to retrain experienced workers and educate local youth for new factory positions. In the past quarter-century those proposed vocational programs have come to fruition. Moreover, this Leningrad strategy emerged at the same time that local Communist Party officials were encouraging the development of a fledgling sociological research community to pursue industrial topics. Chapter 6 explores the consequences of this latter strategy.

The Leningrad approach to vocational education proved so suc-

cessful in the eyes of its proponents that, as we have noted, local social scientists widely credited it during 1984 interviews with having transformed the city's working population and, indirectly, with having helped reorient the local economy around technology-dependent industries. This impact is not negated by the reopening of the educational reform discussion under Gorbachev. Indeed, we may note that, in early 1986, Leningrad city party committee First Secretary Anatolii Dumachev assumed full responsibility for the management of the Soviet Union's entire vocational-technical education program when he moved to Moscow to become chair of the USSR State Committee on Vocational-Technical Education.^[61]

6
Industrial Sociology and the Search for Effective Urban Management

The scale and complexity of our diverse economy make it necessary to sharply increase the effectiveness of social production; the material and cultural level of the population demands the integrated and planned development of the city economy as a whole. . . . The regional party committee is attentively studying these questions, searching for ways and methods to more effectively develop Leningrad and the Leningrad region.
—Grigorii Romanov, 1972

Sociology's Rebirth

The shuffling of national political leaders after Stalin's death presaged widespread liberalization of strict ideological controls throughout Soviet society.^[1] The famous "thaw" of the post-Stalin period was nowhere more evident than in the social sciences, where the removal of many party-imposed restrictions produced an immediate and far-reaching revival of nearly all disciplines. As early as 1955, the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow established the country's first sociological research section.^[2] The following year, the historic Twentieth Communist Party Congress publicly acknowledged that Marxist-Leninist theory and Soviet practice might in fact diverge, thereby providing for the first time since the 1920s an ideological breathing space for inquisitive and searching social science research in general and sociological investigations in particular.

Soviet sociology was reborn and, despite subsequent ideological vicissitudes, has grown into a major academic undertaking.^[3] By 1968 the Institute of Philosophy's research section had become the core of the autonomous Institute of Concrete Social Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences which, in turn, came under attack for ideological

lapses and was reorganized in 1972 to form the Institute of Sociological Research.^[4] By 1977 the Soviet Sociological Association, founded under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences in 1958, had grown into a vast organization supported by 2,500 individual and 460 institutional members drawn from more than 60 cities and organized into five union republic and six regional divisions, one of the most active being housed in Leningrad.^[5]

Leningrad social scientists responded quickly and creatively to the new political, ideological, and academic environment emerging in Moscow. Several pioneering sociologists—Igor Kon, Vladimir Iadov, and Leonid Bliakhman, to name a few—were living and working in Leningrad, their home city, which also frequently served as the focus of their research. Leningrad State University began supporting sociological research in 1958, a sociological laboratory being formed within the university's Philosophy Faculty in 1960 and the semiautonomous Scientific Research Institute of Complex Social Research finally taking shape within the university five years later.^[6] Meanwhile, local sociological research was centered within the Leningrad divisions and sections of a half-dozen Moscow-based social science research centers of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1974, these sections and divisions merged to form the Institute of Socioeconomic Problems, thereby becoming directly subordinate to the academy's Social Science Section, instead of under other research institutes in Moscow.

Almost simultaneously with the reemergence of this sociological community, the gap between Leningrad's labor-force skills and Leningrad's economic development policies came to the fore. Thus, when in the late 1950s Leningrad leaders set out to formulate strategies to foster economic development by upgrading local workforce skills, they naturally turned to the new academic resource being spawned in their midst. As a result of the party's interest in industrial sociology, Leningrad sociologists began to focus much of their research on issues of factory life and worker motivation.

Searching for the Worker

By the early 1960s, local researchers started to link the development of new methodologies to the study of such applied issues as labor relations.^[7] In 1963 the Leningrad city party committee approved proposals for sociological research examining techniques for reducing labor turnover, thus encouraging several leading Leningrad social scientists to investigate the impact of material, technical, natural, social, and psychological factors on economic performance.^[8] After 1965, local industrial sociological research was institutionalized through the creation of the above-mentioned Scientific Research Institute of Complex Social Research, which opened at Leningrad University.^[9]

During a 1984 interview, Vladimir Polozov, a participating scholar in several of the studies of this early period, emphasized the importance of the new university research center in defining industrial research as predominantly interdisciplinary in nature.^[10] Beyond sociologists such as himself, Polozov stressed the substantial influence of psychologist Boris Lomov (then with Leningrad University and later director of the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of Psychology in Moscow) and of Aleksandr Pashkov (Leningrad University's preeminent specialist in labor law, who was also director of the university's program of complex social research). Polozov maintained that the integrated and interdisciplinary nature of the industrial research effort of the 1960s generated a broad-based multifaceted approach to labor problems, which eventually permeated local efforts to deal with shortages and indiscipline. This integrated approach took on ever-greater practical significance as the new university-based center established close working relationships with several prominent local industrial firms, such as the Svetlana Electronic Instrument-Making Association.^[11]

By mid-decade, through the attempts of local social scientists to examine worker motivation, a policy consensus emerged that was widely shared by Leningrad's academic, managerial, planning, and political leaders. Rather than relying on immediate coercive measures to motivate workers, politicians first evaluated the broader social and economic context in which workers must operate. Labor shortages came to be seen as problems of education and of infrastructural development, as much as a lack of discipline among workers.^[12] Two important policy consequences flowed from this general conclusion: first, managers should adopt noncoercive approaches to labor discipline infractions by workers on the job; second, economic planners should adopt broad, all-encompassing approaches to production forecasting, using social and technical indicators as well as purely economic indices.^[13]

The first policy option is beyond our immediate concern. Suffice it to say that Leningrad labor-law specialists have been particularly visible advocates of a broadly defined human-relations approach to labor discipline problems.^[14] The second policy option requires further consideration, as it lies at the heart of the concept of socioeconomic planning. Significantly, the emerging consensus over the need for all encompassing approaches to production forecasting took shape just as a new Brezhnev-Kosygin-Podgorny political leadership in Moscow was preparing to launch its far-reaching reorganization of industrial planning and management.

Economic Reform and Socioeconomic Planning

The 1965 economic reforms were promulgated in Moscow just as local elites in Leningrad had become aware of their labor difficulties

and as Leningrad industrial sociological research was coming into its own. A consequence of this timing, at least in Leningrad, was the development of a close relationship between sociological research, the assault on low labor productivity, and economic reform proposals. This mixture eventually produced the policy innovation of socioeconomic planning.^[15]

The 1965 economic reforms, spearheaded by Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, established three funds derived from enterprise profits, and for the first time brought under direct factory control the efforts to improve local social, health, and recreational facilities. Prior to 1965, target goals for the expansion of an enterprise's social infrastructure were established by the ministries in Moscow and incorporated by central planners into a plant's technical industrial financial plan (TIFP) with little or no local comment. Moreover, the TIFP was not considered to have the same binding character as the factory's production plan, so that some factory directors came to believe that they could ignore the social targets in the TIFP without retribution. According to Marat Mezhevich of Leningrad's Institute of Socioeconomic Problems, the new social planning procedures put into place after 1965 produced an immense psychological as well as practical transformation in factory attempts to enhance social infrastructural development.^[16]

After 1965, in theory if not always in practice, a wide spectrum of services—ranging from education, health care, recreation, and social insurance to cultural programs, public transportation, communications, and commerce—fell to the supervision of municipal authorities and factory managers. To begin with, these changes in social planning procedures meant that a factory's social infrastructure—including locker rooms and stadia, food stores and day-care facilities, cafeteria and bus services—would be tied to enterprise profits. This change in funding strategy was intended to link social security firmly to implementation of the plan in the minds of workers and managers alike. Once social programs became integrated with production plans, rather than technical and financial plans, managers could no longer brusquely ignore social concerns quite as easily as they had previously. Instead, they were increasingly forced to cooperate with workers, committees, and municipal officials in planning and developing a plant's social infrastructure.

To the extent that plant and municipal managers were forced to confront one another over social planning, the 1965 economic reforms accentuated long-standing tensions and unresolved contradictions between ministerial and municipal interests.^[17] Whenever questions about such services arose, Leningrad plant managers found themselves ever more subordinate to city officials who were seeking to secure their own prerogatives in the service sector. In this manner, the reforms created an administrative climate in which Leningrad leaders could argue that

managers should manipulate social services within the individual industrial enterprise so as to enhance economic rewards and performance.^[18]

Early Factory Experiments

Local social scientists simultaneously got permission to experiment with various social planning techniques, their initial efforts taking place in early 1966. A handful of industrial organizations where party and managerial officials had been particularly supportive of managerial innovation were selected for these experiments, including the Svetlana Electro-Apparat, Lenin Optiko-Mekhanicheskii, Kirovskii Plant, and Baltiiskii Plant Industrial Associations.^[19]

At first, sociologists at all of these plants, and at the Svetlana association in particular, investigated the causes of lost work time, lack of labor discipline, and turnover.^[20] Their results encouraged a series of trial measures to upgrade the qualifications of both worker and manager (thus becoming linked with the vocational-education programs discussed earlier); to reduce occupational diseases; and to improve the health care, cultural life, working conditions, and living quarters of plant workers. For example, at the Svetlana association, some shops were completely reconstructed and refurbished with new automated equipment; sanitary safeguards of various kinds were installed; new shower and locker rooms were opened; and special child-care and sports facilities were built for workers and their families. Moreover, a prototype of a factory social plan summarized all these activities and sought to encompass every aspect of the workforce's social, technical, and economic development into a single document. To encourage adherence to the new social goals, party, union, and managerial officials moved to integrate social norms and production targets in an association's production plan. They also initiated a series of reviews of plan enforcement.

In 1966, regional party First Secretary Vasilii Tolstikov placed these early planning initiatives at the center of his well-received address to the Twenty-third Communist Party Congress in Moscow.^[21] Tolstikov pointed to the long-term relationship between the city's scientific and industrial communities, also noting the role of the economic reforms in redirecting the focus of economic life away from central ministries. He suggested that managers learn to view their factories as social units, and not merely as economic units. Tolstikov concluded by calling for further study of the social dimension of labor collectives and for the incorporation of such dimensions into the economic plan. Within a year, Tolstikov would proudly applaud the gold medal awarded by Moscow's Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy to

the Svetlana association for the increased productivity the association achieved through its social planning program.^[22] Tolstikov's speech, its positive reception at the congress, and the honors bestowed by the exhibition proved critical for the further development of socioeconomic planning.^[23] These accolades demonstrated widespread and powerful support for the experiments of the Leningrad social scientists and factory managers.^[24]

After 1966, experiments with socioeconomic planning began to spread throughout Leningrad's industrial community. In 1968 and 1969 the Leningrad regional party committee organized a series of seminars for managers to learn more about the new techniques, and in 1970 the committee began to sponsor the publication of manuals delineating the new planning methods.^[25]

The authors of these manuals recommended a planning format closely patterned after the initial Svetlana experiments.^[26] By 1970 a widely duplicated five-section plan structure evolved, which has continued to function into the 1980s. Included are chapters that examine a given enterprise's social structure; working and safety conditions; income and earnings patterns; political, educational, and leisure activities; and psychological orientations toward labor (particularly among young workers enrolled in vocational education programs attached to the factory).^[27]

Planners and managers base each plan chapter on quantitative analysis of eight measures of an enterprise's current operational capabilities (labor efficiency; mechanization and automation; labor turnover; education and qualifications; production quality; working conditions; housing and sociocultural conditions; and social programs).^[28] Next, planners and managers, ideally acting in consultation with union officials, establish an optimal measure for each planning component, based on production goals. Finally, planners and managers devise measures to bring the plant's operations into conformity with those optimal norms, in theory, while social scientists continue to monitor progress toward those goals over time.^[29]

The experimental socioeconomic plans are said to have had favorable results, with labor productivity increasing. Unfortunately, since no reliable data are available to demonstrate such increases conclusively, it is now difficult to determine precisely how favorable these initial results were. It is even more difficult to explain the causes of increased productivity, given the absence of rigorous data collection at the time. Productivity may have risen simply because more attention was being paid to the workers, therefore and would perhaps have increased whatever the actual content of the plans.^[30] Alternatively, the high visibility of the initial socioeconomic planning experiments and their location within prestigious factories ensured that all necessary resources would be provided for successful implementation. Finally,

however, we should not discount the possibility that the plans were a more effective management tool for integrating social and economic management than any previously existing mechanism.

Regardless of the size of the increases in production, and whatever their cause, those who were involved with the experiments were able to claim success, and on that basis achieve dramatic extensions of the experimental plans to other plants. As the experiments spread to less prestigious enterprises and economic sectors, however, complaints began to mount that social and cultural factors beyond the control of any individual factory inhibited plan fulfillment. Factory managers and social scientists alike began to urge urban district (raion ) officials to formulate integrated socioeconomic plans that combined the efforts of all the enterprises within their jurisdiction.

District Socioeconomic Planning

By the late 1960s the party committee and soviet executive committee of Leningrad's Kalininskii District appointed a blue-ribbon commission of representatives of party and state agencies and scholars from Leningrad State University, as well as from the Leningrad (Voznesenskii) Financial-Economics Institute (see Map 11). This body assumed wide-ranging authority to investigate the feasibility of drafting a districtwide socioeconomic plan. In December 1969 the Voznesenskii Institute hosted a conference of plant managers, district officials, and social scientists to formulate a basic outline for district and citywide socioeconomic development plans during the forthcoming Ninth Five-Year Plan period (1971–1975).^[31] The conferees moved to break up the labor cycle of individual enterprises and of entire districts into three discrete functions—demand, distribution, and production—each requiring distinct responses.^[32]

The 1971–1975 Kalininskii District socioeconomic plan emerging from the conference sessions eventually focused upon eight primary goals: (1) scientific-technical progress and economic development; (2) optimal social and professional workforce structures (i.e., available labor skills corresponding to local labor demand); (3) improved labor conditions and reduced accident rates; (4) upgraded housing and living conditions; (5) enhanced health-care and sporting facilities; (6) enlarged educational institutions, including preschools; (7) expanded sociopolitical activities (i.e., greater participation in party meetings, political lectures, and the like); and (8) the optimal blending of Communist upbringing with the "soulful" demands of the district's population (i.e., local political programs addressing daily moral quandaries faced by the population).^[33] At virtually the same time, the city's historic Oktiabr'skii

Figure 24.
Housing in the Oktiabr'skii District, near the Griboyedova Canal.

District, under the leadership of future regional official Ratmir Bobovikov, undertook a similar effort (see Map 11).^[34]

The Oktiabr'skii and Kalininskii districts' first socioeconomic plans took effect during the period of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, following the close review of relevant party and municipal agencies. The Oktiabr'skii plan took a year and a half to develop and ratify and projected severe population losses owing to the large-scale development of new districts on the periphery.^[35] The reductions were generally viewed as favorable both for the district and for the city as a whole. Although the project demanded simultaneous adjustment of commercial, cultural, and transportational infrastructures, the socioeconomic planning process proved particularly well suited to this purpose (see Figures 24 and 25). Moreover, the plan for the Oktiabr'skii District sought coordinated technological innovation in area industries, compensating for the projected loss in immediately available manpower.^[36] Finally, Bobovikov and his colleagues openly attempted to link local educational patterns to the needs of district industry through the tight control of entrance to vocational and nonvocational secondary schools. District local plans were drawn up at this time for the Vasileostrovskii and Vyborgskii urban districts, and the city of Boksitogorsk.^[37]

Based on various addresses of Grigorii Romanov, it appears that the framers of these early district plans at first simply aggregated individual enterprise plans at a higher and more complex organizational

Figure 25.
Oktiabr'skii District scene.

level. The straightforward logic underlying this approach was evident, for example, in a 1972 speech in which Romanov observed:

From the beginning, everything did not occur as we had presumed, and every time, it seems, we tried to turn our attention to this or that circumstance, many of the problems—especially in smaller collectives—could not be solved within the bounds of a single enterprise independently from the development of the district and without taking into account the plans and needs of neighboring enterprises. Therefore, we logically proposed to begin work on the preparation of integrated plans of economic and social development for administrative districts.^[38]

Once planners, politicians, and social scientists undertook to draft socioeconomic plans at the level of administrative districts, instead of for individual industrial enterprises, they quickly discovered that the number of variables needing to be controlled increased exponentially rather than arithmetically. Planning methodologies developed for Leningrad as a whole during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period (1976–1980) took into account the local activities of over 150 ministries and other central administrative institutions.^[39] Planners responded to the new complexities by drawing on the skills of local social scientists, many of whom had by now joined the staff of the new Academy of Sciences' Institute of Socioeconomic Problems. As the decade progressed, enterprise plans focused ever more narrowly on production and financial

indices, while the scope of regional plans became more ambitious.^[40] The once rather simpleminded application of enterprise planning norms to the urban district, city, and region steadily evolved into an integrated hierarchy under which the level of planning determined the scope of any given plan.^[41]

Among all of these new levels of social planning, the urban district should have been the least likely to succeed. An administrative unit rarely taken seriously by Western scholars, the urban district is viewed as little more than an administrative "transmission belt" between more activist plans and city offices. Nonetheless, an early and significant attempt to develop district plans took place in Leningrad's Kalininskii District and eventually assumed considerable prominence in the overall development of socioeconomic planning. Indeed, when looking back from our perspective of the 1980s, we can see that these district plans provided a vital intermediary stage between enterprise and citywide socioeconomic planning. The importance of the Kalininskii plan in particular for this overall evolutionary process was highlighted in a 1976 article by Aleksandr Netsenko.^[42]

Netsenko proposed that the fundamental goal of production under socialism must be to guarantee the development of society in all its aspects. This aim requires a full investigation of existing problems and all possible solutions. Since such issues are frequently interrelated, decision-makers must look for various solutions that will satisfy all interests. Netsenko argued further that the urban district—such as the Kalininskii—has become the optimal level of organization for such measures, since it is large enough to transcend the particular interests of specific organizations, while small enough to be manageable.

In addition to Netsenko, several other Leningrad writers also singled out the district as a pivotal planning unit during this period. Writing in 1972, Vasilii El'meev, Boris Riashchenko, and Evgenii Iudin noted that district-level economic and social planning required unified action by all enterprises and organizations involved.^[43] They suggested, therefore, that district socioeconomic planning depended on the coordinated development of numerous economic enterprises within a relatively limited territory. This development could be achieved only with the full support of the district party committee, since only that body could mesh the actions of all the various concerns within a single district.^[44]

Leningrad's districts were able to move quickly to develop socioeconomic plans, in large part because of the active interest of key city, regional, and even national party officials. In 1971, Leonid Brezhnev had expressed his full support for Leningrad's socioeconomic planning efforts.^[45] The following year, the national party leader endorsed the notion of citywide socioeconomic planning as well.^[46] Closer to home, Leningrad regional party First Secretary Romanov was also busy adopt-

ing the new plan as his own, thereby ensuring its widespread use throughout Leningrad.^[47] By 1972 every district and the city as a whole had become subject to socioeconomic plans drawn up to cover the periods 1974–1990 and 1976–1981 (the plan of the latter being a more detailed one, as it coincided with the Tenth Five-Year Plan).^[48] While previously Soviet urban and economic planners had never totally ignored social factors, these new planning documents were innovative both in the detail of attention paid to social concerns and in the relative sophistication (by Soviet standards, at any rate) of the mathematical modeling methodologies employed.

The early Kalininskii District plan provides an illustrative example of similar efforts undertaken throughout the 1970s. By mid-decade, a typical plan came to encompass 11 planning areas:^[49]

1. Plan goals

2. Social characteristics of the district, city, or region

3. Prognosis and program for development and encouragement of scientific-technical progress

4. Economic production development

5. Demographic and social development

6. Development of branch social, cultural, and engineering infrastructures

7. Social, cultural, and ideological education program

8. Prevention of antisocial influences (alcoholism, crime, etc.)

9. Development of external economic and social networks of the district, city, or region

10. Use and protection of natural resources

11. Improvement of the administration of territorial economic and social development

Over time, this general planning menu has been expanded and adapted to local conditions. We can get a fair idea of state-of-the-art socioeconomic planning in Leningrad in the early 1980s by looking at planning designs prepared at that time for the city's Dzerzhinskii District.^[50]

The Dzerzhinskii District Revisited

As we noted in Chapter 3, the inner-city Dzerzhinskii District is hardly a typical Soviet urban neighborhood, even for Leningrad (see Map 11). Ironically, its idiosyncratic character sheds light on socioeconomic planning at the district level, precisely because a scheme designed for the Dzerzhinskii District must be explicitly different from the Soviet norm.

For our purposes, central among Dzerzhinskii's numerous exceptional characteristics is the current location of the USSR Academy of

Sciences' Institute of Socioeconomic Problems in the district on Voinov Street. As a result, the area is among the most-studied urban neighborhoods in the Soviet Union. Moreover, district officials can readily call on some of the country's most sophisticated academic practitioners of applied social scientific research methods, explicitly designed to support planning efforts. For example, Viktor Vorotilov, one of the institute's leading economists, served as a deputy on the district soviet, while several of his colleagues have also held district offices and con-sultancies.^[51] The continuing cooperation between district administrators and social scientists fostered the Soviet Union's first and probably most extensive urban ecological mapping project, chronicling local air pollution, green zones, noise levels, pedestrian densities, sanitary conditions, population densities, sports, and medical facilities.^[52] On the basis of the resulting maps and forecasts, Dzerzhinskii officials eventually formulated an integrated economic program. Environmental plans were subsequently incorporated into socioeconomic planning efforts elsewhere, thus illustrating that an examination of features unique to the Dzerzhinskii District may highlight more ordinary practices in other districts and cities, as well as the manner in which local activist elites may change such practices.

The Dzerzhinskii District is one of Leningrad's oldest, with 97 percent of its building stock antedating the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.^[53] Several of the city's leading cultural institutions and historic sites are located within the boundaries of this centrally located district, including the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Summer Gardens of Peter the Great, and a prominent "wedding palace" (see Figure 26). The area's unique architectural presence has often served as an alternative model to the new neighborhoods now circling the older city. During the 1970s, at the time of the previously noted vociferous discussions of urban aesthetics in Leningrad's professional press, several authors cited Dzerzhinskii's streets as optimal urban environments.^[54] By mid-decade, the area had become a focal point for historic preservation and renovation efforts, more than 100,000 square meters of renovated housing becoming available to residents between 1976 and 1980.^[55]

In addition to the Institute of Socioeconomic Problems, numerous other institutions of higher learning and research centers are housed in Dzerzhinskii (including the Leningrad Division of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Oriental Studies and the Mukhina Higher School of Industrial Arts), as are several foreign consulates (including those of the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Finland). All of these prestigious establishments crowd into Leningrad's third smallest district in area (only the island-fortress district of Kronstadt and the resort district of Sestorestsk are smaller) and the smallest in population (110,000 inhabitants in 1980).^[56] Despite Dzerzhinskii's relatively mod-

Figure 26.
"Wedding palace" in the Dzerzhinskii District.

est and declining population—it lost nearly half of its residents between 1959 and 1980—it still has one of the highest population densities in Leningrad.^[57] In 1980, the area's density of 2,300 population per square kilometer was nearly six times that of the citywide average density of 400 population per square kilometer.^[58]

Considering its near-total lack of industry, the Dzerzhinskii District has a remarkable economic presence. In 1980, with only 0.3 percent of Leningrad's industrial production, the district accounted for 2.4 percent of the city's retail sales and 8.3 percent of all Leningrad jobs.^[59] Local employment opportunities are restricted by the district's limited industrial capacity and diminutive size, so that 30 percent of all able-bodied district inhabitants were forced to find employment elsewhere.^[60]

Facing several peculiar and constraining local features, district planners during the 1980s sought to minimize the impact of the characteristics inhibiting economic growth, while maximizing those preserving the status quo or fostering economic development.^[61] First, they advocated an integrated planning hierarchy of long-term (20-year), medium-term (10-year), and short-term (5-year) development, thereby providing intersector and interenterprise targets ranging from the general to the specific. Second, they urged local construction agencies, particularly those specializing in rehabilitation projects, to place new housing, commercial, and service facilities in older structures, in the handful of available lots, and in the courtyards of older buildings. They thus

sought to maximize use of the district's limited open space. Third, recognizing that the district's amenities serve a population considerably larger than the area's 110,000 residents, they proposed an expansion of cultural, recreational, dining, and tourist facilities.

Perhaps most important of all, they emphasized the shortage of workers for local employers as the district's central social and economic issue. The district's planners concluded that no grand 20-year program to expand local amenities and preserve the district's architectural heritage could be effective unless district employers could hire workers who were sufficiently qualified to meet their needs. Special effort was therefore needed to develop housing units to attract singles, couples, and single-child families, and district employers were encouraged to create employment opportunities attracting younger professionals. In making their case, district planners reasserted the primacy of the labor question in socioeconomic planning. Beyond the environmental, architectural, and cultural concerns already noted, socioeconomic planning at the district level, as well as at the enterprise level, remained first and foremost a mechanism for managing the urban workforce.

Even a prestigious area like the Dzerzhinskii District faces extralocal influences that can frustrate the fulfillment of abstract plans. Despite the urban district's virtues as a manageable administrative entity, urban districts in the Soviet Union remain markedly vulnerable to outside interference. For this reason, many of the all-encompassing objectives of socioeconomic plans such as that of the Dzerzhinskii District cannot be achieved.^[62]

Recalcitrant Social Problems

Despite some of the real accomplishments of district socioeconomic planning, recent public criticism of local social services, commercial facilities, and crime control underscores the durability of many social problems confronting Leningrad district managers as they seek to deal effectively with the variables in socioeconomic plans. These complaints have become so widespread that only a few representative critiques can be cited.

In his first public address in June 1983 as regional party committee first secretary, Lev Zaikov denounced the quality of housing and social services in many of the city's new districts. Zaikov called for an increase in the activity of inspectors, particularly at the level of the residential minidistrict (mikroraion ).^[63] Gennadii Bukin offered another critique, one that appeared in a monograph examining the role of commerce in socioeconomic planning, where he stressed the importance of the commercial component in urban plans, as 70 percent of all goods consumed by Leningraders were produced in the city and its surrounding region.^[64]

Bukin argued that unless planners gave commercial activities and consumer goods more attention, none of the other goals of socioeconomic planning could be achieved. Commentary in Leningradskaia panorama took Bukin's proposals one step further, suggesting that labor performance could be directly influenced by the availability—or unavailability—of consumer goods.^[65]

Critics have leveled similar charges over the inability of district planners and managers to provide adequate crime protection. In the 1980s, regional officials have been urging district officials to take crime more seriously. For example, during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, 1985, the local press reported that "rockets" were fired through the windows of at least two apartments in the older sections of the city, touching off serious fires.^[66] A regional soviet resolution of September 1980 emphasized the role of alcohol and narcotics in local crime, and heralded the creation throughout the region, at both the district and the enterprise levels, of 480 "commissions for the struggle against drunkenness and alcoholism," as well as 7 narcotics divisions and 27 narcotics offices.^[67] The decree continued by instructing district soviets to upgrade facilities used to combat both crime and drug abuse. Subsequent reports in the Leningrad press have linked criminality to the sterile environment of newly constructed minidistricts, much as U.S. studies have found a high correlation between public housing and crime.^[68]

In a particularly striking crime account during summer 1984, the city's evening paper, Vechernyi Leningrad , reported that uncontrollable bands of youths poured from the stands of Kirov Stadium to destroy trams on the no. 15 line, thereby disrupting a key soccer match between Leningrad's "Zenit" and the "Dinamo" squad from Minsk.^[69] The paper decried this activity much as New York tabloids might denounce unsportsmanlike conduct in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium or on the IRT no. 4 line following a game. After this apparently major incident, "cognizant organs of state security," as well as various social, party, and municipal institutions, were instructed to increase efforts to maintain order at local sporting events. This report brought protests from fans, particularly those who frequent the stadium's raucous "Section 33," who complained bitterly that their actions had been misrepresented by local reporters. They challenged claims that they had been disruptive and destructive. As the paper was quick to point out, however, someone did tear apart the trams on the no. 15 line after the match with Minsk's "Dinamo."^[70] The entire controversy gained added salience when, at season's end, "Zenit" went on to earn its first national championship in years.^[71]

Grievances of the kind reported about social services, commercial services, and crime control illustrate the multifaceted influences that affect the urban district. Important as the district may be for the overall

socioeconomic effort, a higher level of coordination and planning is necessary if socioeconomic planning is to live up to expectations. Those presumed promises, we may recall, offered to maximize labor productivity by fostering "organic ties between economic development and the resolution of social questions."^[72]

Dissemination of Socioeconomic Planning Techniques

Leningrad's advocates of socioeconomic planning next directed their attention to citywide and even regional integrated planning projects. Local administrators, planners, and scholars considered the feasibility of a citywide socioeconomic plan as early as the late 1960s, an experimental preliminary document prepared for the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966–1970).^[73] Despite the magnitude of the effort, the drafters were able to construct a full-fledged plan for Leningrad's socioeconomic development during the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–1975).^[74] Then, in May 1972, the national State Planning Commission (Gosplan) in Moscow authorized preparation of an integrated plan for the city's social and economic development under the Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976–1980).^[75] Just a short time before, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions had invited Leningrad State University's Scientific Research Institute of Complex Social Research to prepare manuals that could be used nationwide in implementing socioeconomic planning procedures.^[76] The first of these national manuals was published in 1971. Revised manuals for enterprises and regions followed in 1978; and manuals for various economic sectors in 1981.^[77] In other words, the Leningrad socioeconomic planning initiative had begun to have a national influence.

Many of Leningrad's academic participants in the development of socioeconomic planning techniques are reluctant to acknowledge their leading role in the dissemination of those techniques. Instead, they quickly point to the crucial contribution of political figures, municipal administrators, and social scientists in other cities and regions.^[78] Nonetheless, the manuals on which socioeconomic plans were developed elsewhere were prepared by Leningrad scholars. Meanwhile, Leningrad politicians were trying to promote these planning techniques—and themselves. For example, in 1975 Grigorii Romanov invited regional first party secretaries from around the Soviet Union to attend a national conference devoted to sharing the Leningrad experience. Taking advantage of the forum provided by Romanov, his future rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, reported on his efforts to apply Leningrad's model in a rural context.^[79] At this time, it should be recalled, Gorbachev was attempting to use his position as party first secretary in Stavropol', a region on the northern side of the Caucasus Mountains, to establish a national repu-

tation for himself as an innovator in agricultural planning and management. This political strategy was strikingly similar to that of Romanov, who used his power base in Leningrad to gain national prestige as an innovator in industrial planning and management.

As regional and national political elites such as Romanov and Gorbachev endorsed these concepts, socioeconomic plans were drawn up by enterprises—and later, by cities—across the Soviet Union. In 1970, Soviet planners and social scientists reached out to draw on the experience of their East European colleagues who were also initiating socioeconomic planning efforts, through contacts made possible by the seventh world congress of sociologists in Bulgaria.^[80] Also in 1970, the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy in Moscow sponsored a "thematic exhibition" devoted to "the experience of planning and social development in enterprise and organizational collectives in Leningrad and the Leningrad Region."^[81] This exhibit employed many of the city's leading younger social scientists as guides, and brought the new planning methods to the attention of a wide spectrum of national political, planning, economic, and academic elites from the capital.^[82]

Soon thereafter, social scientists began refining socioeconomic planning techniques in such regional research centers as Sverdlovsk (where Vitalii Ovchinnikov, Mikhail Rutkevich, and Lev Kogan were then working at the Academy of Sciences' Urals Scientific Center's Institute of Economics and at Urals State University), Perm (where sociologists undertook research through the auspices of Perm State University and the Perm Polytechnical Institute), and L'vov (where work was focused primarily on the Ukrainian Academy's Institute of Social Sciences).^[83] Grigorii Zhebit and his colleagues in Minsk concurrently developed and introduced a new research-oriented format, the "social passport," to document the sociodemographic characteristics of each unit examined. In 1982, for example, the city of Minsk was the subject of more than two dozen socioeconomic variables.^[84]

It was against such a backdrop of growing national and international initiatives that Leningrad scholars became consultants for socioeconomic planning projects in various regional centers around the Soviet Union, including Al'met'evsk, Boksitogorsk, Murmansk, and Kaluga.^[85] By the late 1970s, major socioeconomic planning projects had established reasonably sophisticated target programs for many Soviet cites, such as Moscow, Murmansk, Ufa, Novosibirsk, Novgorod, Orel, Tol'iatti, Sverdlovsk, Nizhnii Tagil, Donetsk, L'vov, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, and Zhdanov.^[86] Later, during the 1980s, socioeconomic planning also began to spread to rural areas.^[87]

Despite these various socioeconomic planning initiatives, Leningrad social scientists prefer to claim modesty. The available record indicates that nowhere else did local authorities attach such great sig-

nificance to, and social scientists play as major a role in developing, the new planning techniques as in Leningrad. As late as 1982, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet continued to point to Leningrad as a model of socioeconomic planning to be emulated elsewhere. Moreover, the Presidium urged its daily newspaper, Izvestiia , and its monthly journal, Sovety narodnykh deputatov , to highlight Leningrad's planning efforts in forthcoming editions.^[88] Why was Leningrad so cardinal for so long?

One possible explanation for the continued prominence in Leningrad of enterprise, city, and district socioeconomic planning lies with the considerable stake of local politicians in general, and Grigorii Romanov in particular, in the program's visible success. As we have noted, both Romanov and his predecessor, Tolstikov, placed the new planning techniques at the center of their reports to national party congresses in Moscow and at special conferences. Endorsement of a Romanov and a Tolstikov (to say nothing of a Brezhnev and a Kosygin) appears, however, to have been only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the sustained support and success of the new planning techniques. Something else was needed to assure continuing success. In Leningrad's case, this may have been the degree to which socioeconomic planning encouraged discussion of issues that were particularly salient to Leningrad planners and managers. In particular, it concentrated attention on the question of labor availability.

American political scientist William Conyngham has isolated the conditions under which socioeconomic planning emerged as a potent labor-management technique in the Soviet Union.^[89] He concludes that the use of social and economic indices to integrated plans designed to enhance labor productivity had a positive, ameliorative effect on both working conditions and plant productivity, when three criteria were met: (1) labor must be in short supply; (2) local party and municipal agencies must heartily endorse socioeconomic planning; and (3) plant management must take an active interest in social issues. These conditions were rarely met in the USSR; hence the nationwide practical impact of socioeconomic planning has been marginal at best.^[90] But in Leningrad, labor shortages greatly concerned local managers, party and municipal authorities strongly supported socioeconomic planning, and plant managers were as sensitive as any in the USSR to relationships between working conditions and productivity. Hence, Leningrad met Conyngham's conditions for the effective use of social and economic planning indices.

Beyond Conyngham's criteria, Leningrad is unusual for the range of expertise in the social science community and for the willingness of local political, managerial, and planning elites to accept recommendations from that community. The innovative character of local social science became more pronounced as socioeconomic planning ex-

panded beyond the industrial enterprise to encompass the urban district and, eventually, the entire city. Local academics contributed significantly to the planning process: they used previously ignored sociological methodologies to establish the dimensions of the city's labor shortages; adapted mathematical and computer methods to social and economic forecasting; and fostered a new concept of the city as a complex integrated system. Without their methodological and conceptual breakthroughs, socioeconomic planning could never have moved beyond the rhetoric of regional party first secretaries.

Social Science and Policy-Making

We have noted how sociological research defined the scope of Leningrad's labor deficit. The computer and mathematical-modeling revolution in Soviet social science also made possible the simultaneous analysis of the many factors and variables that were now included in the modeling techniques used in socioeconomic planning.^[91] By the 1970s, methodological issues such as modeling had become a paramount concern of social scientists. In October 1977 the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociological Research organized a national conference at which 240 sociologists, economists, demographers, and statisticians from 64 research centers met to discuss methodology.^[92] This growing dominance of methodological concerns testifies to the continuing institutionalization of social and economic planning by the end of the 1970s. Beginning with the Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976–1980), the general national plan had also become designated as a plan of social and economic development.

As socioeconomic planning moved beyond the individual enterprise, it was quickly associated with new Soviet academic definitions of the city as an integrated system. The emergence of this new conceptualization reflected the growing interest of Soviet social scientists in systems theory and approaches. The systems approach to urban analysis gained wide legitimacy following extensive discussions at a national sociological conference on quantitative research methods convened in the Georgian resort town of Sukhumi in April 1967.^[93] As noted in Chapter 3, many, though not all, Soviet demographers, geographers, and sociologists have come to view the city as a social organism uniting various linked subsystems, and therefore in need of integrated planning techniques.^[94] The city thus becomes a social system that requires an interdisciplinary approach to its conceptualization, planning, and management.^[95] Economic and social aspects of city life cannot he distinguished and separated. Economic productivity rests in large part on the optimizing of social development.^[96] Finally, it is at this point that socioeconomic planning techniques come to shape the face of the city.

The goal of harmonic and balanced urban social and economic development could be achieved through the integrated, proportional development of all subsystems within the organic urban whole. Ukrainian urbanist Anatolii Stepanenko, in a typically Soviet attempt to categorize and prioritize complex social reality, has defined no fewer than 31 subsystems constituting the single urban system (see Chart 6). Stepanenko's subsystems represent the core variables that are thought to interact with one another in shaping the totality of the city. Each subsystem is subject to measurement and analysis as social scientists develop numeric indices to capture each of these 31 urban characteristics (e.g., sex and age data for "demographic structure," number of patents and inventions for "science and scientific services," school enrollments for "education"). Ultimately, the component subsystems are analyzed in relation to one another over time. Such systems approaches, when carried by Soviet urbanists such as Stepanenko to their logical extreme, reduce the urban agglomeration to a discrete social unit, one well suited for an effective socioeconomic plan.^[97] By the 1980s, Soviet theorists had moved far beyond the enterprise and the district in their approach to socioeconomic planning.

Numerous Soviet geographers and other social scientists elsewhere joined with their Leningrad colleagues in putting forth new concepts to explain the process of urbanization. While systems approaches certainly were not the only acceptable way to define and understand the socialist city, the theory proved markedly compatible with socioeconomic planning. Leningrad social scientists used systems theory to provide an intellectual justification for new urban planning methods and approaches.^[98] In so doing, they developed a new ideology of socialist urbanization, which has since been institutionalized in the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Socioeconomic Problems. The institute's director, Ivglaf Sigov, once defined the city as a territorial area of labor and population, usually in the form of economic and cultural centers, serving major territorial formations such as a region or republic.^[99]

The emergence and continued support of sophisticated socioeconomic planning techniques in Leningrad's policy climate of the 1960s and 1970s were largely the result of the combined effect of (1) academic breakthroughs in urban studies and mathematical methods, (2) sociological research, with the political support given the new planning approaches, and (3) the permanent labor shortage. Facing a workforce profile that did not meet the labor needs of the local development strategy, Leningrad political, economic, and academic leaders responded by developing socioeconomic planning and vocational education programs, and implementing them citywide. This response quietly reduced the labor crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. Although that crisis no longer exists, the availability of a skilled workforce remains a pressing long-term economic and policy concern.

Chart 6.
Structure of the city as a system.

The Leningrad Approach

As noted earlier, shortly after Stalin's death, Leningrad regional party First Secretary Frol Kozlov announced a new economic development strategy for his city and region. This scheme was predicated on an unquestioning belief in technical progress, increased economic specialization and concentration, and a diminution in the relative importance of light-industrial production. Local managers saw almost immediately, however, that the available labor force could not meet the new demands. In confronting this problem, local officials moved primarily on three fronts: (1) they sought to improve the interaction of science and industry, (2) they resuscitated a dying factory-based vocational-technical education network, and (3) they launched industrial sociological investigations, which eventually generated a planning program that integrated social and economic indices. The upshot was that Leningrad elites developed an innovative and comprehensive approach to the socioeconomic dimensions of a city.

On the other hand, they were not alone in seeking to improve socioeconomic management. The Soviet Union has witnessed a cavalcade of national and local campaigns to achieve those same ends.^[100] The Leningrad innovations discussed in this chapter, and in Chapters 4 and 5, were not even the most celebrated among an endless procession of labor proposals. The famous Shchekino experiments launched at a Tula chemical combine can probably lay claim to that distinction.^[101] Nor have the Leningrad programs described here altered in any profound manner either the structure of the Soviet labor market or the general governmental policies that govern it.

Nevertheless, Leningrad science-industry linkages, vocational-technical education programs, and socioeconomic planning efforts had substantial local impacts. They even influenced the physical shape of contemporary Leningrad and its metropolitan region. Vocational school enrollments have increased, with two fifths of the city's secondary school students now attending vocational schools. To a degree unprecedented elsewhere in the USSR, Leningrad plant managers must now consult with district and city officials in planning factory social and cultural services. Perhaps even more important, these programs have transformed the way Leningrad's leaders look at socioeconomic problems, policies, and objectives. They have helped forge a distinctly Leningrad-oriented approach to managing the urban workforce in particular and urban socioeconomic development in general.