This past week, I had the privilege of attending a lecture with Dr. Yuri Maltsev of Carthage College.  Dr. Maltsev grew up in the Soviet Union and was an Economic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev.  He was also part of the team that drafted the Perestroika plan.  Having been a key part of the Soviet Government, Dr. Maltsev knows the intricacies of the Soviet planning; and has knowledge of facts and figures that have never seen the light of day.

This blog will be the 1st in a series of three that I am writing.  What follows is not verbatim from Dr. Maltsev, but paraphrased via my notes.

The crimes committed by the Communist Soviet government were horrendous to say the least.  Firstly, we need to dispel the notion that the Soviet Economic System was an Economic system, it wasn’t; there were no Economics involved in their central planning, instead it was only a system of control.  The key reason centrally planned Economies failed was because there were no incentives, or ability to calculate.  They cannot compare costs and benefits of products and services because of the absence of price; therefore it is impossible to properly allocate resources in a meaningful way.

Since there were no incentives in the economy, workers knew life was going to stay the same despite the amount of work they did.  Many workers felt hopeless and would slack off and not produce.  Why would they produce?  What incentives did they have?  If they worked, they got paid X; if they slacked off and did nothing they still got paid X.  Instead of providing capitalist incentives such as more money, or more food, the Government created the incentive of fear.  Now workers had an incentive to work; not to make more money or provide better lives for their families; simply put, if they didn’t work they would be shot, or jailed in Siberia (which often lead to death).

Because of this shoddy system of control, the death toll spiraled.  According to Dr. Maltsev, when the Russian KGB files were opened for a brief month, there existed letters and communication records from Lenin himself to the leader of the KGB telling him that, “people weren’t listening, shoot some people and make them listen”.  After that transmission, people were being killed at a rough estimate of 12,000 a day.  According to the KGB’s report, over the years anywhere from 43 to 86 MILLION people were killed by Soviet soldiers for little or no reason.  It is important to point out that this number is death by Soviet soldiers, NOT from natural causes, or disease.