Economic Reform in the USSR and Eastern Europe: The Novosibirsk Paper

In this paper, an attempt has been made to situate the importance of the famous Novosibirsk paper on the conception and implementation of economic reform in the USSR and Eastern Europe. In late 1983, a confidential paper on economic reform was leaked to the Western press providing valuable insights about the nature of views and arguments obtaining within the closed doors of the Soviet administrative and academic world on various problems confronting the Soviet economy and discussions on· remedial measures contemplated in these circles to remove them (Zaslavskaya, 1983). A little while later, the Arkhiv samizdata carne forward with the full Russian text supplemented with several useful annotations (Zaslavskaya, 1984). While the title page and the author's name were missing from the original copy, the Arkhiv samizdata supplied evidence to credit authorship to Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a professor and full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from Novosibirsk, as well as head of the section dealing with social problems at the Institute of· Economics and Organisation of Industrial Production of the Siberion division of the Academy.