Why were Soviet social institutions immune to technological innovation

• Main Author: Aleksey P. Ermilov
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology 2017-03-01
• Series: Социологический журнал
• Online Access: http://jour.fnisc.ru/upload/journals/1/articles/5004/submission/proof/5004-61-10076-1-10-20170929.pdf

The Soviet economic system of the 1960–1980’s can be characterized as state capitalism. However, this fails to explain many important properties of the system, primarily — its inability to introduce new technologies at a large scale, in contrast to classic capitalism. We attempted to identify that specific feature of Soviet society which affected the efficiency of state-capitalist institutions. We consider such pseudo-form, in which the Soviet “socialist” government was forced to invest these institutions. Because of this the essence of the Soviet economy should be defined as “perverted state capitalism”. An effort to give state-capitalist relations a socialistic form lead to their content becoming perverted and diluted, in other words — significantly reduced in terms of efficiency. This lead to the distortion and weakening of the capitalist motivations of key economic actors — nomenclature and workers. Eventually the Soviet economy turned into a collection of constantly inefficient institutions, which were not able to provide accelerated innovative development.