The Centralised System of Management

Abstract

The Soviet system of management was slavishly applied in all the countries of the Soviet bloc for only a relatively short period. The 1956 uprising in Hungary and riots in Poland and the resolution of the following meeting of representatives of the Communist Parties, which called on the leadership of the Parties to respect domestic conditions when applying common principles to the building of socialism, brought about change in the situation. Already, in the first wave of reforms in the second half of the 1950s, some countries had deviated somewhat from the Soviet model. (The Polish reformers wanted to abandon the Soviet model altogether, but they did not succeed.) In the second wave of the reforms the divergency in the systems became much broader. The 1966 Czechoslovak and the 1968 Hungarian reforms meant a break with the Soviet traditional system. The third wave of reforms in the 1980s is widening the gap. As a result of three decades of development the Soviet bloc has more than one system of management of the economy; of course, the number of systems depends on the nature of the system of classification used.