Praise for Loose Opinions

Keeping up with the Joneses, or the Ivanovs, is just as difficult in Soviet Russia as it is elsewhere; the difference is that in Russia your life may depend upon it. Before 1949, it was the height of intellectual fashion in the U.S.S.R. to praise an economic treatise written by one Nikolai A. Voznesensky. He won a Stalin Prize for it. Voznesensky was a favorite of Stalin's favorite Zhdanov, the smartest young economist on the Red horizon, Vice Premier at 42, and the Politburo's chief wartime planner.

Then several things happened to change the fashion. Zhdanov died. His old enemy Malenkov succeeded to the place of favor at Stalin's right hand, and Voznesensky disappeared--apparently clean off the face of the earth. P. Fedoseev, editor of the official magazine Bolshevik, was suddenly bounced out of his job for having praised the Voznesensky book, which, it now seemed, was nothing but "an idealistic motley of loose opinions . . . showing a total and absolute break with Marxism." What awful thing had Voznesensky said? He wrote that the Soviet system works so well that ordinary economic laws of price relationship do not apply.

Last month Editor Fedoseev tried to climb back on the bandwagon by publishing in Izvestia a series of articles extravagantly praising another economic treatise (TIME, Oct. 13) by a more reliable author --J. Stalin. This treatise directly attacked what was now tarred as the Voznesensky thesis: there are still economic laws, said Stalin, "which take place independently of the will of man"; people who don't realize this are "dazzled by the extraordinary success of the Soviet system, and they begin to imagine that the Soviet Government can 'do anything.' " (Only J. Stalin, of all Russians, dares say there are things he cannot do.) Editor Fedoseev glowed with approval; his tribute could not have been more slavish; but still it got him in trouble. He was denounced for failing to admit in his Izvestia article how wrong he had been four years ago when he praised the other book. Fedoseev apologized.

Confronted with the horrible example of Editor Fedoseev, nearly 1,000 Soviet economists and writers gathered at a mass meeting in Moscow last week to confess in public their sin of having once praised the works of Nikolai A. Voznesensky.

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