The Novosibirsk Report was a document that helped provide the technical background for Gorbachev’s perestroika policy.
The document that became known as the “Novosibirsk report” was written by Tatiana Za-slavskaya for a conference that was held in the western Siberian city of Novosibirsk in 1985. The organizers of that conference had a limited number of copies of her report made for participants in the conference. Within a short time, however, copies of the report were handed over to Western journalists in Moscow, ensuring that the document would become widely known and hotly debated. Communist Party officials sharply reprimanded Zaslavskaya and Abel Aganbegian, the chief organizer of the conference, for the unorthodox conclusions that she had offered. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the kind of thinking found in Zaslavkaya’s writings was endorsed by the highest leadership of the Party-state regime. Zaslavskaya became one of Gorbachev’s advisers, the head of the Soviet Sociological Association, and a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR. She has become a legendary figure among Russian sociologists.
Zaslavskaya’s report for the conference in Novosibirsk in 1983 was of great significance in Soviet intellectual history because it challenged principles that had been fundamental to the social sciences since they were imposed by Josef Stalin in the 1930s. Stalin had asserted that in a socialist society, in contrast to capitalist society, there was a basic consistency between the forces of production (including natural resources, labor, and technology) and the relations of production (the mechanisms of managing the economy). Zaslavskaya argued that in the Soviet Union, the level of technology and the skills and attitudes of the workforce had undergone enormous change since the 1930s, while the centralized institutions that managed the economy had changed very little, setting the system up for crisis unless basic changes were made. Stalin had also authored the doctrine of the moral and political unity of Soviet society, based on the assumption that there were no fundamental conflicts among classes or groups in the USSR. Zaslavskaya pointed out that there were groups with a vested interest in resisting changes in the system of management of the economy, and that reform would arouse conflicts among groups with mutually opposed interests. She also repudiated the habit of regarding workers as “labor resources” analagous to machines, and called for greater attention to the “human factor” in production, which would require consideration of the values and attitudes of workers, including their desire for a form of management that would give them greater independence. Zaslavskaya’s reasoning provided the background for the drive for radical restructuring of the Soviet system, though she assumed that reform would take place within the framework of a socialist economy. See also: PERESTROIKA; ZASLAVSKAYA, TATIANA IVANOVNA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zaslavskaia, Tat’iana I. (1984). “The Novosibirsk Report.” Survey 28(1):88-108. Zaslavskaia, Tat’iana I. (1989). A Voice of Reform: Essays by Tat’iana I. Zaslavskaia, ed. and intro. Murray Yanowitch. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Zaslavskaia, Tat’iana I. (1990). The Second Socialist Revolution: An Alternative Soviet Strategy, tr. Susan M. Davies and Jenny Warren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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(1761-1836), friend and adviser to Emperor Alexander I.
Nikolai Nikolayevich Novosiltsev was the illegitimate son of a woman whose brother, Alexander Sergeyevich Stroganov, was an important government official. Stroganov took the boy in and raised him in a household known for its hospitality and refinement, although, according to a contemporary, he was “brought up by his generous uncle like a poor relation” (Saunders, p. 5). Novosiltsev served in the army from 1783 to 1795, and during this time apparently made the acquaintance of the future emperor Alexander I. In 1796, when Alexander’s father, Paul I, ascended to the throne, Alexander asked Novosiltsev to draw up a “programmatic introduction” to the constitutional reforms Alexander was then considering. The document has been lost, but it appears to have focused on the education of those who would someday represent the empire’s vast population. In 1798 Novosiltsev helped Alexander found the St. Petersburg Journal and became a frequent contributor. Paul, meanwhile, was becoming suspicious of Novosiltsev’s liberalism and his influence on Alexander, so in 1797 the young man left Russia for Britain. He spent four years there attending university lectures and meeting such notables as Jeremy Bentham.
In 1801, when Paul was murdered and Alexander became emperor, Novosiltsev returned to Russia, where he became a member of Alexander’s Unofficial or Secret Committee, which regularly met with the emperor over the next two years to discuss plans for reform. Novosiltsev persuaded the committee to review the domestic situation and various departmental reforms and then draft a constitution. Within a matter of weeks Alexander began to voice doubts about the project. In an August 1801 memorandum to Alexander, Novosiltsev revealed the limits to his proposed reform program, stating that the Senate, an appointed body established by Peter the Great to govern the empire while the tsar was away, would be unable to implement and manage reform. Only the ruler could bring about the “Natural Rights, the Lawful Freedom and the security of each member of society.” In a similar vein Novosiltsev urged Alexander to reject a proposal to introduce the right of habeas corpus, arguing that since a future situation may require it to be suspended, it would be best to not enact it at all.
In 1801 Novosiltsev was appointed chairman of a new commission on laws, and from 1802 to 1808, as assistant to the minister of justice, he helped draw up the Statute on Free Cultivators, a singularly ineffective effort to emancipate some of the serfs. From 1803 to 1810 he was president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. In 1804 he undertook a diplomatic mission to Britain to obtain an alliance against Napoleon. The British were offended by his vanity and arrogance and viewed with bewilderment or hostility his proposals dealing with the Ottoman Empire and a German Confederation. The talks failed to produce a treaty until Napoleon’s annexation of Genoa in 1805 forced Russia and Britain into an alliance.
After the defeat of Napoleon, Novosiltsev served as Russia’s imperial-royal commissioner for Poland, which was then a constitutional monarchy under Alexander. In 1820, at the emperor’s request, Novosiltsev prepared a constitutional charter for Russia. Its key feature was decentralization and a genuinely federal structure. The empire was to be divided into twelve “vice-regencies” with elected assemblies at the local and national levels. The document, which also emphasized personal and civil liberties, was never implemented, and its effect on Alexander, if any, is unclear. His successor, Nicholas I, found the charter “most objectionable” and ordered all copies destroyed.
Novosiltsev has been described as an aggressively ambitious but poorly educated man. He was covetous of a place in Russian society, but he felt excluded from it. He was without doubt a talented and intelligent person, but he was unable to bridle his arrogance and cynicism, especially as administrator of Poland and as a diplomat. See also: ALEXANDER I; NAPOLEON I; PAUL I; POLAND
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimstead, Patricia Kennedy. (1969). The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hartley, Janet M. (1994). Alexander I. New York: Longman. Saunders, David. (1992). Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801-1881. London: Longman.
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(1892-1970), Soviet economist who made important contributions to the revival of modern economics in the Soviet Union, especially via the concept of opportunity cost.
Novozhilov was educated at Kiev University, finishing in 1915. While still a student, he wrote two serious economic works, one of which was awarded a gold medal in 1913. Among his teachers were two famous economists, Yevgeny Yevge-nievich Slutsky and Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky. He taught at universities in Ukraine until 1922, when he went to Leningrad. There he taught and worked for the rest of his life. He was often in political trouble for his economic views, and had a very difficult time getting his work published. In the post-Stalin years, however, he gained authority and influence, and in 1965 he received the Lenin Prize (along with Vasily
