Tatyana Zaslavskaya

Tatyana Zaslavskaya ( _ru. Татьяна Ивановна Заславская) (b. September 9, 1927, Kiev) is a Russian economical sociologist, a theoretician of perestroika, an author and co-author of several books on economy of the Soviet Union (specializing in agriculture) and in sociology of the countryside and a large number of research papers; she was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992. In 2000 she won the Demidov Prize.

Biography

Tatyana Zaslavskaya studied at the Physical Department of the Moscow State University for three years, and then graduated from the Economical Department of the University in 1950. She finished her post-graduate study at the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences with the degree of Kandidat in 1956 under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Venzher (Владимир Григорьевич Венжер). In 1963 she joined the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics headed by Abel Aganbegyan (Абел Аганбегян). In 1965 she earned the degree of Doctor in Economics and in 1968 she was elected an Associate Member (член-корреспондент) of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Research

The analysis of economical situation in Soviet agriculture led Zaslavskaya to the conclusion that the revealed problems cannot be explained without sociological analysis, which bordered with blasphemy within the canonical Marxist science, which postulated that the development of the society is derived from the economical relations, and not vice versa. At these times Soviet sociology was under the tight scrutiny of the Communist Party (from the position of bourgeois pseudoscience through a brief period of liberalisation during the Khrushchev Thaw to sharp scriticism during the Brezhnev times). The remoteness and relative scientific freedom of the young department of the USSR Academy of Science at Novosibirsk allowed Zaslavskaya to do her research in sociology of the agricultural sector by studying the Siberian countryside, Altai Krai in particular.

In the later years of the Soviet Union accurate detailed information regarding conditions in Soviet agriculture was considered a state secret when not censored outright. A major breach in security occurred in 1983 when the details of a classified paper, "for internal use only", the report from the closed conference in Novosibirsk by Tatyana Zaslavskaya regarding the crisis in Soviet agriculture, were published in the Washington Post. Later it became known as the Novosibirsk Report in the West. Although expressed in terms of Marxist theory, this paper, an outline of a proposed research project to study the social mechanisms of economic development as exemplifed in Siberian agriculture, was sharply critical of current conditions . Zaslavskaya was the author of a number of works in Russian which deal with economics and social conditions in Soviet agriculture although some of her work was suppressed by Soviet censors, for example, "The Methodology of Comparing Labour Productivity in Agriculture in the USSR and the USA", written together with M.I. Sidorova, suppressed due to its pessimistic results

References

* Tatyana Zaslavskaya, "The Second Socialist Revolution: An Alternative Soviet Strategy", US edition: (in "The Second World" book series) Indiana University Press, (1990), 241 pages, ISBN 0-253-36860-X, ISBN 0-253-20614-6 (paperback)
*"The Novosibirsk Report", Survey, vol. 28 (1984), no. 1 pp. 83-109.