- Tatyana Zaslavskaya
Tatyana Zaslavskaya ( _ru. Татьяна Ивановна Заславская) (b.
September 9 ,1927 ,Kiev ) is aRussia n economicalsociologist , a theoretician ofperestroika , an author and co-author of several books oneconomy of the Soviet Union (specializing inagriculture ) and insociology of the countryside and a large number of research papers; she was a member of the Consulting Committee to thePresident of Russia from 1991 to 1992. In 2000 she won theDemidov 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 theUSSR Academy of Sciences with the degree ofKandidat in 1956 under the supervision of ProfessorVladimir Venzher (Владимир Григорьевич Венжер). In 1963 she joined theNovosibirsk Institute of Economics headed byAbel 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 canonicalMarxist science, which postulated that the development of the society is derived from the economical relations, and not vice versa. At these times Sovietsociology was under the tight scrutiny of the Communist Party (from the position ofbourgeois pseudoscience through a brief period of liberalisation during theKhrushchev Thaw to sharp scriticism during theBrezhnev times). The remoteness and relative scientific freedom of the young department of theUSSR Academy of Science atNovosibirsk allowed Zaslavskaya to do her research in sociology of the agricultural sector by studying theSiberia n 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 theNovosibirsk Report in the West. Although expressed in terms ofMarxist 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 resultsReferences
* 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.
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