Leon Smolinski

Academician Victor Glushkov, the head of the Soviet program of research in cybernetics, estimated recently that, failing a radical reform in planning methods, the planning bureaucracy would grow 36-fold by 1980, requiring the services of the entire Soviet population. Such warnings are not exactly novel. Some forty years ago, the dying Lenin wrote: "Vital work we do is sinking in a dead sea of paperwork. We get sucked in by a foul bureaucratic swamp." In 1933, Leon Trotsky saw acute symptoms of the same disease. "Bureaucracy acts at random," he wrote, "it rejects objective criteria, it does not recognize laws other than the law of its own will, it substitutes commands for plans and pressure for calculation."[i]