ZYUGANOV ECONOMIC ADVISOR ADVOCATES RETURN TO CENTRAL PLANNING.

Interviewed in the weekly Pravda-5 (No. 13, April 5-12), Yuri Maslyukov has confirmed that a Communist leadership would restore the main elements of central economic planning. Maslyukov’s ideas are of interest not only because he chairs the Duma’s Economic Policy Committee, but also because he is said to be a close economic advisor to Communist presidential hopeful Gennady Zyuganov. Maslyukov, whose background is in submarine engineering, is himself a former head of USSR Gosplan. He admitted that the Soviet system collapsed because it failed to provide its citizens with such high living standards as "the opposing world system" (i.e., the Western world). But he argues that by 1989, the Soviet leadership had a viable economic reform program that could have made the old system competitive. Instead, Maslyukov says, the Yeltsin leadership threw the baby out with the bathwater and abandoned central planning entirely.

With Friends Like This, Zyuganov Doesn’t Need Enemies.