[The following takes place during the early stages of the Russian Revolution.]
The true driving force behind the Supreme Economic Council – the “Saint-Just of Russian economics” – was Iurii Larin. Although little known even to specialists, this half-paralyzed invalid, always in pain, could take credit for a unique historic accomplishment: certainly no one has a better claim to having wrecked a great power’s national economy in the incredibly short span of thirty months. He exerted a powerful influence on Lenin, who in the first two and a half years of his dictatorship listened to Larin more attentively than to any other economic adviser. Larin was always ready with quick and radical solutions to difficult problems, which earned him the reputation of an economic “magician.” His office, in a suite at the Metropole Hotel, was the place of pilgrimage for Russians with the most fantastic economic schemes: none of them was rejected out of hand, many were seriously considered, some were adopted.
[…]
He had no higher education: such knowledge of economics as he acquired came mostly from the reading of newspapers, fat journals, and radical pamphlets.
[…]
In the first months of the Bolshevik dictatorship he drafted and on occasion issued a number of important decrees. It was largely owing to him that Soviet Russia established the Supreme Economic Council, initiated economic planning, defaulted on its foreign debts, nationalized industries, and, for all practical purposes, abolished money.
The Supreme Economic Council attracted non-Bolshevik intellectuals, mainly Mensheviks and independent experts, because it offered work that required no political commitment and allowed opponents of the regime to feel they were serving the people. In no time at all it expanded into a bloated bureaucratic hydra centered in Moscow in a sprawling building on Miasnitskaia Street that had once housed a second-class hotel, its many heads spread across the country. Ten months after its creation (September 1918) it employed 6,000 functionaries, whom it paid 200,000 rubles a day in salary. This staff and this payroll would not have been excessive if the Supreme Economic Council did what it was designed to do – namely, direct the country’s economy.
But in reality it occupied itself mainly with issuing orders to which no one paid attention and forming bureaucratic organs that no one needed.
[There’s too much more to type here, but essentially, this guy drove the Russian economy deeper and deeper into the toilet because he literally had no idea what he was doing.]
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "War Communism." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 690-91. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Iu. Larin [M. Lure], Pis’ma o Germanii (Petrograd, n.d.).
See his [Larin’s] letter in Revoliutsiia, IV, 383-84.
Rykov in NKh, NO. 10 (1918), 31-32.
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