A Soviet Case For Entrepreneurship

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If you traveled from Monticello to Moscow, you would cover more than 5,000 miles. Ideologically, the distance from the symbol of Jeffersonian democracy to the seat of Soviet bureaucracy is measureless. Jefferson believed that the strength of this country lay in independent yeoman farmers tilling their own soil. In today's society, Jefferson's ideal citizen would be the entrepreneur -- a standard that is light years removed from the Soviet model of collectivization. It is therefore all the more surprising that a much-decorated Russian hero, raised in the Soviet system, should now be echoing sentiments that sound Jeffersonian.

But perhaps it is not so strange. Andrei Sakharov, a brilliant theoretical physicist, was a key figure in the Soviet development of the hydrogen bomb. For 20 years, he was a pillar of the Soviet military and industrial establishments. Today he is under house arrest in Gorki, a city closed to foreigners.

In the 1950s, Sakharov began to use his prestige to argue for a halt or limit to nuclear testing. Gradually, he became more critical of Soviet policies. By the early '70s, he was a tireless crusader for human rights, an ombudsman for all who incurred offical wrath for dissension. His activities won him the Nobel peace prize in 1975, but by then he was, as he put it, "excommunicated from many privileges of the Soviet establishment" and not allowed to go to Oslo to get his award. In January 1980, he was taken under guard to Gorki. He has been there ever since.

But what has all this to do with Jefferson and the U.S. economic system? Certainly Sakharov might have said, with Jefferson, "I have sworn . . . eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." But even more important, Sakharov, like Jefferson, perceives the essential connection between political liberty -- the entrepreneurship of ideas -- and economic diversity. Further, he has come to see that economic freedom is the best precondition for freedom of thought, creativity, and productivity.

Most entrepreneurship is illegal in the Soviet Union. An independent businessperson there risks arrest, even death. Sakharov has argued that "there is an urgent need for economic reforms that would increase the independence of enterprises and allow elements of a mixed economy." The state monopoly, he says, "inevitably entails servitude and compulsory conformism . . . In periods of stress this servitude engenders terrorism, and in calmer times it encourages a bungling bureaucracy, mediocrity, and apathy . . .

The consequences of the Party-State monopoly are especially destructive in the sphere of culture and ideology . . . People become hypocrites, timeservers, mediocre, and stupidly self-deceiving."

Besides, says Sakharov, monopoly doesn't work. It is no accident, he points out, that all of the great scientific and technological discoveries of recent times have taken place outside Russia.

A recent book by Marshall I. Goldman, an economist at Wellesley College, strengthens this view. In USSR in Crisis, Goldman outlines both the capabilities and limitations of the Soviet system. Under Nikita Khrushchev, he says, the Soviets geared up to outstrip the United States in steel, coal, and other basic industries by 1980. And they achieved their goals. But in the meantime, U.S. scientists developed other, more sophisticated, materials and technologies that have made these industries obsolete. Clearly, a system based on bureaucratic monopoly will always lag behind one that encourages the free exchange of ideas.

Even some Russian bureaucrats now see a link between entrepreneurship and productivity. Science News reported that Sergey G. Skachko, a Soviet embassy official in Washington, felt that "American engineers, lured by the potential personal gain of commercializing their developments, have a natural incentive to transfer new ideas out of the lab and into industry. Their salaried socialist colleagues have had a far less potent inducement for worrying about whether their inventions see widespread adoption."

But the existence of an entrepreneurial sector does much more than boost productivity by encouraging an open exchange of ideas. Entrepreneurship, in part, protects the right to free expression. And the larger the entrepreneurial sector, the safer that right becomes. The absence of economic freedom in the Soviet Union is one reason Sakharov has so few open defenders in his own country. Dependent upon the state bureaucracy for their livelihood -- and therefore for their survival -- few Soviet citizens are willing to speak out against injustice.

This country's 14 million small businesses, by contrast, provide 14 million sources not only for economic opportunity but also for political liberty. Every one of this nation's business owners can say anything he or she pleases. No one can fire these people or take their jobs away. If you spread the wealth and power in society, you inevitably spread freedom.

Certainly the U.S. enterprise system has its Achilles' heels. We have been criticized for wastefulness, corruption, and inequalities. But for all its drawbacks, Sakharov considers "the United States the historically determined leader of the movement toward a pluralist and free society." And, as Jefferson realized at the nation's birth, economic independence is the only guarantee of that liberty.

The Soviet leadership may detest Sakharov's views, but that is no excuse for detaining him in Gorki without medical care. He and his wife are both seriously ill. They should be moved to Moscow and, if they choose, be allowed to leave the country. With the whole free world asking for better treatment for Sakharov, not to provide it would be further evidence of the dangerous inflexibility of the Soviet system. TThe Soviet leadership may detest Sakharov's views, but that is no excuse for detaining him in Gorki without medical care. He and his wife are both seriously ill. They should be moved to Moscow and, if they choose, be allowed to leave the country. With the whole free world asking for better treatment for Sakharov, not to provide it would be further evidence of the dangerous inflexibility of the Soviet system.