Economics should be in command

During the height of the debate on the trajectory that the Russian economy should take in the aftermath of the successful Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution, its presumptive leader then, Vladimir Lenin, declared that, “Politics should be in command.” It should not be the market (economics), with its law of supply and demand, that should dictate the allocation of the country’s resources but the political objective of building a strong socialist economy.

The dogma was perpetuated by the Leninist loyalists within the Russian Communist Party and its application actually intensified during Josef Stalin’s (Lenin’s successor) rule of Russia. Eventually, Stalinism had to be slowly reversed by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and then drastically abandoned by Mikhail Gorbachev.