About review in Foreign Affairs (USA) of the 5-volume New directions in the Soviet economy produced by US Congress, and necessary response (8 pp). [R 8 August 1966]

==========================================================

[Translator’s note: questionable points are marked in red; there are also bracketed comments/explanations]

For your eyes only [top secret!

ATTENTION: CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE CPSU

[Illegible inscription in the top left margin; in the right margin: “34454 Sector 2-a]

The Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress has published a five-volume study entitled “New Directions in the Soviet Economy,” prepared by a team of experts with US governmental institutions. The authors falsify the results of the seven-year plan in the USSR, claiming that the Soviet economy is lagging far behind the American one, with the GDP gap allegedly broadening. The said study calls into question the effectiveness of the new economic reform in the Soviet Union.

The Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress is planning to promulgate the said study in a large number of countries.

Considering that this study, being regarded as an official document, is obviously tendentious, aimed at reaching apparent propaganda goals, the Propaganda Department of the CC CPSU recommends the following [counter]measures:

• Task the newspaper Pravda with publishing an article that criticizes this study;
• Recommend that the newspaper Izvestia carry interviews with members of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, in conjunction with the JEC report, and in regard to the development the Soviet economy;
• Instruct the journals Kommunist, Voprosy ekonomiki, Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnyie otnoshenia, the newspapers Selskaia zhyzn and Ekonomicheskaia gazeta to publish articles, in view of bourgeois criticism of the theory and practice of economic construction in the USSR, with the main emphasis on the initial results of the economic reform and the main tasks of the new five-year plan;
• Task the Institute of Economics under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences [AN] of the USSR, the Institute of World Economics and International Relations, the Research Institute of the Gosplan [State Planning Committee] of the USSR, and the Ekonomika Publishers with the publication, in 1967, of a book on economic reforms in the industries and prospects of the Soviet economy in the new five-year plan;

[stamp “REGISTERED” in the left margin, dated (illegible), signed “Nikolayeva”; handwritten below:

MEMO “CC CPSU instructions (illegible) to be made known to all organizations mentioned above and placed under the Information Department. [This document to be transferred to the archives.” (Signed illegibly) “Deputy Head of the Information Department.”]

• Instruct the News Agency Novosti with conveying to foreign audience materials published by the Soviet Press in conjunction with the publication of the five-volume US study, and with issuing a collection of articles on the Soviet economy by progressive foreign scholars;
• Instruct the news agency TASS to prepare a classified annotated translation of the US study “New Directions in the Soviet Economy.”

We request your consent.

(Signed)

1. Shevliagin,

Head of the Information Department, CC CPSU Date (illegible) August 1966

(Illegible handwritten note at the bottom of the page)