íichael Delyagin: "What Detains Them from Referring to Experience of Stalin’s Regulation of Small Business?"

- What do you think is condition of small business in Russia? According to Rosstat, the quantity of small businessmen is reducing now. IÁ it’s really so?

- Officially registered small enterprises are really getting closed because of strengthening both of tax pressure and power racket.

At the same time plaints about insignificance of small business in Russia aren't absolutely adequate. The matter is that criteria of small business in Russia are artificially underestimated – so that not to give tax privileges. In 2003 antimonopoly bodies of the government made recalculation of a share of small business in economy on the basis of the European criteria: it appeared only by third below the level of Italy - one of the world leaders on small business development. Since then not only scales, but also relative density of small business have grown essentially enough.

Our trouble not in quantity, but in poor quality of small business. It substantially is engaged in some gamble as manufacture is being consistently destroyed by state policy – up to joining to WTO on enslaving, terrible conditions. Recently we can see small "business" used for mastering of these or that budgetary funds. Small business is just insignificantly engaged in manufacture, the more so hi-tech manufacture. Thus in many respects it operates “in the shade” that is caused by ruthless suppression from the state, in appreciable degree it’s connected with organized, including ethnic criminality.

- What interferes with the development of business? Perhaps, it is necessary to lower salary fund taxes which prevent employers from development of manufacture and provision of people with work? What else is organized wrongly and is as a result a hindrance for small business development?

- It is necessary to weaken administrative pressure in practice, not in words. Besides, it’s necessary to fix that we need industrial small business, not "small business" in general. "Small business" occupied with washing up of corruption incomes of the officials, used as the tool of “cut off” of budgetary funds, as a cover for secondhand dealers parasitizing on agricultural manufacturers, frequently for simple gangsters is harmful to a society and is its enemy.

It’s necessary besides execution of norms of the Criminal code and fight against corruption to release small producing business selling products of own manufacture from all taxes in general – to begin with for 5 years.

The first time such idea was put forward in private conversation by Zhirinovsky, but then he felt somehow shy, while idea is correct, worthy of immediate realization.

Present distribution of budgetary funds to tens and even hundreds businessmen makes impression of profanation and support of own acquaintances, not of support of small business development as that.

- What is necessary to do that small business will develop and will lead to reduction of unemployment and growth of the gross national product? After all it’s small and average business which makes lion’s share of gross national product abroad, if it’s not so? May be our country, its economy isn't absolutely adapted for development of small business?

- Actually before war, at Stalin small business which was by then called cooperation gave not less than 6% of industrial production of the country including 40% of all furniture, 70% of metal ware (that is almost all ware used in civil sector), almost all toys. In Stalin’s USSR at least 1.8 million people worked in 114 thousand workshops and other enterprises – I underline we are talking only about industry! In 1936 there were about 15 thousand private and cooperative industrial enterprises in the country.

They were not only industrial, but frequently hi-tech: it is enough to recollect that the first Soviet lamp receivers (since 1930), radio-gramophones (since 1935) and even TVs with electron beam tube (since 1939) were produced by the Leningrad artel "Progress-Radio". It’s not the only example: about hundred design offices, 22 experimental laboratories and even 2 scientific research institutes worked in enterprise sector. Industrial cooperation had own pension system (which was almost absent in village), not to mention system of consumer and even housing crediting.

It turns out that at Stalin – in conditions of dictatorship of proletariat and basic suppression of market relations - the country was “adapted" for development of small business and now, at Putin it suddenly ceased to be “adapted" for it?

Certainly, a quarter of a century of proceeding national treachery caused enormous damage to our Native Land which is quite comparable on its consequences with Hitlerite invasion, however, it shouldn’t be exaggerated.

If experience of "all progressive mankind” with its support of small business is not alien to liberals, what except hatred to own people, slightly disguised by pathological illiteracy prevents them from addressing to the experience of Stalin’s regulation? At whom, for example, kiosks and small shops of agricultural manufacturers (then that were collective farms) had tax of 3% from turnover, while speculators trying to cut off agricultural manufacturers from a commodity market and to enslave them as it’s successfully done today by various mafias (substantially ethnic ones) decayed in GULAG.

It is necessary to recollect also that registration of trade artels occupied at that time one day without any propaganda cries about “a mode of one window” – time spent to get to the place from the region and back could also be included into this period.

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