Alec Nove Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Alec Nove (1915–1994) was an influential British scholar and one of the key founders of the discipline of Soviet studies. By the early 1960s, he was internationally recognized as the leading Western authority on the dynamics of the Soviet centrally planned economy. The author of eleven widely regarded books, he was an eloquent writer and an engaging lecturer. Apart from his economic expertise, Nove was also deeply immersed in Russian history, culture, and folklore.

Nove was born into a Russian Jewish family in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1915. His father, a member of the Menshevik faction that opposed the Bolshevik party, took the family into exile in London in 1922, changing their name from Novakovsky to Nove. Nove graduated from the London School of Economics and then served in the British army during World War II (1939–1945). After the war he worked for four years at the Board of Trade in London, where he learned the practicalities of economic planning. In the 1950s he began direct study of the Soviet economy, spending some time at the British embassy in Moscow. After teaching at the London School of Economics, in 1963 Nove was appointed head of the Institute for Soviet and East European Studies at Glasgow University in Scotland, a post he held until 1982.

Nove’s most important works were The Soviet Economy, first published in 1961, and An Economic History of the USSR, which appeared in 1969. Each book went through several revised editions over the next twenty-five years. Unable to conduct work in the field due to the cold war, Nove mined the Soviet press and academic publications for insights into how the Soviet system really worked with regard to both industry and agriculture, and he was expert at dissecting the arcane and often misleading data put out by the Soviet statistics agency. He uncovered numerous telling examples of the informational asymmetries and perverse incentives of central planning. A typical example was a glass factory that produced very thick panes when its output targets were set by weight. When its output targets were changed to square footage instead of weight, it produced very thin panes, which shattered before they reached their customers.

Nove was wary of applying Western models and assumptions to the Soviet case. Despite the inefficiencies of Soviet planning that he exposed, he was prepared to grudgingly concede that the Soviet system had served the political objectives of the country’s leaders and had propelled the USSR to superpower status. This argument over whether or not there was some sort of logical consistency to Joseph Stalin’s modernization strategy was laid out in Nove’s books Was Stalin Really Necessary? (1964) and Stalinism and After (1975). A true political economist, Nove had the great strength of being able to place economic activity in its political context. As the Soviet system began to reform after 1985, Nove was more cautious than most other Western experts in advocating a rapid shift to competitive markets. Nove himself was a social democrat, and in 1983 he published his own speculation about a possible alternative to both Soviet planning and Western capitalism, The Economics of Feasible Socialism. He also wrote a critique of the market criteria used in state-owned industry in Britain, Efficiency Criteria for Nationalised Industries (1973).

Bibliography:

Nove, Alec. An Economic History of the USSR. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Nove, Alec. The Economics of Feasible Socialism. London: Unwin Hyman, 1983.
Nove, Alec. The Soviet Economy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1961.
Nove, Alec. Stalinism and After. London: Unwin Hyman, 1975.
Nove, Alec. Was Stalin Really Necessary? London: Allen and Unwin, 1964.

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