Budget - history, Stalinist and subsequent

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The first State budget (hereinafter simply the budget) is formed in England, then in France and other continental states. The first timid attempts of kings to impose a rule on the population subject to feudal lords in France date back to 1302-14, and only to the middle of the 15th century. the French kings, relying on the urban bourgeoisie and the petty nobility, arrogate to themselves the monopoly of taxation.

The period of consolidation of the political functions of the new state and its tax rights was followed by a second period, during which the existing financial system was intensively used in the interests of the landowning aristocracy (in France in the 15th - 16th centuries); Having lost their independent political functions and the right to direct tax exploitation of the population, the landowners remained the politically dominant class within the emerging state and continued to exploit the “population in an indirect form, through the financial system. Accordingly, the number of "needs" satisfied by state revenues, along with the maintenance of the state administration apparatus (army, court, administration), includes the needs of the feudal aristocracy (including the "princes of the church"), living to a large extent at the expense of the state.

The robbery of the state treasury by the aristocracy was carried out in the form of pensions, donations, sinecure *, etc., which constituted the most important expenditure items of the budget. In France, in 1537, out of the total state revenues of 8 million livres (equal in purchasing power to 170 million modern gold francs, data from the beginning of the 20th century), pensions and donations absorbed about 2 million livres, that is, about one quarter. In addition, about one quarter of the income was absorbed by the maintenance of the royal court, where crowds of aristocrats were fed. The colossal sums collected by the state at that time, falling through the "satin leaky pockets" of the nobility, fell, in large part, into the stronger pockets of the nascent bourgeoisie and were one of the most important sources of initial capitalist accumulation, in addition, the young bourgeoisie took part in robbing taxpayers and directly, as tax collectors. Payoff *, by the way, was widely used in Russia.

A new, third period in the history of the budget begins with the beginning of the period of wars for economic dominance (17th century). Since that time, foreign policy, expanding the sphere of exploitation of the ruling classes, has become one of the most important tasks of the state. The robbery of taxpayers in order to finance the ruling classes, which is not always convenient to carry out openly, was easily succeeded under the slogans of foreign policy, masking the interests of these classes with the interests of national "defense". No one can believe that the predatory English bourgeoisie in the 17th and 18th centuries, plundering entire continents, waged "defensive" wars, nevertheless, extorting funds from taxpayers for these wars was easier than for direct distribution of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

The natural consequence of the wars was the colossal growth of state debt, the main function of which in a bourgeois state is to maximally liberate the ruling classes from the burden of military expenditures and transfer them to "future generations" of taxable classes, therefore, in the 17th - 18th centuries. “Public credit becomes a symbol of faith for capital” (Marx), and borrowing costs become the most important part of budgets.

Foreign policy has been a particularly heavy burden in those countries where, as in France, the costs associated with it were added to the colossal costs of direct financing of the parasitic aristocracy. In France, the budgetary strain caused by these two items of expenditure was so great that during the era of Louis XIV, "the kingdom became a vast hospital for the dying." “In 1715, about 1/3 of the population (almost 6 million people) perished from poverty and hunger. Marriage and reproduction are disappearing everywhere. The cries of the French people are reminiscent of a death knell, which stops for a while, and then begins anew”(I. Teng). According to available estimates, the total amount of public spending in France for 1661-1683 (Colbert's era) was as follows: the cost of wars and the maintenance of the army and navy - 1.111 million livres, the maintenance of the royal court, the completion of palaces and secret expenses - 480 million livres, and other expenses (including subsidies to trading companies) - 219 mln. livre.

The budget of France in 1780 (B. Necker) had the following form (in millions of francs) - expenses: yard - 33.7, interest on debt - 262.5, army and navy - 150.8; court, administrative and financial apparatus - 09, 3, cultural and economic events (including financing of the church) - 37.7 and other expenses - 26.0; total - 610. Income: direct taxes - 242, 6, indirect - 319, 0 and other income - 23, 4; in total - 585. This budget does not reflect the huge costs of direct financing of the nobility, carried out mainly in the form of distribution of sinecures (unnecessary, but expensively paid posts) in the army and in the entire state apparatus; for example, under Louis XV, almost half of all expenditures on the army were absorbed by the maintenance of officers.

In the fourth period that followed, most European states are moving from the previous open distribution of state funds to more disguised forms of financing the ruling classes corresponding to the spirit of "democracy". The most typical methods of "making millionaires" at the expense of taxpayers in this period are: bonuses for sugar refiners and agrarians - alcohol producers, financial transactions during the construction of railways. networks (treasury guarantees for railroad loans, fraud at the expense of the treasury when buying out private railways or when selling state-owned railways to private companies), etc.

The relative size of government spending on these items, however, is far below the cost of the previous monarchies for pensions and sinecure of the nobility. This relative modesty of the capitalist bourgeoisie in the area of purely financial exploitation of the population is explained by the fact that developed capitalism possesses more sophisticated methods of appropriating surplus value (in a purely economic form in a factory, factory, or agricultural enterprise); the predatory methods of the period of initial accumulation, leading to ruin and direct extinction of the payers, are recognized as simply unprofitable, in exactly the same way as, for example, a 15-hour working day is unprofitable for the capitalists. Capitalist states of the 19th century limit the budget task, mainly, to transferring to the working classes the maximum part of the expenditures for maintaining the state apparatus and waging external wars; such a shift takes place in the form of taxes on the peasantry, the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie; At the same time, since direct taxes on the proletariat and the imposition of basic necessities (bread, housing, etc.) can affect the level of wages and indirectly affect the size of capitalist profits, the industrial bourgeoisie itself is an active supporter of the exemption from direct taxes on small incomes (by establishing a non-taxable minimum) and the elimination of indirect ones.

Desiring to have a qualified workforce, healthy soldiers and able-bodied workers, the capitalist state, since the second half of the 19th century, in Western countries and the United States, local budgets have been formed, which are entrusted with the implementation and financing of cultural and social events through taxes (folk education, medicine, social insurance, etc.), which does not happen in Russia.

The new tasks assumed by the bourgeois state in the 19th century fell mainly to the lower levels of the state organization; in this regard, in the 19th century, along with the rapid growth of the budget in the narrow sense of the word, there is an even faster development of local budgets. Degree of decentralization of government economy in different countries and in different periods of the XIX century was extremely different, and therefore the correct idea of the evolution of the budget as a whole can be made only when considering the budget in each country, therefore, due to the brevity of the article, it is not considered.

In the Soviet Union, three main periods can be established in the delineation of the state and local budgets. In the first years of the revolution, the conditions of a tense civil war demanded maximum centralization in the field of administration and economy; therefore, the period of "war communism" is characterized by both a gradual narrowing of the local budget and an increase in the powers of central bodies in regulating it.

Already according to the 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee not only "determine which types of income and fees are included in the national budget and which are at the disposal of local councils, as well as establish taxation limits" (Article 80), but also approve the estimates themselves city, provincial and regional centers. In the middle of 1920, by a resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (18 / VI), it was decided to "abolish the division of the budget into the state and local and in the future to include local revenues and expenditures in the national budget."

In the second period, with the start of a new economic policy, the local budget is restored, and its volume, through a gradual transfer to the places of expenditures and revenue sources, gains an expansion unheard of not only in tsarist Russia, but also in Western European countries. At the same time, the second period was characterized by the dictatorship of provincial centers, which were granted not only the right to approve the budget of lower administrative-territorial units, but also the very distribution of income and expenses between the budgets of the provincial, provincial city and subsequent links. A feature of the second period was the extreme diversity and annual changes in the volume of individual units of the local budget, which, however, was completely inevitable, since it was necessary to re-allocate expenses and incomes between local units, and since the process of transferring expenditures to places had not yet ended and revenues from the national budget.

With the end of this process and the stabilization of the currency, the third period begins (from the end of 1923), which is characterized by significant stability in the demarcation between the state and local budgets, during this period the former unsystematic and often unexpected for local councils transfer of expenditures from the center to the localities stops; the right to make changes in the distribution of expenses and incomes between the center and localities, which earlier could have been carried out not only by the CEC, but in fact by the People's Commissariat of Finance of the Union, is finally assigned to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and, within precisely established boundaries, to the Central Executive Committees of the Union republics (with the changes now come into effect only 4 months after their publication).

In connection with the stabilization of the entire budget, there is a decentralization of legislation on the local budget, which, within the framework of the All-Union Regulations on Local Finance (30/1V 1926), is transferred to the Central Executive Committees of the Union Republics. At the same time, during the third period, the tendency to further expand the volume of the local budget at the expense of the national budget continues, since under the Soviet system there is no room for contradiction and struggle between the center and localities, the basis of budget delineation is the principle of maximum approximation of the state economy to the people, from the center is transferred, as a general rule, all thatwhat can be transferred without violating the principle of organizational and economic expediency; therefore, the unloading of the national budget towards the local budget in the USSR is extremely wide (almost 50%).

Comparison of the size of the USSR budget with the size of the budget of pre-revolutionary Russia can be made only with the proviso that such a comparison is conventionally and inevitably inaccurate. If we take the total budget in 1913 in the amount of 4 billion rubles, and after the discount for the reduction of the territory, in 3.2 billion rubles, then this figure is opposed by the total (estimated) total budget of the USSR in 1926/27 in 5, 9 billion rubles. (in chervontsy), i.e. about 3.2 billion rubles. pre-war (when recalculated according to the wholesale index of the State Planning Commission). A more accurate recalculation, partly for wholesale and partly for retail indices, will lead to the conclusion that in 1926-27 slightly more than 90% of the pre-war budget will be achieved.

The budgetary policy of the Soviet state is directed in terms of expenditures towards the steady implementation of the slogan of a "cheap people's government", which should be the government of the working classes, that is, to the maximum reduction of expenses for maintaining the administrative apparatus. In Soviet practice, those parasitic salaries and distribution of money to the higher officials, which absorbed huge funds in the pre-revolutionary era, are completely excluded.

The characterization of the morals of the old regime, in this respect, was at one time given by the bourgeois financier, extremely moderate in his political views, prof. Migulin in the following expressions:

- “Foreign business trips of officials, allegedly for government needs, maintenance of the courtyard, higher pensions for officials and their families, distribution of state property to favorites, distribution of concessions with a government guarantee of unrealizable income, distribution of government orders at triple, against market prices, maintenance of a huge class of officials, half which is not needed for anything, and so on … That financial system cannot be considered correct, in which the state spends 12 mln. rub, and for prisons 16 mln. rub., nothing for insurance of the working classes, and retired to their officials 50 million. rub." ("The present and the future of Russian finance", Kharkov, 1907).

This picture of incredible parasitism and plundering of the national property by the tsar's family and courtyards, the landlord and bureaucratic aristocracy is completed by the characterization of the military budget. - “A lot of expensive paid bosses, huge headquarters and carts, bad commissaries, colossal central administration, land admirals, regiments overcrowded with non-combatant and untrained people, old iron chests remaining in the navy, instead of ships, etc. endlessly and, in as a result, a ragged half-starved army and a fleet filled with land sailors”(ibid.).

The pre-revolutionary budget was characterized by a huge weight in it of unproductive expenses, which were intended to support and strengthen the bourgeois-landlord state and pay for its foreign policy of imperialist predation and violence. In 1913, the total expenditure budget amounted to 3.383 million rubles. expenses for the synod, the provincial administration and the police, justice and prisons, the army and the navy amounted to - 1.174 million. rub., i.e. about 35%, and from 424 mln. rubles, assigned for payments on loans, mainly external, about 50% of all costs.

The budget of the USSR, on the contrary, has as its distinctive feature a high weight, expenditures of a productive nature. Defense expenditures in the 1926/27 budget amount to 14.1%, and administrative expenditures, of which the revolution eliminated the sums spent in pre-revolutionary times on the maintenance of the imperial court and church, do not exceed 3.5%. In addition, thanks to the cancellation of tsarist debts, the Soviet budget is not burdened with the cost of paying interest and paying off public debts.

In 1926-27, payments on the state debt accounted for only 2% of the total expenditure budget. At the same time, loans in the USSR were directed exclusively for the purpose of financing the national economy, while the enormous sums received by the tsarist government through foreign loans were used to finance the imperialist policy. Thanks to the colossal contraction of all unproductive expenses, huge funds were freed up, which the workers 'and peasants' government can use to finance the national economy and other productive purposes. The cost of financing the national economy, which in the tsarist budget amounted to only a few tens of millions. rubles, in the budget of the USSR reach (in 1926/27) more than 900 million. rub. - about 18.4% of all expenses. Budgetary aid to local budgets in the tsarist budget was allocated about 61 million. rub.; in the Soviet budget - more than 480 million. rub. As the Soviet budget grew, the expenditure on cultural and educational purposes also steadily increased.

If we compare the tsarist and Soviet budgets in terms of revenues, then the most characteristic feature of the USSR budget is an increase in direct taxation, which gave about 7% of all revenues in the pre-revolutionary budget, and about 15.6% in the Soviet period by 1926/27. Income from the national economy (not counting the railway) in the tsarist budget did not exceed 180 million. rubles, in the Soviet budget revenues from the nationalized economy in 1926-27 amounted to 554 million. rubles, or 11, 9% of all income.

In its structure, the pre-revolutionary budget reflected the centralized, bureaucratic nature of the empire's state structure, based on the suppression and oppression of all nationalities, except for the dominant one. The Soviet unified budget, on the one hand, was an expression of the unity of the plan of state and economic development of all Union republics, but, on the other hand, it provided the working masses of various nationalities with the widest opportunity for independent creativity in all areas of economic and cultural development. The net income of the entire local budget in the pre-revolutionary period reached 517 million. rubles, and in 1926/27 it amounted to (not including state aid) 1.145 million. rub. Expansion and strengthening of local budgets is the most solid guarantee of real independence and creative initiative of local councils.

In terms of the rate of growth of the national income, the USSR left far behind the highest rates of increase in the national income that ever took place in the capitalist countries. In 1936, the national income was 4, 6 times higher than its pre-war value and six times higher than the level of 1917. In tsarist Russia, the national income grew annually by an average of 2.5%.

In the USSR, during the years of the first five-year plan, the national income increased annually by an average of more than 16%, in the four years of the second five-year plan, it increased by 81%, while 1936 the Stakhanov year gave 28.5% growth in the national income. This, unprecedented in pace and scale, growth of the national income of the USSR was a direct consequence of the fact that in the Soviet state “ the development of production is subordinated not to the principle of competition and the provision of capitalist profit, but to the principle of planned leadership and a systematic rise in the material and cultural level of the working people " (Stalin, Questions of Leninism, 10th edition, 1937, p. 397) that "Our people do not work for the exploiters, not for the enrichment of the parasites, but for themselves, for their class, for their own, Soviet society, where the best people of the working class are in power." (Stalin, Speech at the First All-Union Meeting of the Stakhanovites on November 17, 1935)

The distribution of the national income of the USSR proceeded according to the following scheme: 1) appropriations for the expansion of production; 2) contributions to the insurance or reserve fund; 3) deductions for cultural and welfare institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.); 4) deductions for general management and defense; 5) deductions for pensioners, fellows, etc., and 6) individually distributed income (salary, income of collective farmers, etc.).

In the USSR, the amount of income actually used by the working people is greater than the individually distributed part, since in a socialist society "everything withheld from the producer as a private person is directly or indirectly returned to him as a member of society" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in the book: Marx and Engels, Works, vol. XV, p. 273). Approximately one-fifth of the national income goes towards expanding socialist production, and four-fifths of it is the consumption fund. This made it possible to solve all social issues in medicine, education, pension and personal incomes of citizens and at the same time to annually reduce prices for food and essential goods, these are billions of rubles imperceptibly invested in the consumer's pocket.

During the period 1924 - 36, capital investments in the national economy amounted to 180.3 billion rubles. (in the prices of the corresponding years), of which 52.1 billion rubles were invested during the first five-year plan. and for 4 years of the second five-year plan - 117, 1 billion rubles; the unprecedented rates of growth of the national income of the USSR ensured a tremendous rise in the material and cultural standard of living of the working people. In the USSR, workers' incomes are in direct proportion to the productivity of social labor. In socialist industry, labor productivity has increased more than 3 times since 1913, and with the reduction in the length of the working day - 4 times.

In 1936 alone, labor productivity increased in industry as a whole by 21%, and in heavy industry by 26%. Over the past 7 years from 1928 to 1935. in the largest capitalist countries, output per worker remained approximately stable. In the USSR, during this period, there was a huge increase in labor productivity in all sectors without exception. The well-being of the working people of the USSR increased accordingly. Already in 1931, unemployment was eliminated in the USSR. The number of workers and employees throughout the national economy increased from 11.6 million. in 1928 up to 25, 8 million people. in 1936, their wage funds grew from 3.8 billion rubles. in 1924/25 to 71.6 billion rubles. Average annual wages for the same period increased from 450 rubles. up to 2.776 rubles, and the wages of an industrial worker only for the period 1929-1936 increased 2, 9 times.

The incomes of the collective farm peasantry are growing from year to year. The multibillion-dollar expenditures of the state and trade unions, spent on cultural and everyday services for workers, have increased several times. In 1936 alone, these expenses reached 15.5 billion rubles, or 601 rubles. for one working worker and employee. During 1929-30, the expenditure on the social insurance budget (for benefits, pensions, rest homes, sanatoriums, resorts, for medical care for the insured and their children, for workers' housing construction) amounted to more than 36.5 billion rubles. From 27 / VI 1930 to 1 / X 1933 mothers of large families in the form of state. benefits (on the basis of a government decree prohibiting abortions, increasing material assistance to women in labor, establishing state assistance to mothers with many children), according to the USSR People's Commissariat of Finance, 1,834,700 rubles were paid. Only in a socialist state of workers and peasants is it possible to achieve a real growth in the wealth of peoples, an increase in the well-being of the working people.

In the title, in the table, all the income and expense items of the budget of the USSR for 1924 - 1927. all subsequent years, until the war of 1941, they did not change, with the exception of the figures, which had one tendency - an increase in spending both on development and on social programs. The post-war period is characterized by a decrease in local budgets in the republics affected by hostilities, and at the same time, national expenses for the restoration of the consequences of the war fell on the entire population of the country.

After Stalin's death, with the advent of the command-administrative arbitrariness of the CPSU, the entire revenue part of the budgets was concentrated in the central apparatus, which, with the "master's" permission, decided the fate of the regions. In 1964, the famous Hungarian revolutionary leader of the Comintern, and later the founder of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician E. S. Varga, in his suicide notes, posed the question:

- “And what are the real incomes of those who belong to the top of the bureaucracy, to the ruling stratum in the country? Or rather, how much does the state pay itself a month? Nobody knows this! But everyone knows there are dachas near Moscow - of course, state ones; there are always 10-20 security guards with them, in addition, gardeners, cooks, maids, special doctors and nurses, chauffeurs, etc. - up to 40-50 servants in total. All this is paid by the state. In addition, of course, there is a city apartment with appropriate maintenance and at least one more summer house in the south.

They have personal special trains, personal planes, both with a kitchen and cooks, personal yachts, of course, a lot of cars and chauffeurs who serve them and their families day and night. They receive free of charge, or at least received before (as is the case now, I do not know) all food and other consumer goods. What does all this cost the state? I do not know this! But I know that to ensure such a standard of living in America, you have to be a multimillionaire! Only the payment of at least 100 people of personal service is 30-40 thousand dollars. Together with other expenses, this amounted to more than half a million dollars a year”!

If during the life and work of I. Stalin there was always an acute issue of cutting managerial personnel and cutting administration costs, then from the mid-1950s a flurry of vacant positions appeared for the nomenclature. The management staff has grown tenfold. The USSR has turned from a "dictatorship of the proletariat" into a command-administrative system. Once Kautsky himself wrote: "On the other hand, it is true that parliamentarism is a bourgeois means of domination, which tends to turn all deputies, including anti-bourgeois ones, from servants of the people into their masters, but at the same time into servants of the bourgeoisie." …

And he was right.

Note:

• SINEKURA (lat. Sino cura - without care), in the Middle Ages, a church office that brought income, but not associated with the performance of any duties or at least stay in the place of service. In modern usage, sinecure means a fictitious but profitable position. The modern sinecure has much sophisticated forms, the privatization of objects, allegedly at public expense and put into trust, a procurement tender and much more.

** Redemption - a tax collection system, which consisted in the fact that the so-called tax farmer, paying a certain amount to the treasury, received from the state authorities the right to collect tax from the population in his favor. The ransom was widely used in the Moscow state of the 16-17th and the first half of the 18th centuries, especially for the collection of a drinking tax - an indirect taxation of strong drinks, mainly vodka and honey. Customs duties, income from fishing, etc. were also at the mercy. In the middle of the 16th century, the sale of vodka was declared a state monopoly. Drinking houses were opened in towns and villages. They were in the state administration, which was carried out by "loyal" people - elected tavern heads and kissing people. The collection of the drinking tax was also farmed out. With the abolition of internal customs (1753), the main object of the Otkupa was the drinking tax. Manifesto 1 / VIII of 1765 abolished the "correct" system altogether. Since 1767, everywhere, except for Siberia, Otkupa for drinking fees was introduced. State taverns, kruzhechnye yards, etc. were given to the tax farmers for use free of charge, and "royal patronage" was promised; they received a number of privileges and the right to keep guard to combat innuendo; the state emblem was installed over the door of the drinking house.

By 1811, the ransoms were gradually extended to Siberia. They brought a lot of income to the treasury. The tax farmers, soldering and ruining the population, amassed huge fortunes. The ruin of the peasantry by the tax farmers soon assumed alarming proportions. The buy-out caused a protest from the landowners and the appanage department. Manifesto 2 / IV of 1817Payoffs were abolished in all "Great Russian provinces", except for Siberia. The state sale of petya was introduced. As a result of the increase in wine prices, this soon led to the development of innkeeping, to a reduction in the state sale of wine and to a decrease in state revenues. Due to the reduction in distillation, the sale of the landlord's grain was reduced. By Law 14 / VII of 1820, the buyouts were restored throughout the "Great Russia", in 1843 - introduced to the North. The Caucasus, in 1850 - in the Transcaucasia. In 16 provinces of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and the Baltic region, where landlord distillation was highly developed, the ransom system was used only in cities, towns and government villages, while the free sale of petyas was preserved on landowners' estates. In 1859, the drinking revenue of the treasury amounted to 46% of all government revenues. In the late 50s. among the peasants, ruined by the tax farmers, a strong movement began in favor of abstinence from wine. In 1859, it spread widely in the Volga region and in many places took on violent forms, accompanied by the destruction of drinking houses, clashes with the police and troops. Law 26 / X 1860 abolished the tax system from 1863 throughout Russia and, on the basis of the Regulation on Drinking Tax 4 / VII 1861, was replaced by an excise system.

Lit.:

The second five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR (1933 - 1937), published by the State Planning Committee of the USSR, Moscow, 1934;