Authors

Giovanni Cadioli¹;  ¹ University of Padua, Italy

Discussion

The Order of the Red Banner of Labor Riga Furniture Combine was a leading furniture factory in the Latvian SSR. Baltic furniture in itself was amongst the most highly sought in the USSR. As key consumer goods, furniture waste of the key kind of products which Soviet rulers sought to increase production of - this since Kuybyshev and Stalin announced the "turn towards the consumer" at the 17th Party Congress of 1934.
A more serious attitude towards structurally improving the consumer goods industry manifested itself only after Stalin's death in 1953. As the struggle with the capitalist economy evolved into "peaceful competition", economic success acquired a novel character - and so did satisfying the "ever increasing needs of the popular masses".
After years of piecemeal economic change in the late 1950s-early 1960s, Khrushchev seems ready to launch a comprehensive plan for the reform of plan indicators, prices, bonuses, and in general of the division of labor between enterprises and the central bureaucracies in determining plan objectives, economic links, sale volumes, and the provision of inputs.
This program was only launched by his successors, Brezhnev and Kosygin. Increasing the volume of consumer goods production was a key objective.
Documents from multiple fonds of the Latvian State Archives chronicle in minute details the contortions of reform at the Order of the Red Banner of Labor Riga Furniture Combine, which found itself stuck in a series of old and novel problems, worsened by the informal nature of Soviet economic practices, and ultimately rendered insolvable by the broader problems that affected the reform as a whole.
The case of the Riga Furniture Combine may indeed be taken as a textbook example of why and how a reform that seems perfectly rational in its design and aim, was in fact bound to quickly run aground, when practically experimented in the "real existing" Soviet economic fabric.
Documents belonging to the Combine, to the local railways, to the Latvian Gosplan, Latvian Party Committees, and to the Latvian SovMin all paint an incredibly detailed picture of the economic microcosm of a Soviet enterprise under reform.