On 12 November 1960 the USSR Council of Ministers gave Ivan Nikiforovich KHUDENKO permission to carry out an experiment. He could organize wage-payment on State Farms, based on a system of unsupervised team work.
The experiment involved each team supporting itself fully and being on independent financial accounting. The team was assigned only the task of producing such-and-such an amount within a certain period of time. The experiment also involved a broad system of material incentives: the accounts were settled with each team as a whole, not with every individual person; and they were paid for results achieved, not for effort involved. (The average wage level was excluded from the plan indicators.)
Up to then, Khudenko had worked as a finance expert on the staff of the USSR Council of Ministers. He was in the high-responsibility job lists of the CPSU Central Committee and received a salary equivalent to that of a deputy minister (by order of the USSR Council of Ministers).
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SUCCESS REPORTED
The success of the experiment was reported in the newspapers Izvestiya (24 November and 2 December 1961), Komsomolskaya Pravda (16 April, 29 May & 15 October 1965), Literaturnaya Gazeta (21 May 1969, 4 March and 18 November 1970) and in the journal Novy Mir (1971, Nos. 2, pp. 155-156, and 3, p. 244).
A Kiev documentary film studio made a film ”Man on Earth”. The documentary stated that the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers approved of the experiment.
The journal Iskusstvo Kino [Cinema Art], No. 11, 1972, published an account of Khudenko’s successful experiments over 10 years. For example, on the llynsky State Farm 830 people and 227 tractors were engaged in grain production before the experiment took place: under the unsupervised-team system, the same level of output was achieved by 67 people with 67 tractors.
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KAZAKHSTAN
After Khrushchov’s removal in 1964 Khudenko was transferred to a State Farm in a village (Akchi) near Alma-Ata in the Kazakh SSR.
After the unsupervised-team system had been established, the cost price of grain fell fourfold, the profit per worker rose sevenfold, and wages rose fourfold. Khudenko accurately demonstrated that universal introduction of the system into the country’s agriculture would mean a fourfold rise in gross output with the employment of five million people in agriculture: at present 30 million people are so employed.
However, the experiment found zealous opponents.
They were headed by M. Roginets, Agriculture Minister for the Kazakh SSR, and V. Merkulov, department head at the Ministry.
On 23 July 1970 Roginets closed the Akchi State Farm and asked the Kazakh SSR Procuracy to open a criminal case against the organizers of the experiment. The Procuracy, after investigating Roginets’s accusations, did not find anything criminal in the actions referred to.
On 4 September 1970 Khudenko brought an action in a people’s court against the Kazakh Ministry of Agriculture, concerning payment to workers of money actually earned by them in accordance with the conditions laid down by the ‘unsupervised-team system’. (The State Farm had been closed at the height of the work-season — before the accounts were concluded.)
The court refused to hear his suit.
In August 1972 the USSR Ministry of Justice, in response to complaints by Khudenko, ordered that the suit be heard, and the people’s court of the Soviet district in Alma-Ata gave a judgement in favour of Khudenko.
The Kazakh SSR Procuracy protested against the decision of the people’s court, categorized Khudenko’s court action as an attempt to embezzle State Property, and made a criminal case against him and his deputy, Vladislav Vasilyevich FILATOV. (Filatov had been arrested earlier, in January 1972.)
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TRIAL
On 28 August 1973, the Alma-Ata City Court found Khudenko and Filatov guilty of actions covered by two Articles of the Kazakh SSR Criminal Code: 174 (“Unwarranted appropriation of official rank or authority”), 177 (“Forgery, manufacture or sale of forged documents, stamps, seals, or forms”) and also of attempting “especially large-scale embezzlement of State or Public Property”.
Applying Article 39 of the Kazakh Criminal Code (“Passing of milder sentences than the law stipulates”), the Court sentenced Khudenko to six years’ and Filatov to four years’ imprisonment.
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On 3 May 1974 Khudenko appealed to the USSR Supreme Court. After outlining the circumstances of the case, his letter requested that “our case be re-examined by the USSR Supreme Court because of its peculiarly serious nature and exceptional importance”. (The letter is published in full in the Archives of the Chronicle, No. 2.)
Filatov sent a similar appeal to Leonid I. Brezhnev.
On 17 June 1974, V. Vasilev, head of the Administration for Introducing New Technology at the Republic’s ‘Kazselkhoztekhnika’ combine, supported the request made by Khudenko and Filatov. In a letter to Brezhnev, he wrote:
“Turn your highest Party consideration to this and allow a review of the ‘case’ in the USSR Supreme Court.”
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DEATH
On 12 November 1974 Khudenko [1] died in a prison hospital.
His son’s address is: Alma-Ata-64, 149 Tchaikovsky Street, flat 19.
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NOTES
- Khudenko was born in 1917. (Author of photo unknown.)
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