The last orthodox Soviet finance minister who rejected market reform during perestroika
"I won't vouch that the workers won't take to the streets" — Boris Gostev, warning that cooperatives earning a thousand rubles a month would create a class of rich that socialist society could not abide.
An engineer-economist trained at the Moscow Technological Institute of Light Industry, Gostev rose from shoe-factory dispatcher through Gosplan and the CPSU Central Committee's Economic Department to become Minister of Finance of the USSR in December 1985, appointed by his former superior Nikolai Ryzhkov. During his four-year tenure he confronted the fiscal devastation of the anti-alcohol campaign, ballooning budget deficits, and the spread of cooperatives, while consistently opposing market reform. He imposed steep progressive taxes on cooperative incomes and famously warned that 'I won't vouch that the workers won't take to the streets,' refusing to countenance any wealth accumulation that threatened socialist equality. He founded what is now the Budget and Treasury Academy and, after his dismissal in 1989, spent thirteen years there as a professor.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1951–1959Shoe-factory engineer, Ministry of Light Industry, Kalinin sovnarkhoz labour & wages chief
- 1959–1966Gosplan, then deputy department head at State Scientific-Economic Council
- 1966–1975First deputy head, Planning & Financial Organs Dept., CPSU Central Committee
- 1975–1982Head, Planning & Financial Organs Dept., CPSU Central Committee
- 1982–1985First deputy head → head, Economic Dept., CPSU Central Committee
- 1985.12–1989.6USSR Minister of Finance
- 1989–2002Professor, Institute for Advanced Training of Financial Workers
Related historical events
Minister of Finance: four years against market reform
Gostev became USSR Minister of Finance in December 1985 on the initiative of Nikolai Ryzhkov, under whom he had earlier served in the Central Committee's economic department, and held the post until June 1989. By his own account he favoured changes in the financial-economic mechanism while opposing market reforms. In office he assessed critically the conduct of state finances during the anti-alcohol campaign, the growing state budget deficit and the economic restructuring.
He objected in particular to the 1987 reorganisation of the banking system, and to soften its consequences and coordinate interbank operations he founded and headed a Banking Council. Holding the revenue base while budget spending on defence and social provision grew was his central task.
His positions set him squarely against the market-reform wing of perestroika. Russian press accounts note that he never gained the public profile of his successor Valentin Pavlov. Dismissed in 1989, he became a personal union-scale pensioner from July of that year and was remembered as an official who defended socialist redistribution and opposed the market course of perestroika.