Abolins, Janis, and Arnold Ubelis (1996) Common Property Under the Transfer to a Market Economy: Lessons of Soviet Practices of Common Property Management

Conference: Presented at "Voices From the Commons," the sixth annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Berkeley, CA, June 5-8, 1996.

Abstract: "All the natural resources and capital under the Soviet legislation have been common property managed by state institutions or municipalities. The highly centralized management was supposed to ensure most efficient use of all the resources for the benefit of the whole society. A number of reasons are discussed because of which this did not prove to become true. Authoritarian and pseudo-democratic practices of making decisions combined with a strong political influence of the military complex are shown to have made the centralized management wasteful, inefficient, and hazardous to the environment. The transfer to market economy and more democratic system of management does not solve the problems unless complemented by public awareness of the state of environment and fundamental revision of common beliefs of the inheritance of Soviet mentality."