Part IV: Communist Education
Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems
Communist Schooling
Education, Employment, and Development in Communist Societies
The Economics of Education
Financing Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Soviet Union
The 'Unproductives' Labor of Soviet Teachers
China's Vocational and Technicial Training
Source: Harold J. Noah, "Financing Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Soviet Union," in Richard W. Lindholm, ed., Property Taxation and the Finance of Education. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974, pp.13-26. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.
FINANCING ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN THE SOVIET UNION
The focus of this paper is the financing of the network of "general education schools" (shkoly obshchego obrazovaniia) that forms the backbone of the Soviet system of formal education. At the age of seven over 95 percent of children in the Soviet Union enter these schools, where they pass through an eight or ten year course of study. Curricula and syllabi for each grade are standardized throughout the country, with only minor modifications to take care of national and linguistic variations, and urban and rural locations. No other country (not even the United States) is furnished on the immense Soviet scale with a comparable network of common schools attended by the overwhelming majority of children, almost without differentiation of any kind.
In 1970-71, there were in the Soviet Union 190,000 general education schools of all types (day and evening), employing 2,626,000 teachers, and enrolling 49,373,000 students, all at a cost to the State budget of the U.S.S.R. of nearly 7 billion rubles (for fiscal 1970). Table 1 provides data on the size of the general education school system for 1970-71 and for selected earlier years since 1940-41.1
As a result of these continued efforts, the 1970 census figures showed a literacy rate of 99.7 percent among the population aged 9-49. Among the entire population aged 10 years and older, 24 percent had an incomplete secondary education (i.e., less than 8 years), 12 percent had completed a general secondary education (10 or 11 years), 7 percent had specialized secondary education, 1 percent had incomplete higher education, and 4 percent had completed higher education. This left just over a half of the over-9-year-old population with an elementary (3 to 4 years) education only, or less.2
Of particular interest for our present purpose are the figures given on line 7 of Table 1. They show that since 1950-51 government expenditures on general education have risen nearly 3½ times, while total enrollments in general education schools have increased by less than one-half. Expenditures per student (see Table 2) have thus risen substantially over the 20-year period 1950-70 not just in money terms, but in real terms, too, for prices of education inputs have remained fairly stable over the period.3
It is worthwhile setting these per student expenditure increases in general education schools in the context of what has been happening to costs in the other major sectors of the Soviet educational system: kindergartens and nursery schools (enrolling 8,100,000 children in 1970-71); secondary specialized schools, called tekhnikums and offering 2-3 year courses of study at the senior secondary level (enrolling 4,223,000); and the universities and higher technical schools (enrolling 4,581,000 in 1970-71). It is noteworthy that none of these sectors has experienced as great an increase in per student expenditures as has the Soviet general elementary and secondary school. Indeed, the higher education sector now spends less per student per year than it did in 1950, kindergartens only 13 percent more, while cost increases in the secondary specialized schools alone approach the rise of the general education schools expenditures. Table 3 provides details on these matters.
The important conclusion to be drawn from these summary figures contradicts, of course, the generally held view that the Soviet educational authorities are preoccupied primarily with the training of specialized workers at the expense of general education. If we can assume that the government puts its money where its priorities are (and one must note that the Soviet government keeps a very tight rein on spending for education, a tighter rein than most other central governments), then it has apparently given its top educational priority to raising the quality of general education schools, second priority to secondary specialized schools, third to kindergartens, and a poor fourth place to raising the quality of higher education.4
Soviet Administration and Budgets for Education
There are three main channels of funds for the support of elementary and secondary education in the Soviet Union. In sharply descending order of importance, they are: the State budget of the U.S.S.R., nongovernmental institutions (collective farms, enterprises, artels, and trade unions), and private sources.
The system of public budgets in the Soviet Union reflects the formal political-administrative structure and can be understood only within the context of that structure. The U.S.S.R. is a federal union of 15 Union Republics, the largest of which is the Russian S.F.S.R., containing 56 percent of the Soviet Union's population and 76 percent of the land area. The policies and practices of the R.S.F.S.R. set the pattern for the other Union Republics, especially in educational and financial matters. Each Union Republic is subdivided into a number of "provinces" (oblasti or kraia). These in turn are subdivided into towns (goroda) and rural areas (raiony), while further subdivisions provide for local administration of workers' settlements, villages, and small towns under raion jurisdiction.5 At each of these levels there are organs dealing with education. At the Union and Republic levels they are full-fledged ministries of education; at the provincial, town, and rural area level, there are departments of education, under the republic ministry. In all, as of January 1, 1971, the Soviet Union contained over 50,000 political-administrative units, each with its own apparatus for the administration of general education within its territory:
Ministries of education U.S.S.R. 1 Union Republics 15 Autonomous Republics 20 Departments of education Autonomous Provinces 8 Provinces 120 National districts 10 Rural areas (raiony) 3,030 Village soviets 40,866 Towns 1,934 Settlements 3,576 Raiony-in-towns 447 -------- Total 50,036
Each of these units, moreover, has an official budget, part of which is devoted to the provision of education.
The State budget of the U.S.S.R. (gosudarstvennyi biudzhet SSSR) standing at the apex of a pyramid of subordinate budgets is an aggregate of this myriad of governmental budgets from the budget of the Union government (Soiuznyi biudzhet) at the top to the budgets of the village soviets at the base. Immediately below the Union budget are the State budgets of the 15 Union Republics (Gosudarstvennye biudzhety Soiuznykh respublik). The inclusion of the term "State" in the title indicates that, like the State budget of the U.S.S.R., the State budgets of Union Republics are aggregates. Each comprises the budget of the central administration of the given republic (Respublikanskii biudzhet soiuznoi respubliki) and the budgets of all the subordinate government organs of the republic, from Autonomous Republics down to raiony-in-towns, in the listing given above.
The section of government budgets under which education is included also deals with the financing of cultural activities (theaters, sports facilities, publishing, press, clubs, libraries). Taken together, education and culture are denoted by the term: prosveshchenie, literally "enlightenment." (Education is denoted by the Russian word obrazovanie, a literal translation of the French formation.) The section of the State budget of the U.S.S.R. devoted to prosveshchenie, therefore, aggregates expenditures on education and culture in the Union budget and in over 50,000 other budgets of the subordinate organs of Soviet government.
Table 4 identifies these various budgetary divisions and aggregates for 1950, 1960, and 1965. The share of "education and culture" in total State budget expenditures (line 1) decreased between 1950 and 1965 from 12.5 percent to 7.7 percent; it had recovered to 8.5 percent in the figures for 1970 (not shown in Table 4). Most of these funds are spent through the State budgets of the Union republics, and the lion's share of these through the local budgets, in particular.
The Union budget provides for the needs of institutions serving the entire U.S.S.R.: national libraries, museums, theater-academies, national broadcasting, and the like. The republic budgets of the Union Republics are responsible for financing republic-wide cultural institutions, plus provisions for the training of labor reserves, professional and technical institutes, institutions of higher education, and tekhnikums. Local budgets carry the principal burden of financing the mass of schools. Indeed, not only kindergartens and schools, but also local libraries, houses and palaces of culture, clubs, local press, theaters, art galleries, and broadcasting facilities derive most of the funds necessary for their support through the local budgets. Moreover, provision for these purposes appears to be the largest single category of expenditure in local budgets, larger even than the sums devoted to financing local aspects of the national economy.
The allocation of financial responsibility among the various types of local budgets follows the same principle of territorial-administrative assignment that governs the Union and Union Republic budgets. Provincial budgets are responsible for the cultural and educational institutions serving the entire province. These are usually tekhnikums, kindergartens attached to enterprises under provincial jurisdiction, laboratory schools attached to pedagogical institutes, and provincial libraries, museums, theaters, art galleries, and so forth.
Town budgets finance town kindergartens, general education schools (and any boarding facilities they may have), boarding schools proper, continuation schools for young workers, and town cultural facilities. Raion budgets similarly take care of the expenses of the corresponding raion establishments. At the lowest level of Soviet administration, village soviet budgets provide for preschool, elementary and eigbt-year schools (except for the payment of teachers' salaries, which is a raion budget charge), village libraries, clubs, and other cultural facilities.
The current trend in Soviet government finance is to move more of the budget responsibility for educational expenditures to the lower levels of administration. This is in line with recent decisions to have local authorities "coordinate within their competence the activities of enterprises situated on their territories, no matter what the ministerial affiliation of the enterprise."6 Along with greater provincial, town, and rural area responsibilities for the policies and practices of productive enterprises, the local authorities have been granted somewhat wider powers for the financing and administration of school affairs.
Nongovernmental Support for Education
Collective farms are the most active of the nongovernment enterprises in the education field, although many instances of aid to the schools offered by industrial and commercial enterprises are also recorded. Permanent links between farms and schools are encouraged. Indeed, shefy (donor firms and farms) are made much of in the press, and shefstvo (patronage) is acclaimed as an important supplement to direct State financing of schools. In 1970, for example, education 7 drew 15.6 billion rubles from State funds and an estimated 4.3 billion from "other sources," representing mainly donations in cash and kind from collective farms and State enterprises.8 Most of this "voluntary" assistance arises out of participation in the expenses of school construction, repair, and equipment. Indeed, in the early postwar period (1946-50), collective farms built more school places than the official authorities (1.3 as compared to 1.2 million respectively). In 1970, the State paid for 1.8 million new places, collective farms for 424,000.9 Farms also provide foodstuffs for school meals, and enterprises donate space, materials, machine time, and labor for the factory training of classes from neighboring schools. Factory training was a very important feature of the Soviet general education schools from 1958, but since 1964 and Khrushchev's fall from power, the labor-training of young people in school has been severely curtailed.
The Soviet government welcomes and encourages shefstvo, but only in so far as it can be harnessed to move the schools in the direction indicated by the State. Patronage which would allow a school to strike out along a path of its own is simply forbidden. Resources provided by school patrons may not be used at will to support school purposes desired by the patron or the school. "Voluntary" funds must be shown under a special heading in school budgets and they are subject to the same controls and audit provided for regular budget funds. This means that the freedom for a collective farm to spend money (and/or labor and materials) on schools is a freedom to be exercised only within the framework of school regulations laid down by the State. It is this above all that distinguishes the Soviet educational system so sharply from its Western counterparts: the complete absence in the Soviet Union of the type of school so common in the West -- schools which draw substantial financial support from other than State sources and which exist to serve other than direct State interests and aims.
There is no evidence that shefstvo is conducted on a scale or with the regularity that might permit favored schools to raise their quality clearly above the general level. The benefactions of donor farms and enterprises to schools rarely do more than raise the level of school provision to a tolerable level where it would otherwise be especially backward, particularly in rural areas.
Private Resources
Private sources of support for Soviet general education must be mentioned, but need not detain us long, for they are small relative to the large sums spent from the State budget and by "patrons." There are two main categories.
First, there are the fees paid by parents for the maintenance of their children in State-provided institutions: children's homes, crèches, kindergartens, and dormitories attached to schools and boarding schools are the main types. No total of the amount paid is available, but in any case it is doubtful if fees should be included in strictly "educational" expenditure, because they are charged to defray the costs of housing, feeding, and clothing the children, and not to cover costs of schooling.10
Second, there are the fees paid by parents for the private tuition of their children. Long-standing respect for culture and a realistic appraisal of social-economic interest foster demand for private tuition in music, foreign languages, mathematics, and other school subjects. Parents are drawn to make such private investments in their children's education in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere. There are, of course, no private schools to which the Soviet parent can send his children, but graduation from State schools with good grades pays off well in terms of entry into the better institutions of higher education, higher future income, and a more privileged social position. We can hazard only a rough guess at how important funds for private tuition fees are, alongside the sums expended by the authorities. In 1970 there were about 50,000,000 children enrolled in general education. Assume that one child in ten had some private paid tuition during the year, amounting on average to thirty hours a year. This implies some 150 million hours a year. In 1970 in Moscow, I am told, the going rate was about 3 rubles an hour; in the provinces, it is probably less. Assuming an average rate of 2 rubles 50 kopeks an hour, the total annual bill would be 375 million rubles. This sum equals 5 percent of the expenditures in 1970 out of the State budget for general education, and is therefore of only modest importance -- if one has any faith in the values I have used in the calculation. It might be as well to remember that the final amount could easily be half the size stated, or twice as much, or more. We just have no way of knowing.
Tax Revenues for the Schools
The major taxes and their yields in 1970 for the U.S.S.R. as a whole were:11
Billion rubles % Turnover tax 49.4 31.5 Profits taxes 54.2 34.6 Income taxes on cooperatives, collective farms, and enterprises owned by social organizations 1.2 0.8 Receipts from State loans 0.5 0.3 Personal taxes 12.7 8.1 Social security receipts 8.3 5.3 Unspecified and omitted12 30.4 19.4 ----- ----- 156.7 100.0 ==== ====
Most of the resources placed at the disposal of local authorities (and, hence, school authorities) are merely assignments (otchisleniia) from revenues raised in the respective territories of each local unit by all-Union and all-republic taxes.
Local authorities in the Soviet Union exercise virtually no control over how much revenue they receive; they themselves neither establish tax liability, nor set the rates. Table 6 shows that 69 percent of the revenue of local authority budgets in 1965 was derived from assignments from State taxes. Revenue sharing is alive and well in the U.S.S.R.!
Assignments of revenue from the income tax on collective farms are 100 percent in most cases, but in recent years these taxes have been lowered as a part of the general policy of encouraging agricultural production. Their place has been taken by an enlargement of the first category of receipts listed in Table 6: "receipts from enterprises, etc.," in the form of greatly increased assignments from the profits tax. These revenues are now paid directly to town and raion authorities, and not to provincial governments, as before. In the Ukrainian S.S.R., for example, up to half the total profits tax revenue may be assigned to local budgets, and the profits tax receipts of local budgets may constitute up to one-quarter of all their revenue. In most instances, local budgets approach these maxima. Nevertheless, it remains true that assignments from the turnover tax remains the most important single source of revenue for the support of local authorities and, hence, of the schools.
The principle of "democratic centralism" is applied to determine the size of assignments from the highest to the lowest levels of local authority. Just as the Union Republic determines the assignments to be allocated from State taxes to provinces, so the Soviets of Workers' Deputies of the provinces allocate shares of these assignments to the subordinate Soviets of rural areas and towns. These, in turn, allocate further shares of the receipts to the village and settlement budgets subordinate to them. "Democratic centralism" thus asserts the absolute control of the budgets of subordinate levels of administration by the financial authorities of the superior levels. This is often claimed as a particular advantage of Soviet fiscal arrangements over Western budgetary systems.13
Local school authorities appear to possess no significant financial discretion. The tax revenue that comes to them, to be spent through the local budgets on schools and other purposes, comes in amounts and from sources that are largely beyond their control. In fact, they receive the amounts to which they can lay claim on the basis of very closely drawn "norms" of expenditure.14 These are for the most part legislated centrally, and they signify more than the statutory minima or permitted maxima common in United States' school regulation, for they are instead required standards of provision, to which local school authorities are expected to adhere.
Educational policy, in so far as it is reflected in budget allocations, is made at the top, between the officials of the Union Ministry of Education and the officials of the State Planning Office (Gosplan). It is at this level that the representatives of education make their demands upon resources and the Gosplan people state their requirements from education in terms of numbers of graduates of various types and desirable norms of resource consumption per student. After negotiation, compromise and agreement, and armed with Gosplan authorizations, the Ministries of Education of the 15 republics can then command resources from their Ministries of Finance. It is then the responsibility of the Ministries of Finance to make sure that the revenues are available for the school authorities to do their job, and to check that all the regulations concerning levels of staffing and equipment, payment of teachers, and so forth are being observed. One by-product of this system is continual tension between officials of the two ministries at all levels of government. Finance suspects Education of padding enrollment totals, miscalculating requirements of teachers and classroom space, not taking enough trouble to fill classes to capacity (40 students in grades 1-8; 35 in grades 9 and 10) before opening additional ones, and footdragging in the push to eliminate the costly very small schools, among other sins.15 In turn, Education accuses Finance of overzealousness and petty tyranny in its attempt to control the allocation and disbursement of every last kopek.
In one view it may appear unimportant whether tax revenues to be spent on schools are raised to a greater or lesser degree by local initiative, with local approval, and under local auspices. A tax is a tax, it might be argued. It is no more a tax where, as in the Soviet Union, the various Union, Republic, and local budgets merely represent conveniently demarcated, but not organically differentiated, sections of one fundamentally integrated purse. It is no less a tax where, as in the United States, the articulation of budgets is by no means as complete.
Economists, of course, will rightly insist that the matter can never be dismissed so cavalierly, even in a Soviet-type economy, where the financing of all expenditure (public and private, local and nonlocal) can be readily conceived as coming out of one, essentially social, purse. There are important questions not only of the effect on incentives of different tax structures, but also of the effect on the citizens' willingness to pay (and, hence, the subjectively perceived burden) of local taxes levied to support local needs versus centrally imposed taxes to support the needs of other areas of the country.
But there is an even more important point to be made in evaluating the particular fiscal structure the Soviet Union has developed for the schools: it ensures that control over the pace and form of school development is kept firmly in the hands of the top levels of government. The system admirably complements the direct political and administrative control from the center that has been the hallmark of Soviet (no less than Czarist) public administration, and it facilitates the recasting of budgets to fit changes in central educational policy.
Table 1 -- General Education Schools in the U.S.S.R., 1940-41 to 1970-71, Selected Years
'40-41' '50-51' '60-61' '65-66' '69-70' '70-71' Number of general education schools of all types ('000) 199 222 224 214 197 190 Number of teachers ('000) 1,238 1,475 2,043 2,497 2,608 2,626 Number of students enrolled ('000) 35,552 34,752 36,187 48,255 49,426 49,373 of which Grades 1-3 (elementary) 16,126 14,030 14,152 15,343 15,842 15,334 Grades 4-8 (incomplete secondary) 18,135 19,814 19,438 24,926 26,027 26,243 Grades 9-10(11) (complete secondary) 1,291 908 2,597 7,986 7,557 7,796 Expenditures on general education schools from the State budget of the U.S.S.R. (millions of rubles) 860 2,039 3,313 5,778 6,746 6,953
Data are for the beginning of each school year cited, except for expenditures (which relate to the calendaryears 1940, 1950, etc.).
Source: Tsentral'noe statisticheskoe upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR,
Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1970g.: statisticheskii ezhegodnik
(Moscow: lzdatel'stvo "Statistika," 1971), pp. 628, 733; henceforth cited as Narkhoz 1970.
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Table 2 -- Per Student Outlays on General Education Schools of the U.S.S.R., 1950-51 to 1970-71, Selected Years
Year Rubles Index 1950-51 59 100 1960-61 91 154 1965-66 120 203 1969-70 136 231 1970-71 141 239
Source: Table 1.
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Table 3 -- Expenditures per Student from the State Budget of the U.S.S.R.,
by Educational Sector, 1950-51 to 1970-71. Selected Years
Kindergartens and nursery schools Secondary specialized schools (tekhnikums) Universities and higher tech. institutes. ___________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________ Amount Amount Amount (rubles) Index (rubles) Index (rubles) Index 1950-51 284 100 128 100 556 100 1960-61 212 75 155 121 450 81 1965-66 273 96 217 170 384 69 1969-70 318 112 277 216 455 82 1970-71 321 113 289 226 480 86
Source: Narkhoz 1970, pp. 628, 635, 733. ------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 4 -- Expenditure on Education, Culture, and Scientific Research (Prosveshchenie) by Types of Budget, U.S.S.R., 1950, 1960, and 1965 (in billions of rubles)
a These two items do not add exactly to the corresponding total in Line 1, because the figure of 43.2 billion rubles excludes grants from the Union budget to three Union Republics.
Type of budget Total budget expenditure Expenditure on education and culture (prosveshchenie) 1950 1960 1965 1950 1960 1965 State budget of the U.S.S.R. 41.3 73.1 102.3 5.2 8.0 13.2 Union budget 31.7 30.1 43.2a 1.5 0.3 1.0 State budgets of the Union Republics (15 budgets) 9.6 43.0 58.4a 3.7 7.5 12.3 Republic budgets of the Union Republics (15 budgets) 3.0 28.6 37.3 0.6 2.4 3.8 Local budgets (50,000+ budgets) 6.6 14.4 21.1 3.1 5.1 8.5 Sources: G. F. Dundukov, ed., Gosudarstvennyi biudzhet SSSR i biudzhety Soiuznykh respublik (Moscow: Gosfinizdat, 1962), p. 5; and Ministerstvo finansov SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi biudzhet SSSR i biudzhety Soiuznykh respublik (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Finansy," 1966), pp. 23, 53, 96, and 99.
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Table 5 -- Distribution of Expenditures from Local Budgets,
U.S.S.R., 1950, 1960, and 1965
Expenditure category 1950 1960 1965 1. The national economy 15.0% 31.6% 27.0% 2. Social-cultural provisions 75.6 63.9 69.7 a) Education and culture 47.1 35.6 40.2 b) Health and physical culture 27.1 26.6 27.5 c) Social insurance 1.4 1.7 1.9 d) Family allowances - - 0.1 3. Administration 8.7 3.2 2.6 4. Other 0.7 1.3 0.7 ---- ---- ---- 100 100 100 === === ===
Source: Gos. biudzhet SSSR (1966), p. 97.
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Table 6 -- Sources of Budget Revenues of Autonomous S.S.R.'s
and Other Local Authorities, U.S.S.R., 1965
Source Billion rubles 1. Receipts from enterprises, organizations and property under the jurisdiction of the Councils of Ministers of A.S.S.R.' s and executive committees of local Soviets 3.94 2. Local taxes and charges, income taxes on cooperatives, etc. 1.10 3. Assignments to local budgets from State taxes and nontax receipts, 13.40 including assignments from
a) Turnover tax .................................... 8.74
b) Agricultural tax ................................ 0.36
c) State loan .........................................0.01
d) Income taxes on collective farms .......0.87
e) Personal income tax ..........................2.514. Residual budget funds applied to meet expenses .46 5. Other
Total.59
--------
19.47
Source: Gos. biudzhet SSSR (1966), p. 95.
NOTES
- Until January 1, 1961, the official exchange rate was set at 1 ruble = 25 cents U.S. On that date, the Soviet government instituted a monetary reform, cutting the face value of the currency and all internal prices by a factor of ten. At the same time, the parity of the new ruble was set at 1 ruble = $1.11 U.S. The ruble figures quoted in the present study are all expressed in terms of the new (post-1960) ruble. It is always very difficult to say what a foreign currency is really worth; with the ruble, this is especially difficult. According to rates prevailing on the black market, the official rate grossly overvalues the ruble: the ruble is currently bought and sold at a rate of three or four to the dollar. On the other hand, according to Soviet official calculations, the official rate actually undervalues the purchasing power of the ruble (vis-a-vis the dollar) by about 1 1 percent. Somewhere within these wide margins a reasonable rate must lie. If the reader converts ruble figures given in this paper at the rate of 3 to the dollar, he will probably not be too far out. [BACK]
- Tsentral'noe statisticheskoe upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Narodnoe khoziaistpo SSSR v 1970 g.: statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: lzdatel'stvo "Statistika," 1971), p. 23. This statistical source will henceforth be cited as Narkhoz 1970. [BACK]
- The official general price index has remained virtually constant over the decade 1960-70. Compared with 1950, prices in the last decade were down about one-quarter. However, teachers' salaries were raised by about 25 percent in 1964 (they rose again on September 1, 1972), so we should expect an education price index to be not quite as stable as the general price index has been. [BACK]
- For a detailed analysis of educational costs during the period 1950-61, showing that there was a major rise in State budget expenditure per pupil in general education, continuing steadily throughout the decade, and apparently quite unaffected by either the decline in total enrollments down to 1955, or by their subsequent recovery, see Harold J. Noah, Financing Soviet Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966), pp. 87 ff. [BACK]
- In addition, some republics contain Autonomous Republics (of which there are 20 in all). Although the Autonomous Republics have ministries of education, their powers are in fact no more than that of provincial departments of education. [BACK]
- N. Glushenko, "Ukrepliat' material'no-finansovniu bazu raionykh i gorodskikh Sovetov" (To strengthen the material-financial basis of raion and town Soviets). Finansy SSSR 1971, 6 (June 1971), 17. [BACK]
- Including kindergartens, secondary professional schools, higher education and vocational training, as well as the general education schools. [BACK]
- Narkhoz 1970, pp. 732-733. This sum is apart from the share of local authorities in local enterprise profits, in the form of revenues from the profits tax. [BACK]
- Narkhoz 1970, p. 551. [BACK]
- If these fees were counted, it becomes logically necessary to include an estimated sum for the costs of maintenance at home of the majority of Soviet children who attend day schools. But this is undesirable in a study of education costs. [BACK]
- Narkhoz 1970, pp. 730-31. [BACK]
- The published figures give simply a figure for total State budget receipts in 1970 (156.7 billion rubles) and the receipts under each of the named headings listed. These do not add up to 156.7 billion rubles, but leave an unexplained gap of 30.4 billions. However, there is a further item supplied; "Total revenues received from State and cooperative enterprises and organizations: 142.9 billion rubles," which is 29.8 billion rubles more than non-personal tax revenues and State loan receipts. Thus, an amount of about 30 billion rubles a year paid by Soviet State enterprises finds its way into the central budget grand total, but does not appear in the published analyses! [BACK]
- For example: "The absence of unity, the lack of articulation of budgets, is a characteristic of the capitalist budgetary system, and it finds expression in the fact that the central budget, the budgets of the members of the federal union, and the local budgets are not unified in a single budget, as is the case in socialist countries. Only under socialism is it possible to have the unification of the budgetary system ... and development of the budgetary system of the socialist state according to the ever-wider development of the principle of democratic centralism." A. M. Aleksandrov, ed., Gosudarstvennyi biudzhet SSSR (Moscow: Gosfinizdat, 1961), p. 24. [BACK]
- For example, number of students per class, number of teachers per class, size of classrooms, number of rooms per hundred students, heating, lighting and cleaning expenditures, and so on. [BACK]
- See, for example, P. Batyshchev, "Bol'she vnimaniia sotsial'no-kul'turnym uchrezhdeniiam" (More attention to sociocultural establishments), Finansy SSSR 1970, 8 (August 1970), pp. 19-21. Also, by the same author, "Effektivnee ispol'zovat' sredtsva na soderzhanie sotsial'no-kul'turnykh uchrezhdenii" (To utilize more effectively funds for maintaining sociocultural establishments), Finansy SSSR 1971, 11 (November 1971), pp. 14-20. [BACK]