MOSCOW, January 31 (Itar-Tass) —— The leadership of the Russian Communist Party presented its proposals for the nationalization of a number of large industries.
Vladimir Kashin, the deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party’s presidium at a news conference said that oil export alone generate about 11 trillion rubles, an equivalent of the national budget. As much, he said, can be received from natural gas. However, the federal budget gets a tiny figure of five trillion rubles.
Communists see the solution of this problem in nationalization of the earlier privatized enterprises. CPRF Central Committee Secretary Nikolai Arefiev said that no wholesale nationalization of assets was on the agenda. The CPRF suggests individual piecemeal nationalization of industrial facilities, without stopping production or plunging the nation into hyperinflation. Arefiev said that in the European countries nationalization was possible only under government decisions. However, in Russia the process of privatization is not over yet and Communists have presented a bill on bringing certain industrial facilities back under the state control.
“For us it is important to establish a balance between government, collective and private types of ownership for the sake of replenishing the economy,” the CPRF leader and its candidate for the presidency, Gennady Zyuganov, said. In his opinion the European experience is diverse. For instance, in France about 35 percent of property belongs to the state and in the Scandinavian countries, more than 54 percent. Zyuganov also identified the specific industries he and his party would like to see nationalized – the production of mineral resources, the energy system, communication systems, the military industrial complex and the railways. He said that national leadership needs to have the right to shape pricing policies in these industries. In the meantime, Zyuganov said, over the past three years about 500 billion dollars fled the country and not a single modern research-intense enterprise had been built.
The Communist Party leadership said that it had no intention of harming small businesses. Moreover, Arefiev said small businesses “are feeding the country today.”
Zyuganov added that the same would apply to the light, textile and footwear industries and trade.
“Nobody would worry about that, we shall be helping and adding strength,” he said.