Addressing a conference of industrialists and entrepreneurs in Kiev, Volsky presented a cohesive program of forceful state intervention mixed with reviving intergovernmental departments throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The transition to American-style capitalism, he said, would not work in Russia, Ukraine or any other Commonwealth state.
Ukraine should be fertile ground for Volsky's arguments, which many former Soviet managers find persuasive. Ukraine was home to the Soviet Union's second largest military industry after Russia.
The latest economic plan presented to Ukraine's parliament has much in common with Volsky's state-regulated approach to capitalism, including extensive state funding for enterprises.
Arguing that state ownership and the creation of wealth were not incompatible, Volsky, chairman of Russia's Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, said: "State industry should work within the bounds of a market economy".
The organization sent an economic blueprint for Russia's economy to President Boris Yeltsin in mid-September, offering it as an alternative to the shock-therapy program of acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and his young team of free-market reformers.
The blueprint has yet to be published in full, but Volsky's summary in Kiev proposed clawing back state power both in Russia and the Commonwealth. He urged that Russia and the Commonwealth's primary economic interests should be protected and proposed the creation of "basic funds to preserve basic assets in the economy".
Food prices and other basic commodities such as medicines should also be taken under the state's wing, he said.
Gaidar traveled to Kiev last week to repair damaged economic ties between the two countries. Russian enterprises now owe the Ukraine 224 billion rubles in unpaid bills, while Ukrainian firms owe their Russian suppliers 95 billion rubles.
Volsky painted an apocalyptic picture of the Russian economy that his Ukrainian audience, many of whom work in the military-industrial complex, would find all too familiar.
Reeling off a list statistics, Volsky said that Russia's oil output had declined by 17 percent, the circulation of commodities by 40 percent and exports by 50 percent. The same situation affected all of the former Soviet republics, he said, leading the countries "to the edge of hyper-inflation".
Volsky denied that he was calling for the return of Gosplan and other state planning agencies, although he argued in support of establishing a banking union between the countries. He said that none of the Commonwealth countries planning to introduce its own currencies - of which Ukraine is one - had a clear idea of how this was to happen.
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