“Truth, Beauty, Good, Evil: ethical imperatives,” runs the line that Innokentii Volodin finds in his mother’s papers on the day of his arrest. As ever, these are the aims to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn aspires in his latest novel. His account of the events in East Prussia as World War I begins is more than an extensive compilation of historical facts, more than their transmutation into fictional form. It is an attempt to capture the truth about certain elusive laws governing the movement and development of human society, best observed in times of crisis. In War and Peace Tolstoy attempted to expound and test a philosophy of history. Solzhenitsyn’s purpose in August 1914 is substantially the same. Some comparison of the two works is inevitable.

“The productive effort of society,” Communist mythology avers, “has as its goal the provision of increasingly abundant amounts of consumer goods. Moreover, that is the ultimate aim of all production. It should be noted that in a socialist economy, in contrast with systems based on private ownership of the means of production, it becomes a direct goal.” It is also said that “the aim of the socialist economy is full satisfaction of the needs of the population.” One would expect that the fulfillment of this aim would be accompanied by a substantial rise in real wages. The purpose of this note is to check whether that logical conclusion applies to changes in real wages in Poland, by comparing two recent independent estimates—one by W. Krencik, published in Gospodarka Planowa, the Polish economic journal devoted to problems of planning, and the other by the present writer, published in Soviet Studies.