1966 -- YEAR OF
LIMITED GAINS FOR SOVIET ECONOMY
By Sandro Mantovani
The USSR scored some economic successes this past year. If 1965 was a year of readjustment after the final disastrous period of Khrushchevite economic management, 1966 marked a significant increase in overall production. Agriculture, thanks partly to favorable climatic conditions, was the prime contributor to this with the best harvest ever of cereals and cotton. Besides Divine Providence, as the saying goes, these results were achieved owing to increased prices for produce delivered to the state and the more liberal policy with respect to private plots decided on at the March 1965 plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The success obtained in what is traditionally the weakest and most backward sector of the Soviet economy was accompanied by a significant though not spectacular increase in industrial production (8.4 percent as against the 6.7 percent provided for by the plan). All this was expressed, particularly in the second half of the year, in greater availability of consumer goods and in a relative improvement in the traditionally poor quality of manufactured consumer goods. Also, the results of the harvest make it possible for the Soviet leaders to divert the enormous amounts of currency which had been earmarked for cereals procurement to additional purchases of prime capital goods and, probably, of the sort of consumer goods that meet the thirst of the bureaucrats and the upper strata of the intelligentsia for high quality products.
It seems, therefore, that the series of economic measures undertaken by Khrushchev's successors during 1965 is producing positive results, at least in the first phase. On closer inspection, however, such a judgment would have to be at least partially reconsidered.
The basic proposals for agriculture made at the March 1965 plenum were contained in a long-term program of intensive investments. However, some years will be necessary to see the results of these investments. On the other hand, the high prices paid for deliveries to the state and the more liberal policy regarding private peasant plots have had positive effects, as already noted; but these were the emergency measures proposed at the plenum to deal with an agricultural situation which was growing ever more ominous.
For industry, the Kosygin reform meant, on the one hand, a return to centralized management in the respective industrial sectors (reconstitution of the industrial ministries); and, on the other, new methods of plant management, based among other things on imposing a lesser number of leading indexes on the plants from the center and on giving the priority among these indexes to the profit index, which had been considered of sec-— ondary importance before. The process of organizing the ministries went on throughout 1966; and, in fact, if not formally, it still cannot be said to have been totally concluded -- as Baibakov, the president of Gosplan, revealed in his December report to the Supreme Soviet.
The new managerial methods at this time are in force in 673 plants with cadres equal to 10 percent of those in industry. To judge from the official Soviet sources, it seems that these plants obtained excellent results in 1966. Even if this is true, it is very difficult to attribute all the credit for increased industrial production to them alone. .
On the other hand, we may reasonably conjecture that the successes obtained are primarily owed to the guarantees which the Soviet leaders, in official and semiofficial form, have repeatedly given the industrial and agricultural leaders that there will be no heavy-handed political and administrative interference in the affairs of the individual enterprises as there always had been in the past, both under Stalin and Khrushchev. This was what impelled the factory managers to seek to accumulate and make use of these "internal reserves" which have been so much discussed for so long in the Soviet press. These reserves were always kept in the background to meet the challenge of unforeseen political or administrative interference by the central bodies, which otherwise would threaten the normal management of the plants.
This is a success, therefore, even if a limited one which should not be overrated, of the general line of the group in power. We defined this general line when it first appeared as an attempt to politically unify all layers of the bureaucracy, and which therefore meant that confidence was to be placed in all the bureaucrats.
Nonetheless, as has been stated, the positive importance of these economic achievements should not be overrated. The fundamental contradictions of this phase of Soviet economic development are still unresolved. For the sake of brevity, we can turn
the floor over to the president of Gosplan, who lists these contradictions concisely and efficiently in the report already cited: "The national economy has suffered large unnecessary losses due to the squandering of material and financial resources. More than 17 percent of the plants are not meeting the objectives set by the plan. Such plants have underfulfilled the plan by more than one billion rubles' worth of production. In many | sectors, production has not been of the type specified by the plan, and the most important types of goods are not being produced. Fixed capital is not being utilized ina satisfactory manner, and the new industrial complexes are coming into production too slowly. The planned goals for realizing investments and for starting the installation. of new machinery have not been met. In spite of a notable increase in production, in 1967 the lack of a series.of consumer goods will still be felt. The service network is still insufficiently developed, especially in the rural areas."
; These basic contradictions cannot but make their influence felt on the overall functioning of the. Soviet economy as soon as the effects of the factors which have caused this revival are exhausted. Moreover, as has been emphasized several times, even if the contradictions existing today are partially eliminated, when the effects of the economic reform (which presumably will begin at the end of next year) begin to make themselves felt, they will reappear later in a more acute form.
In any case, the economic achievements of 1966, even if they are ephemeral, have had a definite political result -- the consolidation of the dominant group in power.
The beginning of 1966 was marked by the rise toward power of the Shelepin group, supported by the political police and the central leadership of the Komsomol, which had a neo-Stalinist political line whose calling card was the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and a constant emphasis on the "positive role played by Stalin." The nostalgic themes were meant to impress the bureaucrats with their desire for a firm and decisive policy. But the vast, energetic, if ill-defined, opposition of the country found its expression in the resistance of important groups of intellectuals. Shelepin was forced to retreat without having brought his campaign to its culmination. Brezhnev and Kosygin remained in power. Shelepin, however, had not lost the battle; he had simply not fought it and remained with his forces intact. However, the at least temporary stabilization of the economic situation reenforces, for the time being, Brezhnev and Kosygin's position. The enthusiasm with which Brezhnev's birthday was celebrated, which was clearly reminiscent of the minor-key cultism characteristic of the Khrushchev period, is only the external manifestation of this.
However, if, for the present, Shelepin has not succeeded in winning power, part of his political line has been appropriated by the present ruling group and is being put into practice discreetly little by little. The entire period subsequent-to the Twentythird Congress has been characterized by the multiplication and extension of attempts to educate the youth along so-called "patriotic-military" lines. A campaign is being waged with extensive means to recapture ideological hegemony over the youth by commending militarism and chauvinism to them as the highest values. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the war and of the Battle of Moscow served as the pretexts for unleashing this campaign. Innumerable "excursions to sites of glorious military episodes" were staged throughout the summer culminating in a grandiose march on Moscow-by thousands of youth in paramilitary uniforms.
The entire academic and extracurricular education of the youth is keyed to these themes. In short, it seems that the most recent ideological invention of the bureaucracy, after "Goulash socialism," is "patriotic-military socialism."
In this atmosphere rumors of an imminent Chinese aggression and war with China as a result, probably spread deliberately, are given credence. In this atmosphere the ever more insistent campaign against the "threat of ideological subversion" by foreign visitors to the USSR is emerging as a factor. The intellectuals are under fire for their "lack of patriotism," and Novy Mir, the organ of the intellectual opposition, was forbidden to publish a diary of Simonov on the first days of the war which once again strongly emphasized Stalin's responsibility. The Conference on Ideological Problems held this past November apparently marked the defeat and isolation of those elements most blatantly nostalgic for Stalinism (Sturua, Bodiul, etc.); but not so much because their line was rejected as because it was maintained that this line must be executed with greater tact and discretion.
The intellectuals who had become the standard-bearers of the struggle against Stalinism in the beginning of the year seem passive and indecisive even though conscious that developments might take a dangerous turn. For the time being, they are primarily ooops with defending their power positions (the constantly threatened Novy Mir, for example).
The reason for this kind of attitude is their lack of cohesion, their ideological confusion, but most of all, the persistent passivity of the masses in this period. However, this passivity is not so much due to the hopes the masses place in the new leadership as it is to their inability to express their dissatisfaction given their extreme atomization and the lack of a good opening to express this dissatisfaction; therefore, we nay safely assume that at the first sign of economic difficulty, Soviet society in toto will find itself in a state of the most acute tension.