Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
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motivation, a high premium in every profession is placed on Communist Party membership, or membership in communist youth organizations. Unfortunately, this may only encourage hypocrisy. Four of the five most recent defectors—the Kozlovs, Mr. Protopopov and Miss Belousova—had given the impression of being active, enthusiastic communists.
The Soviet authorities are now reported to be involved in a concerted effort to review their means of presenting defections. Lest the five most recent defections set off a chain reaction the Soviet Culture Ministry said on Thursday it had cancelled a month-long tour of the United States by the 110-member Soviet State Symphony-Orchestra, which was to have begun next week.
Once selected Soviet citizens are finally allowed to go abroad, efforts are made to limit their movements and inhibit their curiosity. They are generally advised that the police of the country they are visiting may seek to compromise them.
Wherever possible, Soviet citizens travel in groups. These are usually divided into “teams” of 10, with one person responsible for himself and the nine others. The group as a whole is accompanied by KGB men who represent themselves as interpreters or officials. But for the benefit of anyone contemplating defection they post themselves, for example, at the front and rear of the group every time it enters a tour bus.
In such an uneasy situation, hotel rooms and meals are arranged by the sponsoring Soviet organisation and spending money is kept to an absolute minimum. Since meals are taken together, anyone’s absence is immediately noticed and many Soviet citizens are unaware that they are not subject to Soviet law while abroad according to which defection is treason, carrying a maximum penalty of death.
There are limits to a regime’s ability to control its citizens once they are abroad. The most effective bar to defection remains the rule that when Soviet citizens travel abroad, they must do so without any members of their immediate family. The traveller knows that if he defects, he will never see his family again.
Rudolph Nureyev who was with the Leningrad Kirov Ballet before his defection in 1961, has not been able to see his mother and sister despite a request to the Soviet authorities on his behalf by Sir Harold Wilson, the former British Prime Minister.
Victor Korchnoi, the chess grand master who defected to Holland in 1976, has not seen his wife and son. Lyudmilla Agapova, wife of a Soviet sailor who jumped ship in Sweden in 1974, tried and failed to join her husband through an escape arrangement with the pilot of a private plane.
Miss Vlasova was aware last month when she made her decision to return to the Soviet Union that staying in the U.S. with her husband would have meant never seeing her mother again. She was quickly separated from the group and put on a plane, not only to prevent her from defecting too but also so that the traditional punishment for defectors, separation from wife and family, would, in the case of Mr. Godunov, go into immediate effect.
The combination of practices affecting Soviet citizens who go abroad do have the effect of making defection a relatively unusual occurrence. But the five most recent defections, like the earlier defections of Mr. Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the eminent Soviet conductor, Kiril Kondrashin and Viktor Balenko, who eluded two sets of air defences to flee in the then top secret MiG-25 to Japan, are a serious embarrassment to the Soviet Government.
The difficulty stems from the Soviet Union’s ideological pretensions. Aaron Vergelis, an officially approved Jewish writer, wrote recently in connection with the defections that the socialist and bourgeois worlds are markedly different and that no capitalist country can boast “the unity and complete identity of views” which exists in the Soviet Union.
Defections by prominent artists and sportsmen with exemplary records of party activism do little to bear out the purported unanimity of Soviet society. Yet the only way to prevent defection is to open the borders which, in the Soviet context, would create enormous pressure for internal liberalisation because it would give people the option of “voting with their feet.”
Closed borders make the Soviet system possible, and since the present Soviet authorities show no readiness to contemplate liberalisation, defection. Le Vice Sovietique, seems likely to shadow the regime’s pretensions for many years to come.
Financial Times, Wednesday, December 19, 1979
Planning and Politics Strangle
the Soviet Economy
The recent speech by Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet President, singling out Soviet Ministers for public criticism and threatening officials with the sack was a graphic illustration that the Soviet leadership is deeply upset about the state of the economy.
It was therefore all the more surprising that despite the existence of detailed plans for economic reform, there was no indication in Mr. Brezhnev’s speech that the leaders foresee any change in the economy more basic that tougher punishments for those who fail to reform.
The malaise of the Soviet economy manifests itself in warehouses full of unbought goods, long queues in the snowy streets for household essentials, a ubiquitous black market and statistical tables displaying the worst economic growth rates in more than 30 years.
Soviet national income, a measure similar to GNP, will grow only 2 per cent this year, the worst result since World War Two. Moreover this figure, because it includes shoddy goods which are produced but never purchased, distorts the level of consumption, which in 1979 will probably not increase at all.
In his speech Mr. Brezhnev said the culprits behind each “negligence, lack of responsibility and stupid bungling,” should be found and “punished.” His anger was understandable but the decline in Soviet economic performance stems from the fact that the rigid, centralised system inherited from Joseph Stalin is running down.
This can only be reversed through fundamental reform, not by tighter discipline. Economic and political leadership in the Soviet Union is vested in the Communist Party, and economic decisions reflect political priorities. The factory manager is subordinate not only to the local party committee of which he must be a member but to the department of the Central Committee which oversees his particular branch of industry.
No deviation from the economic plan is legal without party approval, but party leaders are free to commandeer workers to help at construction sites, beautify the city or bring in the harvest. Responsibility for meeting targets lies with the factory manager.
The intention behind all this is to concentrate economic decision-making in the hands of the top party leadership acting through Gosplan, the State planning agency. The Soviet factory manager must execute a blizzard of orders and directives, while his individual role is restricted to maximising output. He is told what to produce, from whom to obtain materials, how many people to employ and what to pay them.
Factory directors have no authority to deal with unexpected contingencies. At a big construction site near Ryazan, for example, a gear broke on some Polish-manufactured excavators. The replacement cost was no more than 250 roubles (about £180), but the new parts could not be ordered direct from Poland.
Instead the project’s chief engineer had to travel to Moscow, wait two weeks for an appointment with the Vice-Minister of Foreign Trade and then see an official in the Ministry of Finance because the purchase of the replacement parts required hard currency. Only with the approval of these officials could an order for the new parts be issued. They took another two months to arrive. In the meantime, the entire project was at a standstill.
Mr. Brezhnev expressed surprise that although the Soviet Union is the world’s larger producer of steel, iron, mineral fertiliser and cement, these basic goods are often in short supply. But this stems from the fact that the country’s highly centralised economic system must measure results on the basis of gross aggregates, which can supposedly be expressed in figures.
The planners set high production targets to force factory managers to make maximum use of men, materials and equipment. But managers protect themselves by overstating their resource requirements, and the system breeds a passion for fictitious results.
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