Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
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requirements by using 200 KG ingots to produce 30 KG units. The waste of steel was enormous but the factory met its targets because output was calculated on the basic of the value which was presumed to have been added to the material inputs. Reducing the steel order would have saved steel, but reduced the factory’s ostensible output too.
Transport workers who send cargoes back and forth between distant Soviet cities in order to accumulate mileage, or construction engineers who start projects but don’t finish them (unfinished projects have come to 80 per cent of capital investment in recent years) also reflect the logic of a system which rewards plan fulfilment rather than the filling of specific needs.
The relation between waste and the excessive concentration on gross output as an economic indicator was outlined persuasively in November 1977 in the party newspaper Pravda in a series of articles by Mr. Dimitri Valovoi, the paper’s deputy editor. There was no sign in Mr. Brezhnev’s speech, however, of any intention to move to qualitative indicators of economic performance which would require human judgments and vitiate central control.
The rigidity of the Soviet economic structure restricts not just factory managers but apparently ordinary workers as well. Under Stalin the economic system was backed up by political terror. With the passing of that era, increases in labour productivity have steadily declined and labour delinquency has increased. Labour productivity increased only 2.4 per cent during the first nine months of this year against a target of 4.7 per cent. In 1951, it increased more than 10 per cent.
Acute alcoholism is a growing and dangerous problem. Alone among modern countries, the Soviet Union shows declining life expectancy, which fell from 66 in 1966 to 64 in 1972 and has now dropped to the point where a figure for males is no longer published. This is attributed to the effects of alcoholism, and Soviet researchers have estimated that with complete sobriety at the work place, Soviet productivity would increase.
Efficiency is also hampered because the burden of adapting to the needs of the bureaucracy which directs the world’s largest planned economy is placed entirely on the average citizen.
In the early years of Soviet power, centralisation had unquestionable advantages. The Russians were proceeding from an undeveloped industrial base; quantity production and the ability to concentrate on specific objectives were beneficial. Agriculture was depressed and living standards were held down to produce capital for investment. Raw materials were plentiful.
Now, however, with the heavy industry base created, the need for efficiency is paramount because the economy faces an exhaustion of inputs. Oil production will increase only 2 per cent this year and may soon begin to fall. Population growth has levelled off, particularly in the European areas where industrial labour is most badly needed and the area of arable land is expected to decline.
Achieving efficiency would appear to require some measure of liberalisation and decentralisation, with the introduction of qualitative measures of economic performance and greater autonomy for factory managers. This was tried at the time of the Kosygin reform in 1965, but had little practical effect. There is now little likelihood that the Soviet economy will be decentralised, and it is no accident that Mr. Brezhnev failed to mention this as a possibility.
Allowing individual factory managers greater freedom to make economic decisions on economic grounds would not have direct political consequences. But the element of economic democracy represented by local decision-making would indirectly create greater possibilities for political democracy because economic discussion inevitably touches on questions of policy.
Under the Soviet system the State, which is ruled by the Party, must have full authority in all areas including the economy. Even the seemingly innocuous decentralisation of economic decision-making would weaken the authority of the Central Government.
This is why, despite Mr. Brezhnev’s threat to replace officials who fail to meet their targets, the decline of the Soviet economy is likely to continue throughout the next decade, leading to ideological vulnerability and public discontent, and giving the authorities an object lesson in the limits of centralised power.
Financial Times, Friday, December 21, 1979
Josef Stalin’s Legacy Leaves
Soviet Leaders in Dilemma
Each member of the older generation will be left with his own memories, but no official celebration is planned today for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin and few people are expected at the Kremlin Wall to lay flowers at the former dictator’s grave.
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, the man known as Stalin, literally “man of steel” created the modern Soviet state. But the Soviet authorities show little inclination either to glorify or condemn him. Sometimes it seems that they would prefer most of all to forget him.
The dilemma posed by Stalin springs from the fact that he turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. Though the present leaders may want to disassociate themselves from his crimes, they continue to exercise absolute power through the structure he created.
Kommunist, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, tried to draw a distinction this week between Stalin and the Soviet system. The journal said Stalin’s career had both positive and negative sides but that the “negative phenomena,” namely “Stalin’s crude abuses of power,” did not reflect the nature of the Soviet system, only the distortions of the “personality cult.”
The only serious Soviet attempt to come to terms with the consequences of Stalin’s rule was made by Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet premier who authorised publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
Between 1962 and 1964 there was a sharp increase in historical and sociological research into the Stalin period. But when Khrushchev was removed, at the October 1964 plenum, this research and the publication of literature about Stalin came to an end.
There is now a basic lack of comprehension about Stalin in the Soviet Union, both on the part of ordinary people who remember how soldiers threw themselves under tanks shouting “For country, for Stalin, for mother,” and on the part of Soviet officials who, anxious for respectability, prefer not to dwell on how the regime was established.
By today’s standards, the first years of Soviet power under Lenin were open and democratic. Lenin used terror but he operated on the Marxist assumption that the need for repressive measures was temporary. The Press wrote frankly about famine and disasters, and there was intensive intra-party debate. Censorship was comparatively lax. Even the memoirs of White Army generals were officially published.
Stalin put his imprint on the Soviet State by effectively gathering all power into his own hands and then, through mass indiscriminate terror, putting an end to the diversity Lenin had tolerated. Stalin put to death 90 per cent of the members of the 1934 Central Committee during the purges of 1937 and 1938 and also most of the staff personnel who worked in the Central Party apparatus.
When Aldo Moro, the Italian Christian Democratic leader, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades last year, the Soviet Press expressed its outrage that the Red Brigades might be associated in some people’s minds with the Soviet Union. In fact no imagined regime run by the Brigades could prove more pitiless than the regime actually established by Stalin.
If total fear deprives people of human qualities and turns them into examples of the animal species Man then it was no accident that in 1937, when the terror reached its apex, a foreign resident found that Russians she approached on the streets “scattered like mice.”
The surrealism of Soviet political life, in which everything accomplished through compulsion is said to be voluntary and a population which dare not speak out is depicted as unanimous behind the Party’s policies, reflects a tradition established by Stalin. While secretly sending millions to their deaths, he spoke publicly of the need to be responsive to the wishes of the people and to treat individuals with the tenderness a gardener shows to a delicate plant.
There will never be a precise figure for the number of blameless persons sent to their deaths by Stalin.