Background Of Strife To Moscow Meeting

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29984, 20 November 1962, Page 15

Background Of Strife To Moscow Meeting

( N .Z.P.A .-Reuter— Copyright)

MOSCOW, November 19.

A plenary meeting of the 330-member Soviet Communist Party Central Committee began today with a report by Air Khrushchev, Moscow Radio said. The committee will discuss improvement of party guidance of industry 7, building and farming.

It is believed party committees throughout the country will be told to wield greater control in these industries.

This private meeting of the Communist elite, due to last about a week, is expected to result in far-reaching changes in the Soviet economy.

Mr Khrushchev's report to the central committee is entitled “Developmer»t of the Economy erf the Soviet Union and Party Guidance of the National Economy.” Moscow Radio said. The Committee is also meeting against a background of press discussion of how the profit motive might encourage factories to make full use of their capital. Acceptance of this idea, put forward by Professor Yevsei Liebermann, would mean a sharp break with previous Soviet economic practices “Communist,” the party's ideological journal, has opposed it on the ground that it would ‘'actually weaken the planning basis.” Party officials have already begun to take greater control over agriculture, so that the Soviet Union produced a record grain harvests this year in spite of bad weather. Mr Khrushchev has said much more needs to be done in other sectors of farm production. The committee meetings, normally lasting a week, are held in private, with only summary versions of the discussions released. The Communist Party newspaper, "Pravda,” yesterday bitterly attacked Communist critics—ostensibly the Albanian Party leadership—of Russia’s handling of the Cuba crisis. The attack was made in an article by Mr Boris Ponomarev, a leading Soviet theoretician and a secretary of the Central Committee. Mr Ponomarev said the Albanian leaders had "unleashed an especially shameful and really provocative campaign. Before, they had hypocritically talked about peaceful co-existence, but in recent times they had openly taken a course of disrupting peaceful co-existence and pushing humanity to a thermonuclear war.

“They are coming out against the peaceful normalisation of international problems against various forms of transition to socialism, and against the struggle for disarmament," he said. Western observers in Moscow interpreted the article as a scarcely veiled attack on China’s reported disapproval of Soviet policy in Cuba.

The article also complained that the “Albanian clique” had taken the path of “uncontrolled slander against the Soviet Union, the Soviet Communist Party and other

Marxist-Leninist parties, and in this it is practically allying itself with imperialist propaganda.”

Mr Ponomarev also attacked “revisionism." which had found “its fullest embodiment in the programme of the Communist Union of Jugoslavia.” Observers considered the article an important step in pointing out to the nation’s party functionaries Soviet annoyance at Communist criticism of its Cuban policy. Chinese Criticism In Peking, the “People’s Daily,” described as "pure nonsense” the claim that "peace has been saved” by the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Foreign observers in Peking said this appeared to be a direct answer to Mr Khrushchev’s statement that the withdrawal was a victory for peace. The editorial said: “The so-called Cuban crisis is far from over.” Since the withdrawal of the missiles, the United

States has become "so increasingly arrogant that it wild stop at nothing in trampling upon Cuban sovereignty.” it said. The editorial echoed parts of two major party ideological statements last week in tl>e form of editorials in the "People's Daily” and the theoretical fortoighUy, “Red Flwg,” criticising “revisionists” who “are scared stiff of United States imperialism” and calling for a "head-on struggle” against imperialism.

It said "History has furnished repeated proof that no humiliating concessions, sacrifice of sovereignty or connivance at aggression can make the United States imperialism . . . become benevolent.

"Tito and his like, lackeys of United States imperialists, have tried by hook or by crook to bring pressure to bear on the Cuban people and force them to accept terms which impair their rights and sovereignty in order to meet the insatiable demands of United States’ imperialism .’•