RUSSIA IN 1965-1 UNEASY MOOD PREVAILS IN INTERNAL AFFAIRS

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30944, 28 December 1965, Page 8

RUSSIA IN 1965-1 UNEASY MOOD PREVAILS IN INTERNAL AFFAIRS

JBV

ISAAC DESUTSCHER]

A mood of uneasiness and malaise has prevailed in Russia throughout the year now ending. A sense of social stagnation and Wical helplessness has spread; and the recent sessions of the Cen ‘7’ ( have done little to dispel it. On the contrary, the economic Plan for the year 1966, announced at those sessions, has confirmed some of the misgivings.

The harvest has once again been poor. The Government, seeking to reassure the public, has maintained that the situation is not as bad as it was in 1963, which was a disastrous year, a year of food shortages, bread queues, and unrest. However, the Government has not so far disclosed the actual results of the last agricultural campaign and the statistics of the crops. The State Planning Commission, on the other hand, has given out a warning that in 1966 manufacturing industries will be affected by a shortage of agricultural raw materials. Opinion Disturbed Clearly, Russia will go on purchasing grain in foreign markets and paying with gold. Russian opinion is disturbed by the prospect, however preferable the people may find it to live on imports than to starve in self-suffici-ency. The burden is made even heavier when Russia has to supply foodstuffs to its Eastern European allies, Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

Russian planners are not likely to respond favourably to the advice preferred by some Western economists that Russia should concentrate (as Britain did in the nineteenth century) on developing its industries and resign itself to having to purchase regularly a large proportion of its food in foreign markets. Considerations of national security militate, of course, against such a policy; but for economic reasons too the idea is hardly acceptable. It was one thing for a country of Britain’s size to rely for the feeding of its relatively small population; on imports; and it is quite another for Russia, with a population approaching the 250 million mark, to adopt such a long term policy. Even if Russia advanced much further in industrialisation and was

able to export a much larger volume of goods than at present, the permanent need for such huge imports would expose the Soviet economy to grave disequilibrium and entail balance of payment difficulties compared with which the British difficulties would be child’s play.

Industry Slows Down

Meanwhile the tempo of Soviet industrial development is again slowing down. A year ago. it will be remembered Khrushchev’s policy was blamed for a slow-down, and his successors promised an immediate speed-up. In the last year of Khrushchev’s Government, they stated, the net national income of Russia rose by only 5 per cent, compared with a 7 or 8 per cent rate of growth in previous years; and Kosygin and Brezhnev promised an 8 per cent rate for the year 1965. The Plan for 1966, however, provides for a rise in the national income by only a little over 6 per cent This is the lowest rate since the war. Various reasons are given for this. There are shortages not only of agricultural raw materials, but of metal and fuel as well, and even of labour. The steel industry has difficulties in continuing its expansion (although with an annual output of 90 million tons it has virtually caught up with the American industry). At the root of the trouble in most industries is not so much a shortage of resources as the inefficient use made of them, and an almost fantastic wastage of labour. All this, as I have pointed out in previous articles, has more to do with morale than with pure economics. Russia is in the throes of a deep national crisis of confidence. The great mass of the people distrust the rulers, view with cynicism their internal struggles for power, and do not believe in promises of improvement. Hence the apathy in industry, with something like a chronic goslow at the factory benches.

Quip Illustrates Mood

A popular quip illustrates this mood and, incidentally, offers a laconic epitome of the political experience of decades: “Lenin has shown us,” so the saying goes, “that a Marxist and a democrat can rule Russia; Stalin has shown that a tyrant can do it; Khrushchev has shown that a clown can also rule us; and now Brezhnev and Kosygin show us that Russia can be ruled by nobody.” The political credit of Khrushchev’s successors has not greatly risen throughout the year. With Mikoyan’s withdrawal from active politics, almost the last survivor of the “generation of October” has gone; and the ruling group now consists of men of the “middle generation,” who have been formed exclusively in the school of Stalinism. These men have little or nothing in common with the Old Bolsheviks and have had no experience of the early heroic era cf the revolution; nor do they have any significant share in the hopes and aspirations of the young post-Stalinist generation. Torn by internal conflicts and troubled by old and new dilemmas, this ruling

group lacks imagination, initiative, perhaps even ordinary courage—such at least is the image popular opinion seems to have formed of them. And the man in the street is now voicing his feelings almost without inhibition. Sometimes

it seems that since the last days of Tsardom no Russian Government has been regarded with quite as much disdain and cynicism. Lukewarm Services And curiously, the political police watch the citizens’ undisciplined behaviour, listen in to their seditious quips, but dare not intervene or resort to reprisals. “Our police are utterly disoriented and paralysed” runs the comment of a shrewd Soviet observer. “And this goes not only for our police, but for most of our administration as well. For twenty or thirty years they believed in Stalin. Then they were told that nearly all they had done under Stalin was wrong. They took their cue from Khrushchev hoping that this was all right. Now they are again blamed for this and are told that they were seduced by Khrushchev's ‘project mongering,’ ‘arbitrary subjectivism’ and so on. What is the wonder that they do not believe in Kosygin and Brezhnev? Who knows what for these two will be blamed tomorrow? And so, the policemen and the bureaucrats are serving the masters of the day rather lukewarmly, anxious not to show any excess of zeal.”

The police arrest people, as in the case of the writer Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz), only on express orders from highup; otherwise they remain aloof and “tolerant” to an almost incredible extent. In truth, they and the administration at large lack sense of direction and self-con-fidence, a fact from which such elements of opposition as there are in Russia derive encouragement.

Mr Brezhnev and his team hope to bring this political disarray under control at the 23rd Party Congress convened for the spring. Will they succeed? They expect to calm the popular mood with emphatic promises of more housing, more food, and more durable consumer goods, even if these have to be obtained at the price of drastic reductions in capital investment. These promises were made at the last sessions of the Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee in April. At the congress Mr Kosygin will be presenting a new Five Year Plan covering the years 1966-1970. He will then make more emphatic promises of an improvement in the standard of living, although his advisers are still arguing about just how much priority consumer goods should be given in the new plan. Meanwhile, according to statutes, the Presidium is obliged to authorise, at least three months before the Congress, a public debate on all issues on its agenda. So far, however, there has been no sign of any such debate—the members of the Presidium still seem to be shrinking from the risk.—World Copyright Reserved Isaac Deutscher. In a second article Mr Deutscher will discuss Russia's external policies in 1965.