Roads fight cars in a messy Soviet Union

Press, 29 June 1983, Page 13

Roads fight cars in a messy Soviet Union

From

MARK FRANKLAND

in Moscow

Motoring back into Russia from Finland this month I remembered an elderly French surgeon whom I once met on the trans-Siberian railway. Accompanied by his wife and several bottles of whisky he had already travelled to its most eastern point Khabarovsk, and I came across him soon after beginning the return journey to Moscow. There was a mixture of disapproval and disbelief in the way he looked out of the window. As we passed through yet another straggling town he announced: “There are only two words I know in the English language to describe this country. One is tnessee and the other is sloppee. The adjectives certainly applied to Vyborg, the first Russian town you reach after leaving Finland. Finnish until the last war, with stern but handsome buildings reminiscent of Helsinki, it has fallen into wistful dilapidation. Much also of the road to Moscow seems to have been built by men with their minds on other things. The motorist quickly learns that Russian roads are to be fought with, not just driven over. Tidiness of the Finnish sort may not come high on the scale of human virtues. Russians can claim to have some much nobler ones. One thinks of fortitude in suffering or general loyalty to ideas as well as friends. Yet tidiness, if it is taken to mean conscientiousness in work and attention to detail, is a valuable civic virtue and one which could do wonders for this country. There is a growing recognition that messiness and sloppiness are wasting much of Russia’s great natural riches. There is unease, too, about why the Russian workman and farmer should so often seem indifferent to these. A successful and officially praised novelist, Yuri Bondaryev, remarked the other day: “We have forgotten something, lost something, from the nation’s treasury and the native traditions of our land. At times our attitude to work has become very superficial and uncommitted as though someone else was doing the work on this earth for us.” It is a comment one hears particularly often about the Russian farmer. “The most worrying thing,” a leading farm expert wrote recently, “is the change in attitude towards the land among part of the rural population. The system allowed farmers not to care about the results of their work when what was needed was a peasant, a modern peasant equipped with technology, but to whom the fate of the land is dear.” Changes are being made in the way work is organised in factories and on farms to increase the individual’s sense of responsibility. Experiments in this direction begaa< several years agcUbut under Yim Andropov’s leadership they are getting much more vigorous

attention. It is a gigantic task. Muscovites have been greatly intrigued by an unusual piece of investigative reporting that has appeared in the literary magazine Novy Mir. It reveals an appaling state of affairs in the giant factory in Rostov that produces Soviet combine harvesters and is indeed the single biggest manufacturer of harvesters in the world. The journalist was horrified at the disorder he found. Where, he asked, was the “organisation, accuracy and synchronised work” — the tidiness, in other words — he had seen in similar American factories and was a prerequisite for producing reliable machines? It was nowhere to be seen, he said, and it was not surprising that Rostov’s main product, the “Niva” (the name means cornfield) was a shamefully wasteful machine that left up to a fifth of every harvest lying on the fields. He did not blame only the factory. Farmers were guilty of “barbarous treatment” of their harvesters, leaving them out in all weather and condemning them to a prematurely short working life. This explained why the Soviet Union could produce more than 100,000 new harvesters in 1978 and yet the country’s stock of machines increased by only 7000. The Rostov factory may or may not be exceptionally sloppy, but its story points to a national problem of giant proportions. Negotiating the unpredictable road back to Moscow, it seemed curious then that the Soviet Party Central Committee is meeting for its first real “Andropov Plenum” to discuss ideology. Would it not make more sense to talk about harvesters, or roads, or even, simply, tidiness? Ideological plenums are rare. This one is the first for 20 years.

What is more, Andropov does not give the impression of being an ideological pedant. A Russian who has worked with him insists that he “thinks in categories of reality, not in categories of dogma.” Ideology is important at this moment for two reasons. One is the unchanging need to justify oneparty rule by portraying it as an essential part of the great “scientific construct” of Marxism-Lenin-ism, the twentieth century’s version of the divine right of kings. The other, more immediately pressing, is to give the country the intellectual map references it needs to undertake even a circumspect programme of economic reform. Czechoslovakia showed in 1968 that economic reform has a way of prompting unplanned political change. It is a tricky business. Like unpicking a vast piece of knitting without letting it unravel too far. So perhaps the plenum does have something to do with tidiness after all. However unheroic it may be as a virtue, it would be an achievement worthy of Heroes if the Soviet Union could acquire it. Copyright — London Observer Service.