Communism’s many broken promises embarrass Andropov

Press, 26 July 1983, Page 21

Communism’s many broken promises embarrass Andropov

From

MARK FRANKLAND

in Moscow

For the past 20 years the Soviet Union has been guided by a political programme many of whose promises have turned out to be pure fantasy. Any young Soviet citizen who bothers to read it — it is still being printed for it remains the official Communist Party programme — must find it hard to understand how it ever saw the light of day. It was adopted in 1961 at the twenty-second party Congress. Nikita Khrushchev was riding high and his habit of letting enthusiasm obscure judgment left its mark all over the programme’s 140 pages. Yet it was not just Khrushchev’s work. It was written by the brains in the party Central Committee apparatus. It was approved by Khrushchev’s colleagues in the leadership; and it was accepted and acclaimed by the party’s nominally supreme body, the party Congress.

These are some of the promises the programme made: @ By 1970, the Soviet Union was to overtake the United States in production per head of population. There would be “material sufficiency” for everyone. All farms would be highly productive and profitable. Heavy physical labour would disappear and the working day would be the shortest in the world.

All this was to have been achieved 13 years ago. ®By 1980, the “materialtechnical basis for Communism” would be built, with an “abundance of material and cultural goods” for all the population. Soviet society would be close to achieving the Communist principle of “to each according to his needs.” Some of the more specific promises were even more embarrassing. • By 1980, Soviet labour productivity was to be twice that of the United States. ® By 1970, the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in farm production by head of population and there would be a 35-hour working week.

In fact, agricultural production.

which the programme said would grow three times and a half by 1980, has increased by 50 per cent. The average working week is at present about 40 hours. It was not surprising that Yuri Andropov should have chosen last month’s meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee to give the outlines of a new programme which will be presented to the next party Congress. Leonid Brezhnev first raised the idea two years ago but Andropov was much more frank about why it was necessary. He said that some of the present programme’s “theses — and it is necessary to say this straight — have not fully withstood the test of time because they contained elements of detachment from reality, of over-anticipation ...” The difference between Andropov’s approach to the new party programme and Khrushchev’s is not just that between a prudent intellectual and a politician who could seldom restrain his impulses. It also reflects the difference between the country now and 20 years ago. Andropov, as he made clear in his speech, believes that the Soviet Union must break into a new stage of development if it is not to become stuck in the second rank of modern industrial powers. (Soviet military might is another matter, though there are signs of unease that this, too, could be affected by failure to keep up with the scientific and technological revolution in industry.) The country Khrushchev knew was built by an abundance of labour and raw materials. They were enough to turn the Soviet Union into a heavy industrial giant and easily compensated for the roughness and waste in execution. When Khrushchev decided that grain production had to be increased he could simply order virgin soil to be put under plough. This is the sort of choice that is no longer there for today’s Soviet leadership. c

There are no more unused reserves of land, labour, or cheap raw materials. Andropov instead has tried to concentrate attention on how the country should exploit the new reserves offered by science and technology. He is calling for changes in the way the economy is managed and planned. The factory manager who innovates, he pointed out, is now often punished by the system rather than rewarded. He realises that an educated, more highly skilled labour force will need different treatment from that tolerated by earlier workers, many of whom were country-born. He is suggesting that neither the economic nor social sciences have done enough to chart the changes taking place in Soviet life. He wants a better intellectual map of where the Soviet Union is so that policy directions can be more securely grounded than Khrushchev’s.

Andropov, also, is being far more careful than Khrushchev in his forecast about the Communist future. It was already decided under Brezhnev that the country, far from being on the brink of Communism, had only entered the stage of “mature socialism.” This Andropov seems to see as a puritan period in which rewards go to the deserving while the non-deserving are made to feel distinctly small. He still promises a rise in the standard of living but his definition of it is significantly cautious. Living standards, he says, are about more than wages and consumer goods. They should be understood “in broader, richer terms. They include a constant rise of people’s consciousness and culture, including the culture of daily living, of conduct, and of what I would call the culture of reasonable consumption.”

“Reasonable consumption” is not a phrase that would readily have come to the lips of the enthusiastic Nikita Khrushchev. Copyright — London Observer Service.