Soviet gambling with high stakes

Press, 23 July 1986, Page 19

Soviet gambling with high stakes

ANDREW WILSON

poses the question from

Moscow: “Where is the Soviet Union heading?” But the only answer he finds is that it is still anybody’s guess.

Eighteen months after the election of Mikhail Gorbachev to lead the Soviet Union into the remaining years of the twentieth century, it is still anybody’s guess where the nation is heading, at home or on the diplomatic and arms front.

On the question of the economy, the Western inquirer can follow one of three groups. There are those (a small minority, mostly of Western Communists) who have seen the new future and “know that it works.” There are those who know that it does not work. And there are those who hope that it might work, but are depressingly aware of the distance to be travelled.

Living with the Soviet reality, I find myself siding with the third group. Without a viable Soviet economy there can be no longterm East-West stability. Gorbachev is the first man on the scene with a chance to rescue Russia from the prison of its past.

Nevertheless, the gap between the dream and the present reality is huge. The party’s programme envisages doubling industrial output by the year 2000. By means of new technology and “scientific management," similar feats are promised in services and agriculture. As a correspondent, I am taken to this or that factory, this or that farm, to see how the new prescriptions — profit-sharing, cost accounting, managerial autonomy — are working. The results sound impressive, but the factories and farms we visit are inevitably “model” ones, under palpably good managers and close to good markets. For the rest it is still too early. There are not yet any production figures, nothing to show what is happening in those poor blighted areas and crumbling factories seen from the train while travelling from city to city.

The few older factories one does visit are backward in the extreme, frequently without automation, without computers, often with very little safety equipment. What might be called the human infrastructure presents even greater problems. At considerable political risk Gorbachev has curbed (though by no means eliminated) the problem of alcoholism. Until last year it was devouring whole sectors of Soviet industry and society — through absenteeism, early death, industrial accidents, wrecked homes.

Even so, there are still large areas of human abuse, particulary affecting women, which the party will have to reform if the good society promised for the year 2000, and still defined largely in crude economic terms, is ever to be a reality. Worse, even as the old scourges are being tackled, new ones are appearing — drugs, vandalism, juvenile street crime — these are problems familiar enough in the West but they are only now appearing with significant frequency in Russia, as Soviet youth discovers the dimensions of its boredom.

It is almost as if Soviet society were being catapulted directly from the last century into the next; as if the twentieth century, as we know it in the West, had never existed, except for the terrible years of the war. On one side are the relics of the world of Herzen and Gorky — the petty bureaucracy, the subservience, the corruption, the drink. On the other looms the menace of imported twenty-first century inf|ctions — even

A.I.D.S. (on whose diagnosis and treatment Soviet hospitals have recently received a "closed” circular). If that were all, there would indeed be little hope that the Soviet disaster could ever be turned round. Happily, the scene has just enough contradictions, at least in privileged centres like Moscow and Leningrad and. in the more relaxed cities of the south, to make transition credible.

Despite the shortages of acceptable goods, people do search hopefully through the department stores; women do contrive to dress prettily, and to bring up sturdy children, on the slenderest means; one does find lucky individuals apparently fulfilled by their everyday jobs; and in a currently easing cultural climate, Moscow has contemporary theatres that could compete'

for attention anywhere in the world. The 64-billlon-rouble question is; can the changes be made fast enough to satisfy people’s awakened expectations, and also to consolidate Gorbachev’s leadership, with all that means, not only for the domestic economy but also for detente with the West?

One of the principal complaints (one could almost say "dismissals”) uttered against • Gorbachev since the first facile optimism at his election subsides, has been that his reforms stop well short of the competitive interplay that is

needed to emulate the performance of the West. Another is that all ■ his pronouncements have been directed towards management and technology, that lie has had little or nothing to say about opening up the scientific and cultural dialogue that is no less necessary for Russia’s modernisation, f Both are self-evidently correct, but the vehemence with, which they generally are made seems to be less rational; A year and a half after his coming to power,, it still bears repeating that Gorbachev is not Russia’s absolute ruler. A rough estimate might put his control of the party at between two-thirds and three-quarters . somewhat higher at the top, where he has strengthened his hold by means of important secretariat appointments, but somewhat lower down the line where the spores of bureaucracy lie deep in the wood. It would still not take too much to upset this situation; and if Gorbachev has one warning before him (apart that is from the excesses after the' precipitate “liberalisation” of the economy in China), it is surely the example of Nikita Khrushchev, who dug his own grave by ignoring the conservative interests of the party’s middle ranks. For Gorbachev to risk a similar suicide would serve neither his own country nor the world. To write these words is to invite the accusation of being the Soviet leader’s apologist. Let it therefore be said, however unnecessarily, that there are huge anomalies that remain inexcusable in Russia, even in the widest context of political expediency — the continued exile of Andrei Sakharov, the incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, of war-resisters in prison, and of Jewish refuseniks within the Soviet borders (to be shelled out, like currency, whenever a bargain is to be struck with America). But perhaps Gorbachev knows himself, just as he must realise that there are other things incompatible with the dignity of a

modern State — such as the übiquitous Leninist slogans, turning in the wind like Tibetan prayer wheels, and offering, speciously, a substitute for thought. The subject on which Gorbachev has most dangerously stuck his neck out, and where failure could activate the liveliest threat to his leadership, is arms control. To Western audiences it might seem that with his rapid succession of proposals and initiatives — on tests, strategic and intermediate missiles, chemical weapons, and conventional forces — he is enjoying a bout in the diplomatic boxing, ring, "floating like a butterfly” if not, as yet, “stinging like a bee.” • But in Moscow one has only to turn to the military newspaper “Red Star,” with its heroic portrayal of the Soviet armed services and missile forces, to know that if he fails to deliver a realistic deal with America (“realistic” to the Soviet military), his seconds are ready to carry him out.

Nor, as one looks at the state of the economy and the size of the resources that must be diverted from the military in order to refashion it, is it possible to doubt the urgent reality of his aims. Useful though it might be in other respects, nobody in the Soviet Union expected the threeday visit of the Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to London last week to shift the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from her identification with President Reagan or, by her mediation, to bring the Gorba-chev-Reagan summit much closer. But the impatience of the Soviet leadership to build new bridges to the West should remind one that the political life of the would-be bridge-builders may not be unlimited.

Copyright — London Observer

New scourges appearing

No absolute ruler

Political life not unlimited