Correspondents' Correspondence Yaroshenko Revisited

...Indeed, the technocrat/bureaucrat conflict has a long tail in Soviet history, stretching all the way back to Stalin's crackdown on the Bukharinites with their finely-tuned economic strategy, and to the Shakhty affair of 1928...

...Yet somehow life goes on...

...A widow moved into the camp to be with her sister's family when her husband died, just as she would have done before...

...By giving too much emphasis to the economic "base," it was charged, Yaroshenko had downgraded the dominant role to be played by the political "superstructure...

...it made you feel bad...

...The reappearance of the controversy was presaged last year by articles in Voprosy Ekonomiki and Kommunist, as well as in journals published in the East European countries...

...In Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring there was a herd of them, headed by Ota Sik...

...This was labeled a "Rightist" fallacy...

...They say they will return when a Cyprus agreement is reached, but they won't wait for it to begin their lives...

...At this camp not far from Nicosia, the white tents line up in neat rows, many surrounded by small vegetable gardens...

...In the Soviet Union today, consumerism has returned through the public's increasing demand for creature comforts...

...Some residents, expecting to go home soon, have done little to improve their temporary quarters...

...The trend, he noted, is regarded with the utmost suspicion by the parly apparatchiki, who detect an attempt on the part of the technically-trained engineers and economists to render them redundant and obsolete...

...It is also building 1,500 permanent dwellings that should reduce the tent population by 5,500 before spring...

...At home the men used to come around and ask about your dowry...

...Others, realizing they must forge new lives in new places, have carefully decorated their dwellings with furnishings and flowers, showing the same pride they once felt for their own villages...

...It's like sleeping in an ice box," one woman declared...

...The government, like the individual families, faces a dilemma: How much can it improve the refugees' lot without seeming to accept the status quo as permanent...

...Officials in Nicosia believe the refugee problem will not be resolved for a long time, and that some will never go home—notably those from the northern port of Kyrenia...

...Lenin, in 1920, had called this Utopian, petty-bourgeois nonsense...

...About 18,000 out of a total of 182,000 displaced persons live in tents...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that the Yaroshenko dispute has surfaced once more...

...The government tried to resettle farmers in the Pa-phos area of southwest Cyprus when the Turks moved north, but out of 4,000 plots of land only 400 are occupied...

...The old people and the unskilled, in contrast, feel they have no place to go except home...

...After all, if the economy can run itself, it does not need Party tutelage top-to-bottom...

...and the way these publications handled the question suggests that it reflects a host of ticklish political disputes involving the top Russian leaders, perhaps signifying a sharpening division among them...

...pressure for resettlement stays strong only so long as the people suffer...

...Renewal of the controversy appears to have been sparked by a high-level tug-of-war over resource allocation, with certain spokesmen advocating some reversal in the priority of producer goods (including, especially, those parts of heavy industry involved in defense) to consumer goods...

...In fact, their role in economics and in society as a whole should increase the closer the USSR came to full Communism...

...In the first year after the war, the impulse was to provide the bare minimum of physical comforts...

...The latest number of Kommunist accuses one A. Yeryomin, an economist writing in Voprosy Ekono-miki, of misunderstanding the true relationship between base and superstructure...

...The journal goes on to say the Party will not wither away under Communism, nor will most of the institutions of the "all-people's state...

...when Russian and German technicians were brought to trial on trumped-up charges...

...They prefer, for the present, to stay where they are and continue to hope...

...Here I knew when someone liked me it was me he was interested in, not my dowry," she said...

...Cypriot leaders fear, though, that the Turks will seize on this to claim the refugees have been successfully absorbed...

...Cokie Roberts...

...Yet superstructural phenomena like technology, Kommunist remarks, do not arrive ready-made upon the Socialist base...

...More recently, in Hungary, the journal Kozguzdasagi Szemle singled out two more—Martin Tardos, department head at the Institute for Business and Market Research in Budapest, and Tibor Liszka, another economist...

...Yaroshenko Revisited New York—The first 1976 issue of the Soviet Communist Party journal Kommunist contains evidence that an old and potentially dangerous conflict may be flaring up again within the Soviet Establishment: the battle between the bureaucrats and the technocrats...

...According to the Soviet dictator, who never permitted Yaroshenko's recommendations to be published, the economist was guilty of misunderstanding the relationship between politics and economics...

...The 920 residents of Strovolos have electricity in their tents, and camp facilities include a kindergarten and playground, as well as workshop with looms and sewing and knitting machines...

...One of the girls had met her husband in the camp and saw an advantage to this lifestyle: no dowry...

...Moreover, his vision of a fully Communist society, featuring a whole variety of political-economic institutions—free markets, kolkhozes and sovkhozes, privately tilled household gardens—was incorrect because it amounted to "reducing the problems of political economy under Socialism to problems of the rational organization of the productive forces [making] the chief thing the primacy of consumption.' This error came to be called the "Yaroshenko Deviation...

...Yeryomin had claimed that as Communism, the last stage of Socialism, was reached, the superstructure would melt into the base...

...This was then, and is still, known as "consumerism," a serious heresy, according to the Kremlin, albeit one that dies hard...

...Three years after Stalin's death, in April 1956, another attack against the Yaroshenko Deviation was launched in Pravda...

...One woman explained, "It took us so long to build our home I can't believe they can take it away just like that...

...Daily visits from a doctor have prevented health problems other than the usual run of colds...

...for the first time this winter a group of tent-dwellers staged a hunger strike to protest their situation...

...Eventually, the economists and planners might displace the partiitsi, and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would disappear about as fast as it did from the program of the French Communist party.-Albert L. Weeks Waiting to Return Strovolos-Cyprus refugees are now enduring their second difficult winter...

...In 1952, Stalin came out with his monumental Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, which took to task L. D. Yaroshenko, an economist working in the Moscow Regional Statistical Bureau...

...But conditions remain harsh...

...The merging of superstructure and base, Kommunist warns, would lead not to Communism, but to a technocracy in which politics and politicians ceased to exist, leaving only the "administration of things...

...These girls are young and their husbands are skilled so they will start anew?all of them are emigrating to the United States and Canada...

...The government gives 138,000 cash allowances and tries to employ as many as possible in social welfare programs, such as park building and reforestation projects...

...Laundry flaps with the breeze on the first day of sunshine in a week, but the streets are huge mud puddles and the canvas shelters give off the musty smell of wet fabric...

...Despite the admonitions of the Kremlin's hierophants, however, a number of "Yaroshenkos" have sprung up throughout the Soviet bloc...

...These men, it seems, were guilty of believing in the "myth of market Socialism," of treating the economy as a potentially "self-regulating mechanism...

...At the same time, the Soviet Armed Forces are pushing for more military hardware, and the technical intelligentsia are keeping up the pressure for a voice in economic affairs...

...She was echoed by the camp director, himself an embittered refugee, who vows, "No one will forget his land, his village, his house, his property...

...The repression of the 1930s further terrorized and neutralized the intelligentsia, particularly the technicians working in the applied sciences (economics, psychology, agronomy, genetics, etc...

...The people say they are nervous all the time, however, and everyone complains about the chill...

...The people are afraid that resettlement there will be lasting...

...In his 1975 book, On Socialist Democracy, Roy A. Medvedev predicted that this struggle would inlensify "as bureaucrats are being replaced |in the apparat| by knowledgeable and more efficient techno-crals...

...They must be created—by the Party leaders...

...Now that return seems a distant goal, the government is supplying stoves, beds and other household items...

...In one particularly attractive tent three wedding photographs sit on a table—two sisters and a brother had all married here, a third sister had borne a baby...