U.S.S.R. in Crisis

...Tolerance, yes-for where would the country be without this production?-but also apprehension about the political-consequences of private enterprise getting out of hand, and an unconfessed but real suspicion that the results of private husbandry point up the futility of expecting much more out of a collective sector seemingly engineered by minds with an aversion to a full dinner plate...

...With meters rather than discovery the success indicator, "drillers quickly concluded that they should drill only shallow holes" and lots of them...

...All this without mechanization, without much save labor invested in the expectation of a fair price in the free markets where peasants may sell their own produce -and certainly without much state encouragement...

...The conclusion drawn, instead, was that the Armenian state baking trust could do with more ovens, more capacity, to produce more bread at loss-making retail prices...

...When I pointed out the full shelf, the stare hardened-clearly, I had violated the meta-rules of-the game played between retailer and purchaser...

...Insulated via special stores and perks, the planners, -checkers-, counters, "union" officials, and managers must in turn support those leaders who have, thus far, never willed to grasp the nettle of reform...

...More than one person in five works in agriculture, compared to less than three in a hundred in the U.S.-and the USSR is perennially food (especially meat) short...

...also can be assumed to understand that much of the vast bureaucratic pyramid whose pinnacle they inhabit has no rationale for existence save to run the bureaucratic economy-and that they themselves have no rationale apart from that pyramid...

...This list of woes should-and rightly so-warm the hearts of free enterprise advocates, even as they sympathize with the hapless Soviet man in the street...

...Making a priority of "defense" over all else, successive oligarchies have created from it a military establishment, an arsenal which staggers the imagination and whose significance can be measured only when set against Western reluctance to invest proportionally from our richer economies in our own defense...

...But concentrated complexes of silos and warehouses, depots and meat-lockers, a planner's dream, gave little payoff when farm trucks were so often out of commission, and hard-surface roads in any case absent in the countryside...

...A newspaper in Soviet Armenia complained that too many people were baking bread at home, then selling it to regular customers...

...It needs to drill, to explore-and rewards its prospectors piece-rate, according to the number of meters drilled...

...In another type of communal caterifig Soviet farmers regularly feed store-bought bread to their pigs...

...Money went to constructing massive storage facilities, to alleviate the longstanding wastage between field and consumer...

...Norton/$15.00 Walter D. Connor Everyone who's been there remembers his encounters with the Soviet economy...

...even delivering it...

...The giant warehouses absorbed more funds than food...

...This, then, is a limping economy, but a big one...

...Why not reform, decentralize, tap individual energies and greed in the face of this sorry situation...

...Difficult, indeed...

...And, unlike the Poles, the Soviet- population has been docile, enduring a great deal...

...Now, in an Walter D. Connor is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and author, most recently, of Socialism, Politics and Equality: Hierarchy and Change in Eastern Europe and the USSR...

...Nyet," came the answer, without a bat of her eyes, a turn of her head, or an inquiry to any of the other ostensibly underemployed clerks...

...Surely Brezhnev, to say nothing of Andropov, maintained a machinery of repression and control big enough td "contain" the overspill of quasi-liberty that would come from a partial unleashing of Soviet managers, workers, and peasants to work as they willed...

...The imperial burden is heavy, and in the Soviet case it costs the citizens of the metropolitan power a living standard lower than that enjoyed by most of the colonials...

...It's cheaper, and has been for a long time, than a grain mash-the state pays more for one loaf's worth of grain than it charges for the baked loaf...

...If this is not enough-and it surely is-Andropov and Co...

...Da"-and it arrived, after the "appropriate" pause during which adepts of eating out in the USSR turn to their vodka or the book they brought to kill the time...

...Agriculture remains, as always, a massive problem-rooted in soil and climate problems but exacerbated beyond the imagination of pre-revolutionary visionaries by the insane collective system imposed by Stalin and preserved with few modifications by his successors...

...A considerable disincentive to home baking-but then, such is discouraged in any case...

...No wonder the Soviet Union has trouble with miniaturization," notes Goldman...

...Even allowing a longish period of adjustment, whether the USSR could reap the benefits of a reform program in the way Hungary, for example, has is doubtful...

...Yet there are reasons why reform in any significant measure has been rejected, why the Andropov regime will experience a pull toward well-worn furrows, why the measures announced on July 26 seem more an echo of the Kosygin reforms of 1965 than any advance beyond them...

...a laggard, but not a basket case...

...all at no wage or overhead cost...

...grain and potatoes rotted at the farms...

...Having already slipped a few notches along on a "nativization" scale in the several months I had been living in the USSR, I asked for cucumber and tomato salad...

...In a restaurant in Yalta, which offered "fresh cucumber salad," and "fresh cucumber and tomato salad," I ordered the former-to be told, again, "nyet," not that day (Soviet restaurant menus are more a record of hopes than an indication of what's in the kitchen...

...But then, why not change...

...Economic decentralization raises in Moscow the fear of losing control of the internal multiethnic empire (from Catholic Lithuanians to Muslim Uzbeks, and others . numbering nearly 270 million stretched across eleven time zones, from desert to permafrost) and legitimating more experimentation than is bearable among those always puzzling Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and other ingrates in the external empire...

...Think, too, of shoe manufacture aimed at fulfilling central directives rather than meeting market demand: if total tonnage is the target, it is easier to make fewer pairs of big shoes...

...To do this, however, requires a de-emphasis on consumerism and a willingness to increase the power of the military-a difficult task in a democratic and unplanned society...

...while the unpaved rural roads alternated between the dust and potholes of summer and the mud of spring and fall...

...IN CRISIS: THE FAILURE OF AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM Marshall I. Goldman/ W.W...

...the short run would not be very short...

...Unlike previous leaders, Brezhnev did try to solve agriculture's problems-not only by importing what his subjects could not produce, but by throwing money at those problems...

...Of the one-fourth of all investment funds thrown this way in his last decade, little stuck, and most of that in the wrong places...

...As Goldman concludes: "The determination of the Reagan administration to counter these trends by increasing the spending in both the United States and the rest of the world is an attempt to halt this apparent and real shift in relative power before it is indeed too late...

...Once, in a Leningrad bookstore, I asked the rather hard-faced young counter woman if she had any books on criminology (spying, right over head, a top shelf full of such...

...And, given that he comes to power a decade older than Brezhnev at his accession in 1964, his chances of accomplishing-should he wish-any radical turnabout before the next succession seem slight...

...The systemic illogic, compounded by inertia, has produced a mess...

...Sales, at presumably market-clearing prices, were estimated greater than the output of state bakeries...

...Our reluctance to match the Soviet buildup has created malaise, suspicion, and fear that the Soviets are so far ahead that catchup is impossible...

...Twenty years and more of an approach-avoidance minuet with economic reform have left Soviet industry still operating heavily under rules that reward gross production, not quality or end utility...

...USSR in Crisis is a serious book, a treatment of the built-in peculiarities of an economy which produces not only the sort of vignettes described, but also a bristling military establishment, its only consistent success story...

...Across-the-board decentralization and marketization would leave producers unsure what to produce, scrambling for supplies and customers who found themselves in an unprecedented and fluid situation...

...The USSR is rich in energy, but also consumes it voraciously...

...if the number of pairs is the objective, one makes lots of small ones-in a country where, as elsewhere, the main demand is for average shoes to fit average feet...

...In civilian industry and agriculture, in the investment/consumption balance, in the procurement and deployment of manpower, and in the tension between sometimes-expressed recognition of a need for reform, and the political fears and inertia which work so strongly against meeting that need, the Soviet economy is wracked with problems...

...Marshall Goldman knows all about this stuff, and has written about it well and intelligently for many years -an economist with the ability to communicate with that majority of us whose talents and education are in other fields...

...The simulation of labor continues in the collective sector ("we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us"), while on the private plots (4 percent of the arable land) work does produce: 60 percent of the potatoes, 30 percent of meat, milk, and vegetables...

...Some Hungarians, Poles, Czechs can remember market economies and how they work, but such is not the case in the state that was first on the socialist path...

...Inflationary pressures now suppressed in a "rationing-by-shortage" system would burst through as rubles emerged from savings banks and mattresses in huge quantity, unemployment would burgeon as factories let go the "slackers, idlers, drifters, drunks and absentees" who were this past winter's targets of Andropov's police...

...In some areas, "gross" means weight: "unit pricing...

...Further, the USSR is no Hungary-a compact, homogeneous collection often million souls-but an imperial power...

...In the short run, reforming a system like the Soviet is immensely hard...

...is spelled out in tons or kilograms . . . the heavier the product . . . the quicker the firm will . . . fulfill its plan and collect a bonus...

...But drilling goes harder and slower as one drills deeper, with more chance of cracks and breakage in pipe and bits...

...The critical question now is whether the USSR, no longer anyone's cultural or economic "model," will use what it has (power and its threat) to take what it cannot make, will rely even more on the means of compulsion to make good the failure of its means of production...

...admittedly deficient service sector, this might have been welcomed as some taking up of slack by citizen initiative: but not so...

...Andropov's inheritance is not altogether a happy one...