Small Leap Forward

...Nor is there any immediate danger- from Moscow's viewpoint-of widescale fragmentation or instant autonomy...

...The Yugoslavs were the first East Europeans to discover the impossibility of maintaining strict central price controls, even under planned Socialist economies, just as they were the first to recognize the advantages of workers having a voice in management...

...Throughout the bloc there is a sudden awakening to the reality that what is good for Dniepropetrovsk and Novosibirsk is not necessarily exportable to Communist countries where 20 years ago the standards of living and of national development were generations ahead of the Soviet Union...

...These changes on the domestic scene, however, are only marginal to the major problem besetting the economies of Eastern Europe today: that of earning sufficient hard currency with their exports to pay for the capital goods, the highgrade machinery, and the complete plants which they urgently require for industrial expansion...

...Aside from the visual trappings -the hotels, the stores suddenly filled with consumer goods, the boost in housing construction, and restaurant menus a yard long-the most impressive facet of the Small Leap Forward is the persistent desire to break with the past in intellectual and economic activity...

...Revisionist theoreticians are assiduously rationalizing their new departures by poking holes in Marxist-Leninist doctrine and brashly admitting past mistakes (usually of others...

...IT is the search for new sources of foreign currency, together with very real desire to find some pan-European solution to the 20 year-old confrontation, that has attracted the East bloc to the diplomatic activities of General de Gaulle and his foreign minister...

...For the moment, therefore, the French will have to be content with paving the way for a more relaxed atmosphere between East and West Europe, with the accent on trade and cultural relations...

...The original plan to turn COMECON into a multilateral trading organization with clearing arrangements and free convertibility has not succeeded...

...When the crude Russian pattern of emphasizing heavy, basic industry was slavishly adopted, unskilled men and women had to be pushed into high positions...

...Its effects are neither so deep-rooted nor so spectacularly dramatic as assumed by many casual visitors, for whom Hilton-type hotels and tourist amenities are synonymous with liberalization...

...There are conflicts among its members...

...In musty ministry buildings from Warsaw to Belgrade, senior administrators will now sit back, carefully place their fingertips together and frankly admit the errors of past planning and the obstacles to future development...

...The more ambitious planners admit privately that selling their best grade goods within the organization is on the whole most unsatisfactory...

...Indeed, some of Ceausescu's allies take a sardonic view of his claims to be the pacesetter in an era of new liberty when there remain vestiges of domestic Stalinism...

...De Gaulle's concept of a fusing of East and West Europe generally was well received in the Eastern capitals...

...A young Hungarian writer, Istvan Gall, can today publish a short novel, The Trap, which, though supporting the policies of Janos Kadar, gives a harrowing graphic account of the interrogation methods of the dreaded AVO secret police of earlier years...

...You kept your seat warm, carried out instructions to the letter, adhered to a host of planning indicators, and overfulfilled your planning target...

...But the changes are important and promising...

...A few weeks ago, for instance, Professor Sik told a group of Dutch economists that COMECON had so far failed to solve his country's economic problems and Prague may seek loans from the West as well as co-production agreements with Western firms...

...A distinguished theoretician like Czechoslovakia's Professor Ota Sik, whether at home in his Economics Institute in Prague, lunching on Geneva's Lake Leman Shores or lecturing in Holland, will freely discuss Czech economic ills and the shortcomings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in coordinating trade and development between its member countries...

...But it would be an error to expect either a sudden economic miracle or a spectacular dash toward complete autonomy by the countries of Communist Eastern Europe...

...but Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria are close behind, and Hungary has reform plans due to go into effect January 1967...

...Internal relaxation has not kept pace with the degree of autonomy the country has won from Moscow...

...Beyond the identity of economic interests, the French President had attacked U.S...

...The Poles have a particular problem, since Polish working men characteristically try to get by with the minimum of strain...

...those baggy, shapeless suits with flapping trousers have disappeared...

...Service to the Party was qualification enough for a managerial post...

...But there is no indication that either Rumania or any other Warsaw Pact member intends to opt out as France has bowed out of NATO...

...This casualty rate would probably be much higher if there were sufficient talent available, regardless of Party affiliation...

...Couve de Murville began his tour in October 1965 with a lone visit to Moscow, went back on the road in April of this year with a mission to Warsaw, Bucharest and Sofia, followed up with a June trip through the Soviet Union accompanied by the General, and in July sounded out feelings in Prague, Bratislava (the Slovak 'capital' of Czechoslovakia) and Budapest, before going to Yugoslavia...

...Few people, probably not even Maurice Couve de Murville himself, know what concrete results the General ultimately expects from his foreign minister's year-long mission...

...M. Couve de Murville's talks last month in Belgrade finally completed, one year after it began, his Grand Tour of Eastern Europe in search of a new modus vivendi...

...Taking the long view, it is inevitable that as Eastern Europe progressively borrows more economic ideas from both Western Europe and North America, and increases its independence from Soviet economic and political influence, the sharp contrast between the two systems will diminish...

...Audiences in a Prague theater rock with laughter at a satirical play showing security police pleading with their last prisoner to remain as their guest to prevent them from becoming superfluous...

...Sik confessed: "After the war we built a Socialist economy, although we had only a dim idea what this really meant...

...The Bucharest leaders and planners consider that the economy-with the fastest growth rate in the area -is doing fine without reforms...

...There has been no move in Rumania to give greater independence to industrial or agricultural enterprises, as planned in Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany...

...But the new system of satisfying market and consumer demand, concentrating on quality, and requiring individual enterprises to do their own marketing, has created a demand for qualified management...

...transistor radios have become the public menace they were in Italy a decade ago...

...Their fatalist attitude was best expressed by Bohdan Drozdowski, a young poet, after the 1957 revolt: To hell with plan fulfilment...

...Ducking payment of parking tickets has become a sport in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest (Sofia still has room to spare...

...Hence the general search led by Poland and Rumania for bigger and better markets in the West and the desperate scramble for hard currency which causes even the most stiffnecked of bloc administrators to adjust their sickly grins as they open the door to the reactionary influence of Western tourists...

...Poland, fundamentally agricultural until 1945, provides a clear example...

...every-body wants to produce what is most profitable and after so many years (it was formed in 1949) COMECON has not progressed very far...

...Life has certainly not become a bacchanalian revel in any of the bloc countries, but for the most part the nagging worry about shortages, the sheer struggle to make ends meet and keep going without frequent recourse to the vodka or slivowitz bottle, has been removed...

...In one of its suburbs, Hostivar, where a machine tool plant serves as a testing ground for economic reforms, I talked to workers who were taking home nearly 30 per cent of their earnings in bonuses, were living in homes they had bought themselves, and were even contemplating purchasing their own pint-sized family sedans-about as big as an incentive as you can find in Eastern Europe these days...

...We copied the Soviet model as the only one available but it proved not to be applicable to a highly industrialized country like Czechoslovakia...

...The trend away from a Marxist, state-planned economy ("Aus Marx-Wirtschaft wird Marktwirtschaft" is a perennial joke) has brought with it problems that are new to the Peoples' Democracies...

...There are a number of more obvious signs of growing prosperity: Dresses have taken a sharp plunge into the midcentury...

...With the customary Polish penchant for hyperbole, one Warsaw diplomat suggested: "It is rather like taking a Ford Mustang (the Poles' idea of the ultimate in autos) and putting a Moskvitch engine in to keep it in line with the competition...

...Both East Germany and Czechoslovakia have television sets-mass produced more for political control than for amusing the masses-in over half the households, a proportion reached in West Germany only three years ago...

...If he envisages some preliminary splintering of the Warsaw Pact organization, he has, up to a point, an ally in Nicolae Ceausescu who has declared that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact are anachronistic and will in time have to be phased out...

...Different countries take different views of personal incentives: Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland are inclined to believe that fringe benefits, housing, more consumer goods, are sufficient...

...Czechoslovakia is today probably further along the road toward radical economic reform than any of the other one-time satell'te countries...

...New brooms have been the order of the day for 18 months now in Czechoslovakia...

...In Prague, though, the new incentives take the form of hard cash...

...There have been wage increases, family allowances and special tax reductions on certain income levels, but the only major concession has been the switching of investment capital to consumer industries and the release of goods on the home market to satisfy a rising demand created largely by foreign films, by television and by the flood of tourists...

...Especially severe are the shortages of trained executive and administrative talent...

...Their sometimes over-ambitious plans take their cue from the Yugoslavs, who five or six years ago discovered the usefulness of that capitalist invention, the profit motive, in boosting labor effectiveness and productivity...

...policy in Vietnam, refused to be integrated with NATO, recognized the OderNeisse eastern frontier of Germany, and opposed nuclear weapons for West Germany's Bundeswehr...

...It is in Rumania, ironically, where party leader Nicolae Ceausescu has built himself a reputation as a maverick rebel, that liberalization seems to be for export only...

...Kenneth Ames, formerly of Newsweek, now reports from Eastern Europe for the Economist, London...

...The three great panaceas being adopted by East Europeans are autonomy for individual enterprises, and-perhaps most important- market responsive prices...

...The area from the River Elbe to the Black Sea, once referred to as "Soviet satellites" or "Iron Curtain countries,' is now in a state of gradual but steady transition: Eastern Europe's Small Leap Forward...

...This worked very well as long as quality production was the only criterion and planning remained completely centralized...

...The progressives in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw make no secret of the fact that there are plenty of individuals in responsible positions today-put there originally because of their houndlike faithfulness to the Party-who look back with nostalgia on the heyday of Stalinism when a man had only to follow the plan...

...How much longer are we expected To build a future for our grandchildren...

...Ota Sik explained the organization's weakness this way: "The greatest obstacle is that COMECON represents an administrative rather than an economic system...

...Premier Gyula Kallai of Hungary was constrained to call de Gaulle and France "a factor for security and stability in the West and in Europe...

...ECONOMIC FERMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE Small Leap Forward By Kenneth Ames Warsaw It was not without courage that the late Professor Oskar Lange, Poland's leading advocate of economic reform, told this writer in a three hour talk two years ago: "It is going to take more than just a year or so to undo the muddle Eastern Europe has got itself into by slavishly adopting and following Soviet planning methods.' But today the scene is dominated by men espousing far more radical concepts than Lange's...

...Over one-third of the general managers of major government-run enterprises and trading organizations have been quietly replaced by an energetic, younger breed prepared to assume responsibility, trained in business methods and willing to make decisions...

...This quiet revolution of thinking and planning is detectable in half a dozen capitals...