The Moscow Congress-Three Articles
PIPES, ROBERT CONQUEST, RICHARD W. JUDY, RICHARD
The Moscow Congress - Three Articles Return of the 'Apparatchik' By Robert Conquest In his The New Class Milovan Djilas remarks, "It is at the height of its power and wealth, but it is...
...Shelepin studied the humanities, if we take ideology to be one of those...
...As a result, commentators have had to make the best of miniscule organizational changes effected at the Congress: the renaming of the leading Party official as General Secretary, and of the leading Party body as Politburo, and the reversion to the Stalin style of listing officials in order of seniority rather than alphabetically...
...Reading their remarks, one gains the impression that the central government is somewhat more tolerant and urbane in these matters than are its provincial agents...
...Collective farm peasants will earn about 80 per cent as much in 1970 as the Program said they would...
...Masherov, an old Komsomol official, has been particularly violent against writers, artists, "rumormongering," and religion-the usual syndrome...
...The London Times fantastically supposes that his inclusion is a gesture to the officer corps, saying that he is chiefly known for building up the Red Army between the wars...
...Under Stalin it was a forcing ground for informers, bureaucrats and prigs-the most unpleasant of all the Stalinist machinery with the sole exception of the Secret Police...
...I see here delegates of the Party organizations of our national Soviet Army...
...If this rate is achieved, the real wages of state employes in 1970 will be from 65-74 per cent of that envisaged in the Party Program...
...The great Khrushchev scheme for improving the lot of Soviet citizens through chemicals has been scrapped...
...The Party has directed and will continue to direct the activity of creative organizations and institutions, giving them every kind of support and help...
...There are several points to be made here...
...A new attempt is being made to smother the voice of history...
...The USSR is the world's second largest producer of crude oil...
...Stormy ovation...
...Even the generation of Russians born and raised after the Stalinist purges has shown itself to contain a significant group of intellectuals whose awareness of alternatives to Soviet reality places them in constant tension with their environment...
...Much of what was produced in these industries was of such poor quality that consumers refused to buy it...
...The poor showing in plastics and artificial fibers probably reflects the redirection of resources into fertilizer capacity and exotic fuels for defense and space programs...
...The Seven-Year Plan, however, called for Soviet national income to be about 20 per cent higher in 1965 than it actually was, and this general underfulffllment conceals a mixed performance within the economy...
...In his speech, Kosygin attributed the reverses of the SevenYear Plan to bad weather (it wrecked the harvests), to the Americans (their aggression in Vietnam compelled the Soviet Union to increase military expenditures), and to Nikita Khrushchev (his hairbrained scheming disrupted good management...
...In their economic passages, these orations dwelt on the achievements of the old Seven-Year Plan (1959-65) and on the anticipations of the new Five-Year Plan (1965-70...
...To regard the "interests of the Socialist Fatherland" as "holiest," and conformity with them as most virtuous, is by our standards tantamount to Right-wing nationalism...
...It might be added, too, that in Lenin's time the General Secretary was not the first figure in the Party...
...Light industry and consumers' goods, to the surprise of few, failed resoundingly to achieve the goals set for them in the Seven-Year Plan...
...Though he seems to be rather isolated from the literary community, for many Russians he carries the mantle of international prestige...
...Pravda, March 30, 1966...
...In fact, such scant reference was made to the economic aspects of the Party Program in speeches before the 23rd Party Congress that one is forced to conclude that the Program is no longer thought to be relevant...
...Kosygin declared that the average monthly money wage paid by the state, when augmented by the cash value of all welfare benefits, is scheduled to increase from 128 rubles in 1965 to 155 rubles in 1970...
...The image of the Red commissar gives way to that of the comrade in a grey flannel suit...
...The laggard among heavy industries was chemicals, which fell short of the industry goal by about 18 per cent...
...But all of the present Politburo members have come up through the Party ranks, except the light industry figure Kosygin...
...The generation of managerial experts built up in Stalin's last years, who played a big role up to 1957-men like Mikhail Pervukhin, Maksim Saburov, Vyacheslav Malyshev, Ivan Tevosyan-have no current equivalents...
...Too dearly have we paid for that which we have conquered, too dear is to us Soviet authority, that we should allow slander and defamation of it to go unpunished...
...More radical, of course, were the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, physically wiping out a large proportion of the survivors of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia whom Stalin regarded as too independent even when they faithfully served him and his regime...
...All of them rose through the leadership of the Komsomol...
...I feel shame not for those who have slandered the Fatherland and have covered with mud all that which is most luminous for us...
...When viewed together, the two plans provide glimpses of past, present and future, as well as an opportunity to realistically evaluate the progress of the grand design drawn in the Party Program...
...Moreover, though it is true that the older men had throughout been Stalin's accomplices at the highest level, they nevertheless remembered an earlier period, the comparatively free '20s...
...In my opinion, it is this conflict between imagination and reality, rather than concrete political dissatisfaction, which underlies modern intellectual dissent in Russia and elsewhere...
...by 1970, if the new Plan is fulfilled, Soviet oil output will have nearly reached the 1965 production of die United States...
...his head of the Trade Unions, V V Kuznetsov...
...The problems arising from the intractability of intellectuals, however, would hardly bother the Soviet regime were it not for its great and constantly increasing dependence upon them: In the modern world, knowledge in all its aspects is an indispensable adjunct of wealth and power...
...The main part of their careers has been in the Party and Komsomol organizations...
...They are roughly equivalent to a prominent American writer calling Robert Lowell or any other opponent of U.S...
...In no sense do they express the feelings and soul of our creative intelligentsia, who are indissolubly bound with the people, with the Party...
...But the hope that they would utilize this freedom with circumspection was only partly fulfilled...
...In all but a few exceptional cases, the 1970 targets are well below the goals set forth in the Program...
...The Soviet political leaders, therefore, continue to place highest priority on achieving rapid economic growth...
...Nor did advertising campaigns, installment credit and price slashing induce enough shoppers to change their minds about the shoddy merchandise...
...Others, hiding behind words of humanism, moan about the severity of the sentence...
...Nevertheless, it is plainly he and his associates who represent the alternative leadership which will make its bid for power when present policies run into their next crisis...
...The low point was reached by the author of Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, who after Ivan Bunin and Pasternak is the third Russian novelist ever to receive the Nobel Prize...
...He neglected to mention heavy outlays on the Soviet space program, elevated priority for rapid growth and producers' goods, accelerated military spending that preceded by several years the direct American involvement in Vietnam, and the appalling inefficiencies of the Soviet economic system...
...The Komsomol background is a bad augury...
...Soviet national income in 1970 is to be 275 billion rubles (in constant prices) according to the Five-Year Plan...
...Under Khrushchev he was in the end relegated to be Ambassador to Indonesia, but he always retained membership in the Central Committee...
...Not "convergence" with the West, but Fascism in its most vicious form would then become a likely prospect for the USSR...
...complete fulfillment of the new objectives for industrial consumers' goods will raise output in this sector to only 68 per cent of the level charted in 1961...
...The newer men are neither more nor less pure products of the Stalin epoch...
...All in all, the main impression given by the present leadership is its extravagant third-rateness...
...The only motive for holding the session at all seems to have been that the present rulers wish to avoid the taint of illegality, or rather of more than a little illegality, for the Congress should constitutionally have been held not later than last October...
...And a grouping which merely looked possible on the face of it is now being spoken of in Moscow as genuine and powerful -one centering on Shelepin, V. Semichastny (head of the KGB and chiefly known in the West for his typical denunciation of Pasternak as "a pig"), Dmitri Pavlov (head of the Komsomol) and Mikhailov, at present in charge of the press, whose return to the center of things last year is attributed to Shelepin...
...If these kids with their black consciences had been around in the memorable 20's [sic!], when judgment used to be passed not on the basis of strictly defined articles of the Criminal Code, but "under the guidance of the revolutionary sense of justice' (Applause)-Ach, it is not that kind of punishment these turncoats would have received...
...This is thought unlikely to work in a technological society...
...There have been many similar complaints-like one in Pravda on January 30, in which the phrase "period of the personality cult" was denounced as non-Marxist...
...As for the younger men, Aleksandr Shelepin was a Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee as early as 1943, and he was promoted by Stalin to lead that organization during the last and worst period of the dictator's life...
...To these ends, the emphasis of the new Five-Year Plan is on heavy industry and producers' goods...
...The new Politburo member, Arvids Pelshe (who started his career in the Secret Police), is of very slight interest-and that mainly as the man who enforced a tough centralizing and Russifying policy upon the Latvian Party in 1959, purging the leading elements of the Riga leadership...
...The directives of the Five-Year Plan, which were published in February, stated that per capita meat consumption was to increase 20-25 per cent...
...How would they act if in some of their units there appeared traitors...
...Brezhnev rose to rule the Moldavian Republic in 1950 and became a member of Stalin's last Party Secretariat...
...Mikhailov headed it from 1938-52, and had Shelepin and Semichastny as his assistants during the later years of his tenure...
...Consumers' goods, by contrast, have been cut to the quick in the new Plan...
...News of these improvements was trumpeted by the Soviet leadership and its organs...
...Although Brezhnev and Kosygin have repudiated Khrushchev's scorn for the private automobile, it is clear that Soviet cities will be spared strangulation by traffic for some years to come...
...this is about 90 per cent of the target mentioned in the Party Program, and it is more than 80 per cent of American power output in 1965...
...Under the best circumstances it is difficult to draw limits to intellectual and artistic freedom, as can be seen from the confusion existing in the United States over the matter of pornography...
...and in any case it would require a stabilized and authoritative despotism...
...How well this devotee of external and mental uniformity, to whom the whole country was one vast "command," would have understood the present predicament of the Central Committee facing Soviet intellectuals...
...All governments, but goaloriented governments in particular, have to promote education and research, and thus must increase the number of intellectuals...
...the new Plan calls for only 42 per cent as much plastic and 60 per cent as much artificial fibers as did the Party Program...
...The day may well come when an ambitious demagogue will want to unleash it as a means of acquiring power...
...Most of the present apparatchiks at least went through technical colleges when young...
...Many of the old figures are still there-four more (besides Suslov and Brezhnev) of Stalin's Party Secretaries, Nikolai Mikhailov, Nikolai Pegov, Averki Aristov and Nikolai Patolichev...
...It was without doubt the dullest Congress in the history of the Party...
...Gross industrial output, says the new Plan, is to increase at an average annual rate of 8.4 per cent...
...And since individual Soviet political speeches usually require four or five hours to make a couple of points, five days was just long enough for a few dozen people to say nothing...
...The issue of the intellectuals did not play a prominent part in the sessions of the 23rd CPSU Congress...
...The planned production of industrial consumers' goods is modest...
...At the same time, we are unalterably guided by the principle of the Partyness of art, the class approach to everything done in the realm of culture...
...It is quite understandable that the Soviet people cannot ignore the shameful activity of such individuals...
...Brezhnev, Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov all rose to their first important appointments in the extremely vicious struggle of the bloody purge period itself...
...The current ideas, if such they can be called, of this Shelepin group can be traced in the campaign to give Stalin a better press...
...The recent spate of articles in the Soviet press commemorating the 75th birthday of Sergei Kirov lacked any hint, such as was seen before Khrushchev's fall, of Stalin's complicity in his murder...
...intervention in Vietnam a traitor to the nation, and suggesting that the Marines be asked how to take care of him...
...The figures who battled for supremacy between 1953-1957 were powerful personalities, and at the same time they were men with ideas, capable of forming genuine factions...
...These points were officially formulated in Leonid Brezhnev's long speech: "The Communist party of the Soviet Union always has and will in the future show concern for the development of literature and art...
...grain output, on the other hand, is to average 30 per cent more in the next five years than it did in the last...
...First, most of the current leadership held positions of considerable responsibility before Stalin's death...
...The other speakers at the Congress occasionally touched on the subject of the intellectuals, usually to complain, and rarely qualified their complaints (as did Brezhnev) with assurances of the wholesomeness of "positive" criticism...
...The reappearance of Kliment Voroshilov in the Committee seems, like the Politburo name change, to be a symbolic nod to Stalinism...
...Stormy ovation...
...It was only when he fell that the Army was finally able to secure the complete rehabilitation of its martyrs...
...The peak of the crescendo, though, was reached at the 22nd CPSU Congress in 1961...
...Such renegades attach little worth to that which is holiest of all for every Soviet manthe interests of the Socialist Fatherland...
...but others began to stray...
...He then became Party Secretary and Head of the Agitprop Department in Stalin's last days...
...The majority seems to have rallied against him mainly because of his too obvious personal ambition, rather than for any policy motive...
...Lacking anything better, it is worth considering what that index reveals...
...A mobilized society, whether its aims be religious or secular, is too earnest to tolerate free-wheeling...
...He was not wrong, though, in thinking that something had to be done...
...Corn and hogs were Khrushchev's agricultural favorites...
...From the power point of view the Congress seems to represent the success, for the time being at least, of a Stop Shelepin movement...
...In economics and in the cultural field (as Richard W. Judy and Richard Pipes will demonstrate in the following pages), the Congress marks a reversion to Stalinist traditionalism...
...The Soviet Jacobins By Richard Pipes Nicholas I was once shown an architect's elevation of a projected building on which the draftsman, to provide a sense of proportion, had depicted some human figures...
...The Soviet chemical industry is to double its output between 19651970...
...The millennial goal of goulash communism recedes farther into the future...
...Underneath the placid and conservative surface of this uninteresting Congress, there were revealed ominous forces...
...Ustinov is, of course, Stalin's old Minister of the Armaments Industry, doubtless included as a concession to Westerners who want to talk about technocrats...
...This accords with the fact that the Congress was marked by a total absence of condemnation of Stalin, and of Stalinism, and by a complete lack of anything resembling further rehabilitation of any of his victims...
...and to some extent the same attitude held true for Lenin, who regarded anyone unwilling to commit himself one way or the other in the Civil War as ipso facto an enemy...
...This is 20 million tons less than demanded by the Party Program, but it will exceed the 1965 American steel production by about 10 million tons...
...The more probable prospect is of a cycle, common in decaying autocracies, between unworkable repression and unfruitful concession...
...Applause...
...But stalemate is hardly a possible solution in the Soviet Union's sort of politics...
...If so, we must presumably regard all the General-Secretary-Politburo stuff as the surviving vestiges of a much larger operation, the retention of the symbols after the scrapping of the substance...
...On the contrary, he is chiefly known as Stalin's leading accomplice in slaughtering those who were building up the Red Army...
...The Presidium of 1953 contained (among its full members) only two men whose main career had been in the Party apparatus-Khrushchev and Georgi Malenkov (and the latter was a close adherent and leader of the young managerial class...
...As is known [kak izvestno], we experience not a few difficulties and shortcomings, and their truthful criticism in the works of art is useful and indispensable-it helps Soviet men to overcome these shortcomings...
...Such aims require the mobilization of the whole population, and inevitably clash with that right to irresponsibility which constitutes the essence of intellectual freedom...
...But this is a typical phase in the final degeneration of a regime...
...As long ago as last August, Pavlov set the tone, attacking a certain "one-sidedness" which had become apparent in attitudes to the Stalin era, and which hindered "the inculcation of patriotism, the correct understanding by young people of the history of our Motherland...
...Collective farmers are to do relatively better...
...In fact, with the one exception noted below and Aleksandr Episher's attack, references to intellectuals were moderate in tone...
...Superiority in the arms and space races with the United States is a cherished goal...
...Since it is difficult to form an accurate impression of changing consumer welfare from data on individual commodities, one wishes for a good index of per capita disposable income...
...The two provincial promotions to candidate membership-Dinmukhamed Kunaev and Petr Masherov-are unlikely to carry more than symbolic weight...
...Having said that, the Nobel Laureate devoted the remainder of his talk to the pollution of the Russian waterways...
...The pecking order in the latter Plan was as follows: metallurgy, chemicals, fuels, electricity, machinery, etc., down through the lesser entries...
...Over the past year or so, there has been a decisive slowing down of rehabilitations, and they now seem to have ceased...
...Although these were years of boom in the United States too, our Gross National Product (not strictly comparable with the Soviet measure of national income) rose only about 36 per cent...
...From the beginning the Soviet regime undertook a variety of steps to overcome the resistance of intellectuals...
...The prevailing attitude may be summarized as follows: We welcome constructive criticism and have no intention of imposing on writers and artists the requirement that they depict only the sunny side of life...
...Under circumstances other than those in which they were uttered, these sentiments would be considered thoroughly reactionary...
...But it is also true that a powerful speech in March in favor of most of Stalin's record, by a secretary of the Georgian Party, Sturua, was severly cut when it appeared in Pravda...
...In the new Five-Year Plan, they hope to reverse the downward trend of recent years in the rate of industrial growth and to coax Soviet farmers to provide enough food to feed the rapidly growing population...
...The exceptions are certain consumer durable goods, such as refrigerators (output is to triple) and television sets (output is to double...
...Nicholas is said to have knitted his brows and asked: "And who are these Jacobins...
...The New Plan By Richard W Judy The early years after Stalin's death brought significant improvements in living conditions for Soviet citizens...
...With great exertion, the planned production of mineral fertilizer was achieved...
...Socialist art is profoundly optimistic and positive in its attitude to life...
...When a quack medicine does not work, this does not argue in favor of no treatment at all...
...I feel shame for those who tried and try to defend them, no matter how this defense is motivated...
...And the further the bad old days of Stalin's rule recede into the past, the more the old tyrant's stress on heavy industry and rapid growth is replaced by a benevolent goulash Communism...
...Four weeks ago the Party faithful again assembled in Moscow, this time on the occasion of the 23rd Party Congress, and the major speeches were read by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin...
...Yet, for all the ingenuity and brutality of the measures taken against him, the Russian intellectual did not turn into a passive instrument...
...Khrushchev was wrong in thinking that his large-scale experiments could save the Soviet economy...
...Soviet electric power generation is scheduled to be 900-1,000 billion kilowatt hours...
...For we can trace little sign of difference between his tough-line faction and the other groups in economic policy, which is Russia's most critical area...
...Soviet data show the actual rate to have been less than 2 per cent...
...They are amoral...
...It is more and more being said that Aleksandr Shelepin was the driving force behind the overthrow of Khrushchev...
...Many Soviet writers and artists stayed within the vaguely imposed official limits by taking no chances...
...Pravda, April 2, 1966...
...For the notion that the USSR is in any sense a technocracy is entirely false...
...Kosygin made no mention of this in his speech before the Congress, but the other figures he gave suggest that the average annual per capita meat consumption from 1966-70 is likely to be about 5 per cent higher than it was in the period 1961-65...
...Kosygin remains from Stalin's postwar Politburo, but he only began his spectacular rise in 1938...
...Almost all the members of the leading bodies are now, in the most literal sense, veteran apparatchiks (with the sole exceptions of Alexei Kosygin and Dmitri Ustinov...
...and other veterans of the '30s and 40s such as Korotchenko and Ignatov...
...The claim was made that the General Secretary-Politburo business is a reversion to Lenin's ways...
...It is solely a matter of tighter discipline, stricter control, firmer insistence on the acceptance of Party prejudices in every area: an end to the inconsistencies and indecisions which have characterized the postStalin attitude to alien and unusual ideas...
...And indeed, though equally not the senior member, there was another post which has not been revived-that of Chairman of the Politburo...
...To help achieve this objective, the term "intelligentsia" was formally broadened by the Communists to include all those occupational categories not engaged in unskilled physical work, such as bureaucrats, Army officers, agronomists and veterinarians, and so on...
...Like faded paramours, tìiey have been discarded by the new leadership in favor of grain production...
...The struggle for power among the men at present in the Politburo continues, as it must, but it appears to have become little more than the interweaving of petty intrigues one might find in the offices of an Urban District Council in Glamorgan...
...Meanwhile, the revival reflects the Shelepin attitude...
...Sholokhov began his address to the Congress with some low-level jokes, which the audience seemed to enjoy immensely, then made viciously menacing remarks in the direction of Sinyavsky, Daniel, and all those who had tried unsuccessfully to defend them: "There is nothing more sacrilegious and disgusting than to slander one's mother [i.e., Motherland], basely to insult her, to raise an arm against her...
...This need produces an acute contradiction, curiously resembling that which Marx and Engels had incorrectly predicted for the capitalist economy...
...But as Sherlock Holmes pointed out, it can be significant that the dog failed to bark...
...So compelling was that hymn that the refrain continues to resound on the pages of Western newspapers: The idea has become firmly rooted in popular and journalistic mythology that the Soviet Union is rapidly evolving into a consumer-oriented economy...
...In the United States, the annual rate of increase of per capita disposable real income averaged 2.5 per cent during the period 1959-65...
...The Seven-Year Plan called for Soviet farms to produce 70 per cent more in 1965 than they had in 1958...
...The Soviet leaders, for example, pointed with pride to a 53 per cent growth of Soviet national income during the Seven-Year Plan-certainly a respectable advance...
...Our interim report must be "Am Osten nichts neues...
...But Lenin ruled without a Politburo until March 1919, and without a General Secretary until April 1922, just before the practical end of his career...
...It keeps a sharp eye for the new, the progressive in our life, and is able to show clearly the beauty of the world in which we live, the greatness of the aims and ideals of the man of the new society...
...But housing construction lagged 15 per cent behind the Plan...
...This, of course, does not mean that one should write only about the good...
...As usual, the best showing was rendered by heavy industry and other producers' goods...
...Of course, such persons are among us exceptions...
...plastics reached only 46 per cent of expected production, and the output of chemical fibres was about 40 per cent below target...
...Meanwhile, the population is likely to increase by about 13 percent...
...The Soviet consumer was told once again to content himself with minimal gains for five more years...
...Unfortunately, there exist also craftsmen of art who, instead of helping the people, make it their speciality to blacken our system, to slander our heroic people...
...From this point of view the persecution of intellectuals carried out by Nicholas I has much in common with that carried out by the Communist party, despite the great difference between their respective visions of the good life...
...Though Khrushchev was genuinely exasperated by these intellectual and esthetic forays, by and large he preferred to react with threats, pressures and ridicule rather than with force...
...Thus the over-all picture of Soviet economic progress during the SevenYear Plan was one of rapidly growing power in heavy industry, in defense and space production, and in producers' goods, with Soviet consumers sharing much less in the country's economic advances than they did in the early post Stalin period...
...He thus represents the anti-liberal, anti-concessionist bureaucratic self-righteousness now on the upgrade...
...The Party Program set a 1970 goal for national income that was 33 pejr cent higher than the level now planned...
...The Moscow Congress - Three Articles Return of the 'Apparatchik' By Robert Conquest In his The New Class Milovan Djilas remarks, "It is at the height of its power and wealth, but it is without new ideas...
...It held out the promise of a society of Affluence by 1970, and the golden gates of full Communism were to swing open by 1980...
...The producers' goods industries have been relatively unaffected by the retrenchment...
...Brezhnev's statement, with a few appropriate changes, should be fully acceptable to the Birch Society...
...The production of passenger automobiles will increase from 201.2 thousands in 1965 to 700-800 thousands in 1970...
...The 1970 target for mineral fertilizer is 62-65 million tons, about twice the 1965 production, yet far short of the goal of 80 million tons which Khrushchev announced at the Party Plenum of February 1964...
...Applause...
...This implies an annual rate of growth of about 7 per cent...
...This conclusion is reinforced by the vast discrepancies between the economic goals of the Program and those of the new Plan...
...Even in Khrushchev's time it was being used for such undisciplined and provocative actions, carried out against the official line, as the extraordinary mustard gas attack on the West German debugging technician which led to an unprecedented apology from the Soviet Government...
...We are sometimes told this type of change means we are getting a new generation that does not bear the guilt of Stalin's purges...
...Khrushchev, Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov all stood for something, and had their followings...
...Textiles, footwear and clothing helped to drag the output of light industry down more than 10 per cent below schedule...
...Unfortunately, these figures were dressed not in uniform but in civilian clothes...
...Kosygin ruefully reported that the actual gain was only 14 per cent...
...Prolonged applause...
...The targets of the Seven-Year Plan called for real wages (including all welfare fringe benefits and increased leisure) to increase annually at an average rate of 7 per cent...
...All the greater, therefore, is the glory of that small band of intellectuals who refuse to be muzzled and bravely hold a mirror to Russia's face...
...The Soviet index of real wages per employe hardly gratifies that desire, but it can safely be assumed not to understate any real improvements in Soviet living conditions...
...Steel output in 1970 is to be 124-129 million metric tons...
...Its adherents reject the visible world and retreat into the world of inner solitude, much as nearly 500 years ago Russian church reformers sought refuge from the prevailing corruption in their Trans-Volga dugouts...
...One of the most effective was to deprive them of an independent livelihood by nationalizing all educational and cultural institutions and thereby making the intellectuals into salaried employes of the state...
...The retirement of Anastas Mikoyan and Nikolas Shvernik means the end of any serious connection with the leadership of the 1930s...
...If he comes to power, his solution would probably be the Stalinist one of "to hell with the consumer...
...The Stalin revival has met with political opposition...
...Since the American consumer is applying a higher rate to a larger base, the gap between the American and the Soviet consumer has widened steadily during the Seven-Year Plan...
...The new Central Committee, apart from the removal of Khrushchev and some of his closest associates, shows surprisingly little change...
...Similarly 20 years ago, before the more technocratic phase in the '50s, Aleksandr Podgorny and Petr Shelest were the only members of the Politburo with careers originating outside the Party -but in their leadership positions they had unrelated assignments...
...Soviet agricultural performance was both ludicrous and tragic...
...His concern for fish was genuine and eloquently expressed...
...It may be that the pressures brought almost unanimously by the foreign Communist parties had some effect...
...Suslov has been Party Secretary continuously since 1947...
...As a result, stocks of unwanted goods piled up in warehouses and the leadership felt obliged to make some reforms in the system of economic management...
...One feels doubly ashamed for those who offer their services and request to be given the opportunity to bail out the condemned renegades...
...It was also the shortest of the regular Congresses...
...For intellectuals have no place in any political system determined to fulfill aims that go beyond satisfying the current needs and wants of a society...
...Nevertheless, in the Soviet context it must be regarded as fairly moderate: let us say, as reasonably conservative, rather than reactionary in tenor...
...It has nothing more to tell the people.' This total exhaustion of anything to say has never been demonstrated so clearly as at the 23rd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, which ended early this month in Moscow...
...What is particularly astounding is the relatively recent emergence of a strong Christian movement within the literary community...
...He is the one old Stalinist who could be brought into the Central Committee without representing any political danger to the present rulers...
...On the other hand, it has also been noted that the overt rehabilitation of Stalin which had been forecast did not occur...
...When problems cannot be solved by reforms, however striking, within the established framework, the only choice seems to be to patch up the old traditional methods in the hope that they will be able to cope somehow, and that no unforeseen crises will occur...
...enough better, says Kosygin, to raise the average annual increase in real per capita income to about 5.4 per cent...
...The consumers' goods picture was not all black...
...Some durable goods, such as refrigerators and washing machines, exceeded their planned targets by ample margins, and total value of furniture output was exactly as planned...
...but we also will not tolerate any blackening of Soviet achievement or permit literature and art to operate autonomously outside Party control...
...Annual meat output is to average only about 19 per cent more in the period 1966-70 than it was in 1965...
...Khrushchev's dismissal, and the subsequent obeisances in Stalin's direction, aroused fears that the new Party Congress would initiate repressive measures against the intellectual community...
...Fortunately, new measures did not materialize...
...Neither new ideas nor new people emerged...
...The belief was that the new Soviet intelligentsia, recruited in large measure from the peasantry and working class, would eventually turn into a perfectly malleable instrument, a functional social group like all the others...
...They, our warriors, know well that humanism does not mean slobbering...
...For the lack of any initiatives worth talking about in any fields signifies a definite policy-of doing nothing...
...In addition, the present Secret Police machine has been controlled by Shelepin and Semichastny since 1958, and it forms an important instrument of the faction...
...if it is maintained, this rate will put industrial output in 1970 at a point 15 per cent below the target of the Party Program...
...A brutal nationalism, kept in line only by the regime's adherence to an international doctrine, heaves and pants for release...
...revolutionary fervor is transformed into concern for the status quo, and all would be well if it weren't for Mao...
...WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, the 1970 targets of the new FiveYear Plan are beneath those mentioned in the Khrushchevite Party Program...
...After the wild adventures of the Khrushchev era, which brought no tangible benefit to the Soviet Union, the ruling group is exhausted and has turned to what seems to it to be the only alternative-immobilisme...
...The new Five-Year Plan merely permutes the order of the top five: electricity, fuels, metallurgy, chemicals, and machinery...
...The readopted nomenclature is far more closely associated with Stalin...
...American passenger car output in 1965 exceeded 9 million units...
...With abundance presumably come bourgeois attitudes, mores, and sweet reasonableness...
...In Soviet terminology, Boris Pasternak, and that reincarnation of the Neanderthal man, General Malinovsky, were and are considered as occupationally kindred: both members of the "intelligentsia," both servants of the state...
...Stormy, prolonged applause...
...The Party is against administrative and arbitrary decisions in questions of art and literature...
...Within the heavy industrial sector there is a slight shift of emphasis from that displayed in the SevenYear Plan...
...These insidious appeals to lynching instincts have overtones that clearly recall Nazi Germany and Goebbels...
...Thus it was almost completely a non-event...
...To Stalin or Khrushchev every non-uniformed citizen (literally and figuratively) was potentially a rebel...
...the new goal for these industries is 91 per cent of that specified in the Program...
...Prolonged applause...
...Kosygin, however much an economics man, is also a politician, and was a full member of the leading political body in the postwar period...
...For the past 10 years, the Kremlin has tried to win over Soviet intellectuals by granting them greater freedom...
...And, as to that, it is significant that the man chosen to make the most violent attacks on the writers at the present Congress was Aleksandr Epishev, Deputy Minister of State Security in Stalin's last, Doctors' Plot, phase...
...Many Western experts think that this figure is an exaggeration, but even if it is valid, the population growth from 209 to 232 millions would not permit much added consumption...
...These apprehensions were reinforced by the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel on the eve of its convocation...
...That program sounded like a hymn to the Soviet consumer...
...The output of electricity, fuels, ferrous metals, and machinery paced producers' goods to a vigorous overfulfillment of the Plan...
...From the podium of that assembly, Nikita Khrushchev announced the new Party Program that charted the course of Soviet development for 20 years into the future...
...It deals with them as they deserve...
...The last seven years compare poorly with the first six years after Stalin's death, when real wages were reported to have increased 5.9 per cent per annum on the average...
...This is a gain of 21 per cent over the five-year period, or an annual average increase in wages of about 3.9 per cent...
...And there is something else that comes to my mind...
...The purposes of these reforms were (1) to foster communication between the consumer and manufacturer about consumer preferences, and (2) to provide management with some incentive to satisfy those preferences...
...Even on the very short term, on the shallowest political level, it represented stasis...
...Perhaps this accounts for the quite unprecedented fact that seven of the Politburo members failed to speak at the Congress-not wanting perhaps to commit themselves even to the non-committal...
...after some delay, the trumpets were echoed in Western journals...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 9
