The Politics of the Soviet Party Congress
HOPKINS, MARK
ECONOMICS AND POLYCENTRISM The Politics of the Soviet Party Congress BY MARK HOPKINS Moscow Soviet Communist party congresses, convened every five years, are party time in all ways. This was...
...Theater tickets were available for the asking...
...The moderates, meanwhile, apparently have compromised with the hawks on some questions, among them Angola...
...Such weighty matters aside, the Communist party functionaries were in Moscow for a good time...
...Especially notable in this respect, of course, were the speeches of Italian Party Secretary Enrico Berlinguer and Guy Plissonier, representing the French CP...
...Fleets of Volgas and Chaikas stood ready...
...At earlier congresses, for instance, Brezhnev had promised that the production of consumer goods would be given high priority...
...And his answer appears to be that in this cradle-to-grave welfare society he can look forward to steadily missed quotas of new apartments...
...a barely adequate amount of consumer goods...
...The one speaker Soviet delegates listened to most attentively, however, was their own General Secretary, Leonid I. Brezhnev...
...What, he tends to ask, is in it for me and my family...
...The issue has posed bewildering complexities for the various groups represented in the 15-man Politburo—the orthodox ideologues, the military, the industrial planners and managers, and the intelligence and secret police forces...
...Since he no longer anticipates social revolution from "them" in the Kremlin, for him—and probably for the rest of the world as well—it was the best that could be expected...
...The central newspapers published essays about those who reached their special goals, while Moscow television transmitted film clips of brigade chiefs haltingly recounting in memorized sentences the exemplary decision of their crews to do even better...
...They also knew agriculture and related industries have been marked for huge investments: The target is 215-220 million tons of grain a year, close to the all-time Soviet record...
...On the foreign side, delegates who get their information only from the Soviet press may have raised an eyebrow at the slowly yet steadily growing number of European parties declaring their intention to follow an independent line...
...He supported nuclear arms limitations and wars of national liberation, ideological battle and trade with the West...
...He is pleased to have learned that the chances of war between the Soviet Union and the United States have lessened, and hardly surprised to hear again that the "yellow hordes' along the Amur River in the Far East remain hostile...
...And from his five-hour keynote address they could discern how current intra-establishment battles over the economy, politics and foreign policy have been resolved...
...Following the success there, Brezhnev's group acknowledged that Soviet power can be extended without seriously endangering the benefits of Westpolitik...
...In fact, on the domestic side, there was little the provincial ward captains and state bosses had not learned from the '76-80 Five-Year Plan unveiled last December...
...But he has been told virtually nothing by the media about the ideological restlessness of the European Communists...
...Mark Hopkins, a past contributor to these pages, is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...
...and a bit more leisure...
...They and their foreign Communist guests occupied all the main hotels...
...They came, of course, to listen to the earnest orations in the Kremlin's glass and marble Palace of Congresses, to approve a new economic Five-Year Plan, and to "elect" the Central Committee, which chooses the Politburo and ruling Secretariat...
...The latest Party directives, far from being draconian, have a desperate ring to them...
...The apparatchiki know that when their boss goes, a lot of them will too...
...In short, to the detached Soviet citizen the 25th Party Congress was above all uneventful...
...This time he did not renew those pledges, confirming a victory by the military and allied enterprises...
...The apparatchiki—the most influential political people in the 15 republics that make up the USSR —arrived by jet wearing their best black suits, adorned with red Socialist Labor medals and rainbow war ribbons...
...The Party leader for 11 years now, Brezhnev seems to have recovered physically and politically...
...They knew that the nation's oil, natural gas and coal would have to be exploited more intensively to maintain Soviet power...
...This was especially true of the 25th gathering held February 24-March 3, attended by 4,998 official delegates plus prominent foreign Communist figures...
...No matter who direots it, Soviet power can only advance by methodically, rationally planned steps based on computer findings...
...The socializing afforded the local secretaries an opportunity to politick a bit, angle for better jobs, exchange notes and gossip...
...Brezhnev's "Westpolitik" has since attracted some $10 billion of capitalist credits and eager trading partners in Western Europe and Japan...
...But they had sufficient time for less formal comradeship, their real task being to endorse decisions already made...
...Even new blood—the generation born about the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and reared under Stalin—is unlikely to change the regime's corporate complexion...
...Nearly all economic progress is supposed to come from greater productivity: using more modern technology and applying it more effectively...
...Recording the progress of his "Peace Program," announced at the 24th Party Congress, Brezhnev defined the limits of detente...
...an uneven, albeit sure, supply of food...
...Indeed, beneath this country's veneer of authoritarian economic management, petty corruption, gold-bricking, sloth and lethargy have become so institutionalized they pose long-range social problems...
...As for the average Soviet citizen's reaction to the production in Moscow, last year the press began exhorting workers and farmers to overfulfill production quotas in honor of the upcoming congress...
...There were no major shake-ups at the provincial level, a reasonably good omen of political stability so long as the 69-year-old Brezhnev stays in power...
...The Soviet citizen has never had it good, but he remembers having had it a lot worse in the past and so seems to react with cynical passivity to attempts at implanting the Protestant work ethic from above...
...Alcoholism is still a national malady, causing 25 per cent of factory accidents and millions of lost man-hours of production...
...This year the millions of Soviet factory hands, collective and state farm peasants, shop clerks, truck drivers, miners, railroaders, researchers, construction workers, and managers will remember the 25th Congress—if they think of it at all —as a call to work harder and more efficiently during the 10th Five-Year Plan...
...Proponents of accommodation with the West predominated at the previous congress...
...The United States has not met expectations because of the ineptly handled Jewish emigration issue, yet the essential American product—grain—has been plentiful...
...Regular pilfering of public property—gasoline, grain, meat, clothes, lumber, and assorted spare parts—drains tens of millions of rubles from the economy...
...The USSR of the 1970s is limited to a narrow course...
...They successfully argued that only advanced American, West European and Japanese technology and money could lift the lagging Soviet economy to a competitive position...
...But it probably makes little difference today who commands the Politburo...
...He has given up smoking again, and Western diplomats in Moscow who have talked with him say he looks better and acts more vigorously than he did at the Helsinki summit last summer...
...Banquet tables overflowed with luxurious caviar, meats, vodka, cognac, and available fresh vegetables...
...marginally better medical care and education...
...Many Western specialists here believe he would now like to oversee an orderly succession...
...Only the inner circle, though, will be privy to the actual sums spent on the defense complex, ranging from the overt military budget (the same in 1976 as last year) to the KGB cadre...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 6
