Gorbachev Consolidates His Rule
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
THE 27 TH CONGRESS OF THE CPSU-2 Gorbachev Consolidates Rule BY ROBERT V. DANIELS A Party congress in Moscow bears little resemblance to a congress or political convention in a democratic...
...Although he has held the number one position for barely a year, Gorbachev has already put a strong stamp on public life in the Soviet Union as well as on the personal make-up of its top leadership...
...In fact, rumor had it that he was challenged in the Politburo...
...Apart from the purges of the '30s, the current turnover rate has been exceeded only by the 50 per cent housecleaning in 1961, when the neo-Stalinists were closing ranks against Nikita S. Khrushchev...
...The upheaval contrasts with the 15-20 per cent turnover rate between congresses during the Brezhnev era, pursuant to the now repudiated policy of "stability of cadres...
...he has made a sensational promise: The nation's GNP and standard of living will double by the year 2000...
...The 27th Congress of the CPSU was a predictable triumph for General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev...
...Traditionally, the Central Committee has consisted of those holding the country's most important Party, government and military positions...
...Moreover, Soviet power is today more oligarchic than personal, the General Secretary's considerable scope for shaping policy notwithstanding...
...Acceleration of the socioeconomic development of the country,'' he repeatedly stressed in his five-hour address to the congress," is the key to all our problems...
...He has already begun to distinguish himself by harping on discipline, chiding the press —including Pravda—for publishing "disruptive" criticism, and spouting the patriotic themes of the growing Russian nationalist element in the Party...
...Should Gorbachev's political luck turn sour, he might be remembered as the Khrushchev, or perhaps the Georgy Malenkov, of the post-Brezhnev era...
...The relationship of the General Secretary to his cohorts in the Central Committee, as in the Politburo, is therefore one of mutual vulnerability...
...If Gorbachev signally fails to deliver on his promises in internal or in foreign matters, apparatchiks who would like to take advantage of his embarrassment might well try to rally the Central Committee around a harder-line alternative...
...Gorbachev is fully aware of the reasons for the Soviet Union's economic stagnation...
...There are precedents in the Soviet Union itself, too, for the kind of initiatives Gorbachev is promoting...
...THE 27 TH CONGRESS OF THE CPSU-2 Gorbachev Consolidates Rule BY ROBERT V. DANIELS A Party congress in Moscow bears little resemblance to a congress or political convention in a democratic country, other than the mere fact of periodically bringing together a few thousand local political activists from around the country...
...A similar renovation of the Party Central Committee, started upon Brezhnev's death, was also registered officially by the congress...
...But Gorbachev himself, at 54, remains the youngster of the group...
...less measurement of performance by quantity of output and more by profitable sales...
...Given the relationship of mutual vulnerability between the leader and his immediate subordinates, Gorbachev must have the confidence of the Politburo and the Secretariat in order to keep the bureaucratic political base firmly under his feet...
...The Central Committee is the ultimate repository of power if the leadership of the Soviet regime is contested, as it was unsuccessfully in 1957 and successfully in 1964...
...See "Reading Russia's Cycles," NL, September 9, 1985...
...He named five new national secretaries to an expanded 11-member Secretariat, while three in their 70s or 80s were retired...
...Breaking out of the low-growth doldrums that have beset the USSR for almost a decade is not merely a priority with General Secretary Gorbachev...
...Here Gorbachev has reversed the old strictures on self-employment and moonlighting by plumbers, mechanics and many professionals, such as doctors...
...What does Gorbachev's reconstructed political foundation mean for the future direction of Soviet policy...
...The unusual new group included exiting Ambassador to the U.S...
...His rival, former Leningrad boss Grigory V. Romanov, reportedly nominated the 70-year-old Moscow Party chief Viktor V. Grishin, and Gorbachev was said to have squeaked through by one vote...
...And like Khrushchev, he could get out on a political limb with these gambits, run into rejection or unacceptable conditions from the American side, find his foreign policy exposed as a revelation of Soviet weakness, and open himself in this area, as in economics, to political retribution at home...
...Is there any way in which opposition to the Soviet leader, whether principled or opportunistic, could be made effective...
...There are heavy items on Gorbachev's agenda, though, that needed the imprimatur of a well-orchestrated Party congress before he could forge ahead...
...He has secured formal endorsement of his policies of reform and detente, and of the sweeping renovation of the Party and governmental officialdom that has been under way for the past three years...
...The Khrushchev experience demonstrates that the answer is yes...
...In the eyes of most Western economists, Gorbachev's plan faces a twofold hazard...
...Dominating all other issues is the question of economic reform...
...At the congress, perhaps as a concession to coopt the Romanov crowd in Leningrad, Gorbachev rounded out the Politburo by bringing in the man who had been following in Romanov's footsteps, Party Secretary Lev N. Zaikov...
...His speeches on the subject sound like the critical writings of American Sovietologists...
...The presumed supervisor of the military and of the defense industry, Zaikov has Robert V. Daniels, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, is a professor of history at the University of Vermont...
...They are of course not called upon to prepare campaigns against the opposition either...
...The net effect of the changes executed in the last three and a half years, primarily under Yuri V. Andropov and Gorbachev, has been a dramatic arrest of the Kremlin's creeping senility...
...Another chronically depressed sector is consumer services...
...This time, intensified change became irresistible thanks to the aging of so many Stalinist bureaucrats who had been growing old in office...
...It was on the second step of the Soviet hierarchy—the Politburo candidate members and the Party Secretariat— that Gorbachev focused sharply at the congress...
...When Konstantin U. Chernenko died last year there was still strong resistance to this Young Turk...
...According to unwritten but strict custom, it is the status of the jobs these individuals have been appointed to by the highest leadership that qualifies them for the Central Committee slate submitted every five years to the Party congress for its unanimous endorsement...
...In the worst case, it may prove so unsettling to the Party chieftains as to provoke a top-level political reaction against Gorbachev...
...He speaks of "openness" and "democratization" togetthemass-es involved in the administrative process, and even uses the Yugoslav expression "self-management...
...Whatever the case, he then moved with surprising speed and apparent ease to dispose of his senior opponents, ousting Romanov from the Politburo in May 1985, and Grishin in January of this year, while the 80-year-old Prime Minister Nikolai A. Tikho-nov retired last December...
...Once Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in late 1982, a steady stream of officeholders at the Central Committee level began losing their posts, usually for reasons of " health " or " retirement on pension," to people a generation younger...
...Congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union do not make decisions or choose leaders: they ratify them, with prearranged set speeches and unanimous votes...
...Gorbachev, himself responsible for this area in years past, has attacked the problem by creating a new "agro-industrial" czar, and at the bottom by proposing small-team and family operations suggestive of recent reforms in China...
...The other main concern at the congress, foreign policy, is equally fraught with political disappointment or danger...
...Comparisons with the 20th Party congress 30 years ago, where Khrushchev launched his de-Stalinization campaign and the peaceful coexistence line, are a bit overdone...
...Despite amuch-heralded "food program" launched in Brezhnev's last year, withupped investments and prices for the collective farms, per capita production has literally been flat...
...He spoke of the "completeun-acceptability" Of nuclear war, assured dissidents in the international Communist movement that Moscow claimed no "monopoly of truth," and dug up the old bogey of revolutionary war only to denounce "the myth of the Soviet or Communist 'threat.'" This was, he claimed, a fiction conjured up by "the Right wing of the monopoly bourgeoisie of the U.S.A...
...Agriculture is still the soft underbelly of theSo viet economy...
...Between 1981-86 the average age of the Politburo was brought down almost a decade, from 72 in 1981 to 64 at present...
...Now, apart from himself, his patron Andrei A. Gromyko, and the holdover bosses of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Gorbachev has a Politburo dating entirely from the post-Brezhnev era...
...A strategically positioned candidate is already visible, in the person of Second Secretary Yegor K. Ligachev...
...Anatoly F. Dobrynin to head international work for the Party, former Ambassador to Canada Aleksandr N. Yakovlev as propaganda chief, and Aleksandra P. Biryukova, a trade union official and the first woman to join the Secretariat since the early 1930s...
...It served to justify "military appropriations, global ambitions, interference in the affairs of other countries, and an offensive against the interests and rights of the American toilers.' Pursuing his peace offensive, Gorbachev has made some extraordinary offers for a Soviet leader, even though the details may be faulted—a 50 per cent cut in strategic missiles, elimination of intermediate missiles from Europe, a complete test moratorium with inspection, and eventual banning of nuclear weapons altogether...
...The tempo quickened when Gorbachev finally took charge personally, with the result that over 35 per cent of the Central Committee members confirmed at the 26th congress were ousted, in addition to the 10 per cent who died in office...
...Gorbachev reiterated his endorsement of detente, directing it particularly toward the West Europeans and the Chinese...
...Prior to Stalin's takeover, under the New Economic Policy (nep)of the 1920s, the Soviets practiced a very effective form of decentralized, market socialism to revive their war-torn economy, Soviet economists have lately been debating how they might apply the nep cxperience to the massive yet sluggish industrial and agricultural system that continues to be run on Stalinist lines...
...thus become the number three man in the Party hierarchy...
...Second, it may encounter resistance and sabotage on the part of the bureaucrats who have to carry it out—as did the similar-sounding reforms enunciated by Khrushchev and by Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin early in the Brezhnev era...
...If there is a political enemy in sight it is the Party's own past and the "shortcomings and slip-ups" of its dead or deposed leaders of yesteryear, always excepting the canonized cult figure of the founder, Lenin...
...Assuming there really was a serious opposition alignment, it collapsed ignominiously...
...In other words, of the 319 members installed in 1981, only 171 have been reelected at the 27 th congress to a slightly pared-down Central Committee of 307, leaving space for 136 newcomers who have risen to elite jobs in the last five years...
...That was the secret of Brezhnev's survival, avoiding any serious innovation that would disturb his colleagues...
...His most recent book is Russia: The Roots of Confrontation...
...less unearned guarantees to labor and more monetary incentives...
...First, it does not appear sufficiently thoroughgoing to deliver the dramatic upsurge he has promised...
...At the congress he further hinted at allowing the kind of small-scale private enterprise— dressmaking, restaurants, etc.—that the Hungarians and Yugoslavs enjoy...
...He has called for less central control and more managerial initiative...
...At the same time, it is the creature of the leadership through the process of appointment to and removal from the jobs conferring Central Committee rank...
...He almost seems to be echoing Khrushchev in the 1950s...
Vol. 69 • February 1986 • No. 4
