Soviet Union: Leadership At the Crossroads

FROM the crenellated walls of the Kremlin to the high seas, the Soviet Union last week paid tribute to its founding father, infallible oracle and uncanonized saint. His spectacular, freshly painted portraits gave Moscow a colorful veneer for the occasion. Everywhere, banners and flags snapped in the spring breezes. At nightfall, colored lights twinkled in the capital's trees, fireworks illuminated its skies, and spotlights played on a huge portrait suspended from a blimp. Coinciding with the civilian celebrations was a dazzling worldwide show of strength by the Soviet navy and air force. After a year of almost ceaseless drumbeating, the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth had arrived at last, and Vladimir Ilyich was being given his due.

So was Leonid Ilyich. Throughout the festivities, Leonid I. Brezhnev, 63, General Secretary of the Communist Party, moved with an air of self-assurance and complete command. He had reason to. Unless the evidence that has been accumulating for weeks is completely illusory, Brezhnev is now on his way to gaining control of the Soviet Union's enormous power as no one man has been since the forced retirement of Nikita Khrushchev nearly six years ago.

Officially, power remains in the hands of the "collective leadership" that succeeded Khrushchev--a collegium whose key figures all along have been Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin, 66, and President Nikolai Podgorny, 67. Yet Brezhnev completely dominated the Lenin observances. He delivered four major addresses that were broadcast over prime-time television and accorded saturation press coverage. At Lenin's wreath-bedecked mausoleum in Red Square, Brezhnev stood slightly but perceptibly apart from the rest of the eleven-man Soviet Politburo, several of whom have recently reappeared after recovery from reported illnesses. He is the only Soviet leader who has spoken authoritatively of late on the two consuming issues of Kremlin policy: the state of military preparedness and the Soviet's stumbling economy.

At the high point of the Lenin gala, it was Brezhnev who commanded the brightest spotlight and biggest headlines. Before an audience including 66 foreign delegations, Brezhnev rose in the Kremlin's modernistic Palace of Congresses to deliver a three-hour, 82-page speech. (Kosygin followed the next day with a talk that lasted all of ten minutes.) Pausing only to sip cherry-flavored water, Brezhnev spoke self-confidently on a wide range of subjects, taking a tough but carefully qualified attitude. Nations fighting against imperialism, he said, will always have in Russia "a reliable and true friend." Enlightened circles in "bourgeois countries," on the other hand, can count on "a partner prepared to promote mutually beneficial cooperation." He admitted to grave shortcomings in the economy but vowed: "We shall work steadfastly to set our mistakes right."

Combined Weight

There are other shards pointing to Brezhnev's ascension. In a fulsome news report, Tass announced Brezhnev's nomination as a candidate in the June 14 elections for the Supreme Soviet, describing him as "a true Leninist" and "a tireless fighter." Another Tass item lumped together announcements of the nominations of Kosygin, Podgorny and one Victor Yermilov, an obscure Moscow machine-tool fitter. Such clues are minor and not conclusive, but the combined weight of the evidence is impressive.

Sifting the evidence, a top White House aide noted last week: "Brezhnev has evidently succeeded in establishing a dominant position in the leadership."

Actually, Brezhnev has always been prominent simply by virtue of his leadership of the vast party apparatus, which is the most powerful of all Soviet bureaucracies. If the widespread theories of his new pre-eminence are correct, however, he now rates as "first among equals"--and then some. To do so, he would have had to assure himself of two crucial sources of support.

One is the Politburo, the supreme decision-making body in the Soviet Union. Its eleven members occupy the key executive positions in the Soviet party and state. The hierarchy that enjoys the strongest representation within the Politburo is the Communist Party's vast administrative bureaucracy, which functions, in effect, as a parallel government in the Soviet Union. For each area covered by the ministerial offices--heavy industry, agriculture, propaganda, etc.--the party maintains a counterpart agency and staff. These full-time party professionals, numbering some 200,000, exercise broad supervisory powers over their governmental opposites. The party's chief means of maintaining primacy over the nation's other bureaucracies, including the trade unions and police as well as the government, is the power of nomenklatura, the hiring and firing of officials outside the party apparatus. Brezhnev would have also had to secure the loyalty of a second source of power--those groups that exercise an informal influence on the Politburo. The most important of these is the coterie of party officials based outside Moscow; they hold a majority on the Central Committee, which formally ratifies Politburo decisions.

The Metal Eaters

Above all, he would have had to reckon with the armed forces. No Soviet leader could gain power today in the face of the army command's express opposition. An elite, well-paid and tradition-conscious group of professionals, the military officer corps is one of the most cohesive elements in Soviet society. Moreover, as the protector of an invasion-wary people, the army commands genuine popular respect, even though its vast appetite for funds is chiefly responsible for persistent shortages of consumer goods. Top political leaders rely heavily on military expertise for advice on policies as diverse as the location of a factory and the Soviet stance at the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) now going on in Vienna. These talks, as well as the economic difficulties at home, are forcing Brezhnev to focus on some basic decisions of foreign, military and economic policy. There is the possibility, however fragile, of a major detente with the West and a resulting higher share of Russia's productive capacity for consumer purposes. However, Soviet negotiators at SALT, like their U.S. counterparts, realize that their military brass are fundamentally suspicious of any deal that would limit their power in the development of new weapons.

Brezhnev has lately gone out of his way to cement relations with the power groups outside the Politburo, particularly the military.

In his speech at the Palace of Congresses, for example, he said that he intended to keep the armed forces "fully provided with all that is needed for the vital task of national defense." If Brezhnev feels under any obligation to the military, however, his position could become uncomfortable. As the chief exponent of "goulash Communism," Khrushchev frequently sought to divert money and materials into consumer industries, away from the military men and what he called "the metal eaters"--the managers of heavy industry. But while Khrushchev tried, often unsuccessfully, to keep the military men on relatively short rations, Brezhnev may feel obliged to keep them well fed in exchange for their recent backing. That would further distort the economy, already heavily oriented toward military needs, and the very quality of Russian life as well. As TIME Correspondent Jerrold Schecter cabled from Moscow: "Guns have been built at the expense not only of butter but also of soap, toilet paper, furniture, dishes, flatware and household appliances. There remain glaring imbalances--sleekly engineered missiles and submersible tanks, on one hand, and rickety apartment-house elevators and bathroom plumbing that is 50 years out of style, on the other."

Since Khrushchev's one-man show came to an end, his successors have replaced his shoe-pounding, maxim-spouting ebullience with deliberateness that has long since crossed over the border into dullness. Conservative, guarded, suspicious, they exemplify a whole generation of bureaucratic middlemen. Writes British Kremlinologist Robert Conquest: "Vacillation, the attempt to combine contradictory drives, has been the pattern. The predominant motive seems to be a desire to avoid all change and reform in the hope that no crisis will spring up and that the contradictions within their society and economy will go away."

Crisis and contradiction, of course, have not gone away. During the collective reign, Kremlin policymakers often seemed to lack both will and imagination. The Soviet Union's relations with China deteriorated from diplomatic hostility to armed clashes. Russian miscalculation in the explosive Middle East led to the humiliating defeat of the Soviet-armed Arabs. In Czechoslovakia, the Politburo decided that a military takeover was the only way to halt the contagious liberalization movement.

Grave as foreign policy failures may be, they have rarely led to Kremlin shakeups. Domestic failures are something else. Soviet leaders are now facing their most alarming internal failure in years: a serious sag in the economy. While the country is by no means facing depression, the men who seized power from Khrushchev because of his economic failures can hardly be pleased that the Soviet economy in 1969 fell behind that of the previous year in every major indicator. The projected economic growth rate for 1970 is 6.3%, the lowest planned for a peacetime year since 1928. Moreover, the Soviets have recently begun requesting delivery of Canadian wheat. Of 128 million bushels outstanding from a 1966 deal, at least 75 million will be shipped to Russia this year.

It is ironic that the economic shortfall should be a major issue in 1970, of all years. It is not only Lenin's centennial but also the year in which the Soviet Union, according to Khrushchev's boast of a decade ago, was to overtake and surpass the capitalist system. Today the U.S. gross national product stands at $932 billion, the Soviet at an estimated $600 billion.

Russian shoppers of 1970 need no figures to remind them that their stores are woefully short of the amenities of modern life--and often the necessities as well. In the Russian Republic, according to the State Planning Commission, meat will be underproduced by.40% in 1970, eggs by 44%. Other drastic shortages will be in passenger cars, furniture, building materials and synthetic fabrics. Russians who have traveled abroad are most painfully aware of the deficiencies. Said a Soviet journalist, fresh from a visit to East Germany: "The stores were filled with a variety of food and children's clothing and toys that is unimaginable here. I couldn't help asking myself, 'Who won the war?' "

Such deficiencies persist despite a program of reforms introduced by Khrushchev's successors to increase flexibility throughout the system. Factory managers were given greater authority in planning production goals, hiring and firing workers, finding markets for their products and reinvesting their capital. They were to be judged not only on the quantity of production but also on the capitalist notion of profit, the return on invested cash. In the two years that followed, both industrial and agricultural production showed healthy gains. But there were no signs of a spectacular Japanese-style "takeoff," which some had apparently hoped for.

The major problem with the reforms, Western economists believe, is that they were never put fully into effect. Despite Kosygin's enthusiasm, the reforms were effectively sabotaged at midlevel, notably by the Ministry of Finance. Beyond that were problems at the local level. Factory managers who developed the capacity to overfulfill their production quotas, for example, frequently had trouble finding enough raw materials to do so. The reason: allocation of most industrial supplies remained under central control. Capital projects were stalled midway by the same kind of shortages, leaving the landscape cluttered with half-completed factory annexes and office buildings.

Lesser inefficiencies have proved no less annoying. Shoppers in Russian stores must typically move through three lines to complete a single purchase: one to select the item, another to pay for it, a third to pick it up. Red tape snarls every transaction. The Moscow weekly Economic Gazette recently published a study of the paperwork necessary to order a pair of pants from a Soviet tailor shop. No fewer than four magazine-size blanks must be filled out, it said, adding that Soviet trousers "eat" enough paper each year to print a daily newspaper with a circulation of 30,000. Costs mount, not only in wasted materials, but also in salaries for an army of paper-shufflers. The Soviet Union, moreover, has not kept pace technologically with the rest of the industrial world, except where a new development may have direct military applications. Computer technology is the most notable failing.

The workers did not have the one incentive that might have galvanized them into greater effort: consumer goods. Pro duction of household and personal articles increased, but not nearly enough. One result has been a flourishing black market. Westerners in Russia are regularly offered outrageous prices for their clothing, even though buyers and sellers run the risk of being imprisoned. Food prices on the legal "free markets" have jumped so high (cucumbers: $7.50 per lb.) that people living in southern regions find it profitable to hand-carry some delicacies to Moscow by air.

In some areas, Soviet leaders have frankly admitted their inability to keep pace with needs and have asked for outside help. Nearly four years ago, they enlisted Italy's Fiat to build a vast, $800 million automobile plant at Togliatti in the Caucasus. Production, delayed by material shortages, is scheduled to begin in July, but Moscow hopes eventually to get 660,000 cars a year from the plant. Last week Henry Ford II announced that the Soviet Union had invited Ford Motor Co. to participate in the construction of a mammoth truck-building plant at Naberezhnye Chelny, east of Kazan. Its production capacity of 150,000 heavy-duty trucks a year would be larger than anything in the U.S., but Russia obviously needs that much and more; it is currently producing fewer heavy-duty trucks and buses than the U.S. did in 1925. When Ford was asked how soon the Russians wanted to begin production, he replied dryly: "Yesterday."

Soviet leaders were heartened by the economy's first-quarter showing for 1970, with industrial production up 8.9%, v. 6% for the first three months of last year. The question is whether that rate can be sustained once workers and managers tire of the exhortations that have bombarded them since mid-December.

What is particularly nagging to many Russians about the consistent shortcomings of their economy is that the country is endowed with vast natural resources, boasts a comparatively well-educated work force and has produced a military technology that is second only to the U.S. Perhaps no recent event has so dramatically underscored this frustration, especially among the young and ambitious middle-management group, as the U.S. moon landing. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, the brilliant and outspoken academician who has championed major reforms in the Soviet system, recently gave voice to that feeling. Said he: "Now, at the start of the '70s, we see that having failed to catch up with America, we lag farther and farther behind."

Strategic Moments

Is Brezhnev the man to halt that demoralizing lag? If vision and creativity are required, the answer is probably no. Born the son of a steelworker in the Ukrainian industrial center of Dneprodzerzhinsk, he has never been anything but an orthodox organization man, maneuvering successfully in party ranks for almost 40 years. He became party head of a key industrial area of the Ukraine almost overnight during the great purges of the 1930s. A protege of Khrushchev, who was then boss of the Ukrainian Party, Brezhnev has since had a wide range of experience in jobs that took him into agriculture, industry, the military and the government.

After backing Khrushchev during his climactic struggle in 1957 to establish himself as Stalin's sole heir, Brezhnev won full membership on the Politburo. Three years later he became Soviet President and made state visits to no fewer than 14 nations. While abroad, he was able to add to his collections of antique watches and exotic songbirds.

As one of the ruling triumvirate that replaced Khrushchev in 1964, Brezhnev threw himself into agricultural planning, no doubt taking great satisfaction in the Soviet Union's record wheat harvests of 1967-68. In foreign policy, he is considered a strict hard-liner and is widely believed to have been one of the loudest proponents of the Czechoslovak invasion. In any event, he has become its loudest apologist: the Brezhnev Doctrine, defending the use of Soviet troops in any socialist state "threatened" by imperialist subversion, looms as a fearsome fact of life in every East European capital. The doctrine also furnishes a rationale, should one ever become necessary, for a preventive strike on China.

During the Czechoslovak crisis, Brezhnev displayed a fiery rage against Prague's kidnaped leaders that surprised those who thought of him as a meticulous, self-controlled man. Totally colorless in public, Brezhnev is said to be a convivial partygoer who is fond of co gnac and vodka. Though he has reportedly suffered from a heart ailment and is a heavy smoker of black Russian cigarettes, he appears to be in robust health.

The same cannot be said of his Politburo colleagues. Several--notably Mikhail Suslov, 67, Arvid Pelshe, 71, as well as Kosygin--are aging and sickly. Kosygin is said to have asked permission to retire several times; he was reportedly turned down in the interests of preserving a balance in the collective leadership. The Politburo membership has remained virtually unchanged for five years, however, and it is possible that Brezhnev may soon encourage a number of its members to retire. At least some Politburo appointments would probably go to younger men, refleeting the fact that three-fourths of Russia's 14 million party members are 50 or younger.

Though Brezhnev seems to have taken a firm hold on his country's economy, long Kosygin's sphere, his precise course of action may not become readily discernible until the 24th Party Congress convenes, probably in November. At that time, the next Five-Year Plan will be unveiled. An official of the State Planning Commission has indicated that the plan will probably call for an annual growth rate of 7% to 8%, place heavier emphasis on consumer production, seek some outside capital investment a la Ford and urge the rapid development of natural resources in Siberia.

Paying Heed

In implementing the new economic program, says Schecter, "Brezhnev's guidelines are likely to be short on expanding economic reforms and long on increasing party efficiency." As the leader of the party, he is also likely to stress the worker's sense of duty. "Today we live as well as we worked yesterday," he says. "Tomorrow we shall live as well as we work today."

It is one of Brezhnev's catchier slogans and undoubtedly reflects his genuine goal for the Soviet Union. But as Russia's workers have long since learned, their labors support a system in which the standard of living is not the uppermost priority. No matter how the Soviet leadership decides to divide the rubles of the '70s, there is little doubt that the military will continue to demand a disproportionate share of the country's wealth. Tomorrow, as any soldier sees it, a nation can live only as well as it is armed today.

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