Soviet Union

By William R. Doerner

What in Lenin's name was going on in Moscow? Soviet oratory can be numbingly dull and dutiful, but the interminable speeches at least provided time for a good snooze. Mikhail Gorbachev had hardly got going in his address to the Central Committee last week, however, when the 307 members must have realized that this was a speech they could not afford to sleep through. Though Gorbachev went on for some three hours, there was hardly a dull moment. The General Secretary of the Communist Party had a bracing message for his colleagues in the Kremlin: the Soviet socialist system is a mess and must be fixed. As if that were not bad enough, Gorbachev went on, "it is the leading bodies of the party and the state that bear the responsibility for all this."

Gorbachev was just getting wound up. In cool and firm tones, with uncommon candor, he rattled off a long catalog of abuses of the system. He charged that:

-- "Disregard for the law, report padding, bribe taking, sycophancy and the encouragement of toadyism have had a deleterious effect on the moral atmosphere of the society."

-- Soviet policymaking has grown rife with "conservative sentiments, inertia, a tendency to brush aside everything that does not fit into conventional patterns, and an unwillingness to come to grips with outstanding socioeconomic problems."

-- "Day-to-day practical activity ((in the party and government)) has been replaced with rule by decree, a show of efficiency and mountains of paperwork."

-- "The growth of alcohol and drug abuse and a rise in crime have become indicators of the decline of social morality."

-- "There were no firm obstacles placed in the path of dishonest, pushy, greedy people intent on personal gain from their party membership."

To remedy the situation, Gorbachev called on the party to approve a series of reforms that could bring about significant changes in the Soviet system. He proposed that local, republic-level and perhaps even national Communist Party officials be chosen from slates of more than one candidate and by secret ballot. He also suggested the election of factory managers by their workers. At the same time, Gorbachev made it clear that any such changes would not be permitted to interfere with strict Communist Party control, which he said will remain "unshakable." Said he: "The point at issue assuredly is not any breakup of our political system."

During his 22 months in power, Gorbachev has presented his own country and the world with a totally different view of Soviet leadership. After a string of aged and feeble General Secretaries, he has emerged as a dynamic figure who challenges both his own people and his adversaries. He has introduced a new policy of glasnost, or openness, that is changing, at least superficially, dozens of areas of Soviet life. His ultimate goal, which he spelled out last week in the clearest terms to date, is nothing less than a transformation of Soviet society, one that will speed up the country's sluggish economic growth and modernize its aging institutions.

Without naming any of his predecessors, Gorbachev made it clear that his criticisms were aimed mainly at Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled from 1964 to 1982. Said Gorbachev: "At some point, the country began to lose momentum, difficulties and unresolved problems started to pile up, and there appeared elements of stagnation and other phenomena alien to Socialism. All this badly affected the economy and the social, cultural and intellectual life."

Kremlin watchers in Washington, who have become accustomed to unexpected moves by the Soviet leader, were surprised by both the tone and content of the speech. State Department officials began immediately to examine it closely. One expert burst out of his office after he finished reading the diplomatic dispatches from Moscow and said, "This is big stuff. This guy is serious." Added another top American policymaker: "This speech has made a number of us take a much more serious look at Gorbachev as a man who is not just making broad, sweeping pronouncements. He's considering some very serious changes in the system. He is determined to reinvigorate it."

Others were far less impressed with Gorbachev's calls for reform. Said Mikhail Tsypkin of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington research organization: "This is just an effort to strengthen the party apparatus. These are attempts to make the system more workable." He was correct in that nothing in Gorbachev's plans would fundamentally change such Soviet shibboleths as central economic planning and the total political dominance of the Communist Party. Indeed, Gorbachev several times downplayed the notion that he was planning anything really revolutionary.

Even though last week's call for contested elections for party office was hedged, it was an illustration of Gorbachev's ability to capture the political initiative. On the surface it was one of his most startling proposals to date, a chance to inject new blood into a stultified bureaucracy. Much, though, will depend on how the idea is carried out.

Many Western Kremlinologists are skeptical. British Sovietologist Martin McCauley, for one, predicts that Gorbachev plans to use the device "to make sure that his own people get in," presumably by arranging for candidates of his choice to challenge unwanted incumbents. Dimitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out that the party apparatus already has the right to nominate several candidates at party meetings. And as for secret ballots, it all depends on who will do the vote counting. Western observers noted that last week's Central Committee meeting did not adopt any resolutions that would put the voting proposals into practice.

The personnel changes announced last week contained mixed signals. As expected, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, 75, party chief of Kazakhstan, was dropped from the ruling Politburo, "in connection with his retirement," thereby eliminating one of the longtime Brezhnev hangers-on who had led the resistance to Gorbachev's changes. But the closest Brezhnev crony left on the Politburo, Ukraine Party Boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky, not only held on to his seat but was one of the few delegates aside from Gorbachev invited to address the Central Committee. This seemed to indicate that while Gorbachev has consolidated power, he does not yet totally dominate the party and appointments.

The most striking results of Gorbachev's many initiatives since he took power have been in the cultural field (see following story). But his ultimate goal, and the real reason behind last week's scathing criticism of past regimes, is to get the country's economy moving again. After growing at an estimated 4% annual rate for much of the postwar period, the Soviet economy in recent years has expanded at only half that rate.

Gorbachev's efforts at economic reform have been surprisingly timid, and his experience in this area may give some clues about his future political reforms. In the industrial sector Gorbachev has taken a few tentative steps toward basic cost effectiveness. Some large state enterprises, including the huge Byelorussian railroad system, have been required to operate on a "self- financing" basis, meaning that they can no longer cover operating losses with subsidies from the state and may spend only as much money as they earn. In a wage experiment under way in Estonia, workers are being paid a share of their employer's income rather than a set salary, in much the same way partnerships in the West divvy up the pot.

Gorbachev's initiatives have already given the Soviet economy a temporary boost. The annual growth rate officially announced in early January was 4.1%, higher than the level called for by the current Five-Year Plan. But few Western experts believe that the economic reforms Gorbachev has introduced to date will solve the country's basic problems. Says Arthur Hartman, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Moscow: "The Soviets use the words radical reform. But if you look at the decrees that have been issued, they are very pale things. It is not radical reform if you look at what has happened in China or Hungary." Those two countries have adopted capitalist incentives and given farmers, workers and managers much greater freedom to run their economic lives outside the dictates of central planning.

Even if Gorbachev's reforms were more far reaching, he would face tremendous opposition from a society and a system that, despite their revolutionary rhetoric, are not accustomed to change. He clearly hopes that the cold-water approach of glasnost, combined with its twin, perestroika (restructuring of the economy), will inspire Soviet society to mend some of its less redeeming ways. But to some, the endless emphasis on problems and the seamy side of Soviet life sounds like alarming admissions of failure. "I don't like hearing about so many bad things," says a 38-year-old Moscow secretary. "We never had this when I was young."

Most ominously for Gorbachev, a growing resistance to the glasnost ethos exists within the Soviet Union's vast bureaucracy. Gorbachev conceded that this opposition was strong when he told a private meeting of Soviet writers last June, "Between the people who want these changes, who dream of these changes, and the leadership, there is an administrative layer: the apparatus of the ministries, the party apparatus, which does not want alterations and does not want to be deprived of certain rights connected with privileges."

It was precisely this group that ultimately defeated past attempts at reform, most recently those of Nikita Khrushchev and former Premier Alexei Kosygin. Today many top bureaucratic posts are still held by people who were appointed in the Brezhnev era. Often they simply do not want change and are in a position to block Gorbachev's reforms. In a speech last July in Vladivostok, the Soviet leader said acidly, "Those who attempt to suppress the fresh voice, the just voice, according to old standards and attitudes, need to get out of the way."

Many Kremlinologists question whether Gorbachev will be able to win over the bureaucracy. Says Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of the Harriman Institute for Russian Studies at Columbia University: "Glasnost is a lever to break up the static formations of the entrenched interests and corrupt groups that have been so powerful. But the implementation of these policies is hindered because ((Gorbachev)) has not had time to develop the support among mid- and lower-level officials. It's a huge machine, and it's very hard to get a handle on it." Jeremy Azrael of the Rand Corp., a West Coast think tank, says that regional party bosses have become "feudal barons" and that Gorbachev has to gain control over them before he can be master of the national party.

Beyond all the talk of glasnost, Gorbachev's ambitious objective is to get average Soviet citizens to support reform. He said last week that "democratization" means drawing "into the reorganization its decisive force -- the people." Yet those people are reluctant to join a revolution that may someday be reversed by another leader. The state, for example, has been encouraging moonlighting service operations to register as part of a program to bring the underground economy into the open. But a Moscow teacher who offers tutoring lessons in her free time admits that she is not about to step forward. Says she: "What if the party line changes and goes against private enterprise? If you register, they'll have a list of 'capitalists' to arrest."

This week the largest group of U.S. foreign policy experts to visit the Soviet Union in some time will be able to form their own judgments on the changes wrought so far during the Gorbachev era. A delegation of 350 members of the Council on Foreign Relations, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance and ex-U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, is scheduled to be in Moscow for discussions with Soviet officials and academics, and Gorbachev is expected to meet with the group.

While Gorbachev is often pictured as a man in a hurry, he gave party members plenty of time to ponder the thoughts contained in last week's speech. The Soviet leader suggested the convening of an extraordinary national party "conference" sometime in 1988. Its purpose would be to discuss organizational changes like election reforms and to review progress in the current Five-Year Plan. The conference would, in effect, be an extraordinary session of the quinquennial Soviet Party Congress, the most recent of which occurred last year. Such special meetings have been held before, but they are by no means regular events. The last one was called by Stalin in 1941.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Strobe Talbott/Washington