A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  Khrushchev's enthusiasm and ambition in the economic and other fields found characteristic expression in his insistence on the early building of communism, which was to replace socialism as the culminating phase in the evolution of Soviet society. The Twenty-second Party Congress, in October 1961, paid much attention to this issue, proclaiming that the preconditions for communism should be established in the U.S.S.R. by 1980. Although the concept of communism remained fundamentally vague and lacked substantiating detail, Feldmesser and other Western scholars have been able to draw a generally convincing picture of the projected Soviet Utopia.

  Communism would be based on an economy of abundance which would satisfy all the needs of the population. These needs, however, were to be defined by the authorities. In the words of Khrushchev, "Of course, when we speak of satisfying people's needs, we have in mind not whims or claims to luxuries, but the healthy needs of a culturally developed person." Presumably, the authorities could also determine that some people had more needs than others. Nevertheless, the main thrust of communism would be toward equality. Income differentials would be drastically reduced. More than that, communism would finally eliminate the distinction between town and country, industrial and agricultural work, mental and manual labor, and thus the differences in the styles of life. Members of the new society would be "broad-profile workers," that is, persons trained in two or three related skills who would, in addition, engage without pay in one or more other socially useful occupations in their leisure hours.

  The collective would obviously dominate. Even some of the abundant

  consumer goods would be available in the form of "appliance pools" of refrigerators, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners. Apparently, Khrushchev objected to the last to private automobile ownership and projected instead public car pools. On a still broader scale, life would become increasingly socialized. Free public health services and transportation would be followed, for example, by free public meals which would virtually eliminate kitchen drudgery for women. The Academician Stanislav Strumilin and others constructed models of communal cities of the future, with parents allowed a daily visit to their children, who would live separately under the care of a professional staff. Indeed communism would seem to imply a great diminution in the role of the family, if not its abolition, although most Soviet commentators have refused to face this conclusion. By contrast, the role of the school would expand, and so would the roles of labor brigades, comrades' courts, and other public organizations. Lenin's, or Khrushchev's, authoritarian Marxist system would in no sense be diluted, or even diversified, in communism, but only strengthened and more effectively "socialized," so to speak, and internalized. In the end, only mentally deranged persons would seriously object to it.

  According to a bitter Chinese remark, largely applicable in the economic as in other fields, the fall of Khrushchev resulted simply in Khrushchevism without Khrushchev. Yet, as already indicated, it brought at least a striking change in the manner of execution and in tone, if not in fundamental policy. The new leaders abolished Khrushchev's reorganizational reforms, such as the division of the Party in two and the creation of the sovnarkhozy, and discontinued some of his pet projects. They stopped the discussion of the imminent building of communism and the propaganda concerning the early surpassing of the United States in the production of consumer goods. Instead they revealed grave economic shortcomings and failures of the past administration and took a more realistic view of the potentialities of the Soviet economy.

  It was in the middle and late 1960's especially that fundamental measures were enacted to bolster Soviet agriculture. Collective farmers finally received a guaranteed wage, which made their position comparable to that of the sovkhoz workers, whereas earlier they had the last claim in the distribution of gain, frequently rendering their very existence marginal, a point emphasized by Lewin and other scholars. Also, pensions and social services were extended to the kolkhoz members. Over a period of years the state greatly increased the amount of resources devoted to agriculture so that investment in agriculture came to constitute over a third in the allocation of the total national investment. Another AV2 per cent of the national income was assigned to subsidize retail food prices to consumers,

  to keep these prices down in spite of heavy production costs. Still other large sums went into agricultural research. If one adds to these huge expenses some five billion dollars spent by the Soviet Union in 1975-76 alone to buy grain abroad, more money to buy meat and butter, as well as similar huge purchases later, one can get an idea of the enormous effort mounted by the Soviet leadership to develop the agricultural sector and to supply the Soviet public with increasing amounts of food at more or less stable prices. Indeed it has been said that instead of being the most depressed social group in their country the Soviet peasants became the most pampered. But that only made the generally miserable condition of Soviet agriculture all the more striking.

  The new Five-Year Plan, 1966-70 - eventually designated as the Eighth - presented by Kosygin to the Twenty-third Party Congress in the spring of 1966, reset a number of Khrushchev's economic goals from 1965 to 1970. The economy was to strive for a 49-52 per cent increase in the output of heavy industry and a 43-46 per cent increase in consumer goods, with the annual growth rate of 8.5 per cent and 7.7 per cent respectively - a very high figure for consumer goods in relation to heavy industry, although in line with Khrushchev's thought on the matter on the eve of his fall. Subsequently the Soviet government signed contracts with Italian and French companies to help develop the automobile industry in the Soviet Union.

  The Eighth Five-Year Plan was followed by the Ninth, 1971-75, then the Tenth was promoted as the "Five-Year Plan of Quality," the "Basic Directions" for which came out in mid-December 1975, some two months before the Twenty-fifth Party Congress. Yet rather than recapturing the earlier drive the new Plans seemed to testify to a slowdown of the Soviet economy, accentuated by the disastrous crop failures of 1972 and especially of 1975, which necessitated massive purchase of grain abroad - supplied, particularly by the United States in 1972, on terms remarkably advantageous, to be sure, to the Soviet Union. To quote an expert evaluation of the economic position of the U.S.S.R. at the time of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress:

  Soviet economic growth slowed down significantly during the Ninth FYP period (1971-75), and the Plan's ambitious targets were generally - sometimes widely - missed, affected as the USSR has been by declining reserves of labor and other retardational forces and under the blows of two major crop failures. Particularly hard hit was agricultural production, and consumer goods output and consumption levels rose much less than planned. Civilian equipment production and capital formation also fell short of expectations. Nonetheless, Soviet heavy industries expanded

  at high rates, and (presumably) military production did well too. The recession in the West made Soviet industrial performance look particularly good.

  The just-announced Tenth FYP (1976-80) provides for further retardation in growth throughout the economy. The advance in consumption levels is expected to slow down even further, as are fixed investment and capital formation. Labor productivity will also rise more slowly. Despite the relative moderation of the Plan's goals, they may still turn out to be rather ambitious in relation to resources. No liberalizing reforms seem to be in the wings; rather, there is strong emphasis on centralism in planning and management, with considerable hope placed on mergers of enterprises into rather large units and on computerization. Yet withal the industrial basis of Soviet power - including military might - will certainly continue to grow at a pace that would be creditable for any advanced industrial power.

  Since the fall of Khrushchev and in general since the death of Stalin, the standard of living of the urban, and especially of the poverty-stricken rural, population apparently continued to improve, at least until rather recently. At the same time, the Soviet Union was bearing very heavy military expenditures, exemplified by the deployment of anti-missile ballistic s
ystems and by the tremendous growth of the Soviet navy. Economic activities in the U.S.S.R. spread out, and the economic map of the country is undergoing constant change. Illustrations of this change include the rise of Novosibirsk as a great scientific and technological center in Siberia, the Bratsk Dam, the Baikal-Amur mainline railway, the new problem of the industrial pollution of Lake Baikal, and the shift in the center of oil production since the Second World War from its long-time location in the Caucasus to new fields between the Volga and the Urals, and, recently, also to oil and natural gas fields beyond the Urals.

  The new leadership also resorted to economic reform, described generally as an economic "liberalization" and associated with the name of a Kharkov economist, Evsei Liberman. Faced with an economic slow-down, characterized by a drop in the growth rate of the gross national product and by a marked decline in the return from investment and in the growth of productivity of labor as well as by a great loss accruing from an under-utilization of capital and labor resources, the government decided to shift the emphasis and the incentives from the sheer volume of production, where they had been from the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan, to sales and profits. Under the new system managerial bonuses were to depend not on the output as such, but on sales and profits, the latter factor finally giving serious recognition to the element of cost in Soviet production. In January 1966 forty-three enterprises from seventeen industries, with a total of 300,000 workers, were switched to the new system. Others followed in

  subsequent months and years. Some economic reform was realized in industry, transportation, and retail trade, and it spread to the sovkhozes and to the construction sector. Yet, ambivalent and probably insufficient to begin with, it was emasculated in the process of implementation, with the result that there proved to be very little difference between the new system and the old system before 1965. More prominent was the new emphasis on material incentives, provisions of more and more differentiated rewards. However, although widely applied, these incentives did not lead to an important improvement in performance.

  Indeed, the Tenth Five-Year Plan, 1976-80, and the Eleventh which succeeded it, although on the whole less ambitious than their predecessors, witnessed repeated inability of the Soviet economy to meet set goals, a decline in the increase of labor productivity, and other signs of stagnation. Some specialists considered 1979, the first of the unprecedented four successive years of bad grain harvests, a disastrous turning point. Then and in the years immediately following, seemingly everything, from transportation bottlenecks and difficulty in maintaining the supply of energy to ever-increasing alcoholism and inflation, combined to retard Soviet economic development and to emphasize the seriousness of Soviet economic problems. Other observers wrote more generally of the first successful period of the Brezhnev regime, when the growth of Soviet military and industrial might went hand in hand with a sharp rise in living standards, and of the last stagnant and disappointing years with their ubiquitous shortages of food and consumer goods. At the time of Brezhnev's death perhaps the best evaluation of his eighteen-year stewardship of the Soviet economy, from 1964 to 1982, went as follows (accompanied by a telling comparison with the United States). On the one hand, there was

  Steady growth of aggregate output over the eighteen-year period, averaging 3.8 per cent per year, with industrial output growing at an average annual rate of 4.9 per cent.

  Steady increase in living standards of the Soviet population, with per capita consumption rising at an average annual rate of 2.7 per cent.

  Significant growth in Soviet military power in absolute terms - achieved through a steady increase in real Soviet defense expenditures averaging 4 to 5 per cent per year - as well as in relative terms vis-a-vis the United States.

  Reduction of the gap in aggregate and per capita output (GNP) between the Soviet Union and the United States. Whereas in 1965 Soviet GNP was only about 46 per cent that of the United States (38 per cent on a per capita basis), by 1982 it was 55 per cent (47 per cent on a per capita basis).

  Reduction of the gap in productivity between the Soviet Union and the United States. While in 1965 the productivity of an average Soviet worker was only 30 per cent that in the United States, by 1982 it was 41 per cent.

  Increase in the output of major industrial commodities to the point where, at the beginning of the 1980's, the physical output of many key commodities in the Soviet Union equaled or exceeded that of the United States.

  On the other hand, there also was

  Steady deceleration in the growth of the Soviet economy. The average annual growth of GNP declined from the peak of 5.2 per cent during 1966-70 to 3.7 per cent during 1971-75, to 2.7 per cent during 1976-80, and to an estimated 2.0 per cent during 1981-82.

  Steady deceleration in the growth of living standards, with the average annual growth of per capita consumption declining from a peak of 4.3 per cent during 1966-70 to 2.6 per cent during 1971-75, to 1.7 per cent during 1976-80, and to an estimated 1.2 per cent during 1981-82.

  Failure to achieve satisfactory growth in Soviet agriculture. Over the eighteen-year period the average growth rate of GNP originating in agriculture amounted to only 1.7 per cent.

  Lack of growth of agricultural productivity both in absolute terms and in relative terms vis-a-vis the United States. While in 1965 the productivity of an average Soviet farm worker was only 14 per cent that in the United States (in the Soviet Union one worker supplied six persons; in the United States one worker supplied forty-three persons), by 1981 it actually declined to a mere 12 per cent (in the Soviet Union one worker supplied eight people; in the United States the corresponding figure was sixty-five).

  Although a significant effect of long-term weather cycles on grain output in the Soviet Union cannot be ruled out, the most significant failure of the Brezhnev era appears to be grain harvests, which after 1972 repeatedly fell far short of expectations and needs. There were six of these poor harvests over the eleven years: 1972, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982. Whereas the Soviets appeared to be closing the gap in aggregate output with respect to the United States through the mid-1970's, the dramatic slowdown that has taken place in the Soviet Union since 1976 has resulted in some widening of the output gap. The Brezhnev reign was characterized by the highest priority being given to the growth of investment and defense spending except during the period 1964-70. As a result, the per capita consumption of an average Soviet citizen today is still not much more than one-third that in the United States - in fact, over the eighteen-year period under Brezhnev's rule the relative gap remained almost constant.

  But while the facts and the statistics seemed reasonably reliable, explanations of them differed. Possibly the most important issue was to what extent Soviet economic difficulties were of a temporary and relatively remediable character and to what extent they were intrinsic to the system.

  "The Thaw"

  Soviet economic policies from the death of Stalin to the advent of Gorbachev thus demonstrated both the continuation of the main course of development pursued by the deceased dictator, and certain hesitations, reversals, and changes. Also, they indicated somewhat more attention to the immediate needs and wishes of the population than had hitherto been the case. Mutatis mutandis, the same or similar generalizations can be made in regard to other aspects of the evolution of the Soviet Union in those years. Stalin's death and especially Beria's fall in the summer of 1953 resulted in a considerable diminution in the role and power of the political police. Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin gave another shock to the state security apparatus, for it emphasized its horrible past crimes and mistakes and led to a vindication, usually posthumous, of some of its prominent victims. Two developments in relation to the police after Stalin's death deserve special notice: the numbers of forced-labor camps and their inmates was drastically reduced; also, it seems that Soviet citizens gradually lost the immediate and all-pervasive dread of the political police which they had acquired under Stalin. But, although milder, the Soviet Unio
n remained a police state.

  As we shall see in a later chapter, Stalin's death was also followed by some relaxation of Party control in the field of culture. Khrushchev's denunciation of the late dictator in itself suggested the need of thorough reevaluation of a great many former assumptions and assertions. It also created much confusion. For a number of months in 1956 some Soviet writers exercised remarkable freedom in their approach to Soviet reality and their criticism of it. But, after the Polish crisis and the Hungarian uprising in the autumn of that year, severe restrictions reappeared. After 1956 and until the proclamation of glasnost, in the "quiet" years between Stalin and Gorbachev, actual Soviet culture, although not as much hampered and badgered as in the worst days of Stalin and Zhdanov, on the whole faithfully reflected totalitarian Party control. Khrushchev's fall made little difference in this respect. In fact, it can be argued that his successors generally assumed a harder line against dissent, as illustrated by the arrest, trial, and sentencing of Andrei Siniavsky and Julius Daniel in 1965-66 and numerous other instances of cultural suppression.

  The amount of covert opposition and bitterness that this control and the Soviet system in general created can only be surmised. Yet it should be noted that uprisings against Communist regimes took place not only in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, but also in the

  U.S.S.R. itself: notably in the Vorkuta forced-labor camps in the north of European Russia in 1953; in Tbilisi - or Tiflis - the capital of Georgia, in 1956; in Temir-Tau in Kazakhstan among young Russian construction workers, most of them members of the Union of Communist Youth - or Komsomol - in 1959; and in Novocherkassk in 1962. Sporadic riots, strikes, and student demonstrations against the government also occurred in the Soviet Union in later years, as in Dneprodzherzhinsk in 1973.