So. Maksim Maksimovich spread documents and telegrams with his long fingers. A little problem with Solkemfib, the viscose plant at Solovets, away off in the green gloom of the north-eastern forests. It was one of Maksim Maksimovich’s new generation of chemical-fibre operations, along with the big new installations at Barnaul and Svetlogorsk, and it ought not to have been causing trouble at this point in its life-cycle, with machines only four years old and the trials of running them in safely behind. It had its own wood-pulp mill, to provide cellulose, and a nice big lake for water. Power came by 220-kilovolt line from one of the hydro stations on the upper Volga. Everything else arrived and departed on a railroad spur. Really, it was only salt, sulphur and coal in, viscose out. That was the particular simplicity of viscose production from the planner’s point of view. None of the more complex chemical inputs the process required – sulphuric acid, lye, carbon disulphide – could easily be transported in bulk. They all had to be manufactured on the spot, at the plant itself; which meant that, to the remote and abstracting eye of someone chiefly concerned with supply chains, a viscose plant could be treated as robust. It was relatively insensitive to disruption. It could be supplied from multiple sources. It was not a hostage to problems elsewhere. Feed it its raw materials, and it chugged along, an economic black box, busly turning trees into sweaters and cellophane and high-strength cord for car tyres. This always struck Maksim Maksimovich as a very obliging way for a physical process to work – and charmingly close to the political textbooks too. Trees into sweaters! Brute matter uplifted to serve human purposes! What could be more dialectical? Who knows, perhaps this thought had figured in Mr K.’s decision that the citizens of his radiant future should, mainly, be wearing viscose and polyester. Yes, a viscose plant was an activist. It woke nature from its idle sleep and set it to work. Unfortunately, it also created a mighty run-off of lignins and poisonous sulphide compounds, but Solovets was a good long way from anywhere else.
Yet somehow Solkemfib had contrived to fumble. The week before last, according to the report in front of him, a piece of heavy earth-moving equipment had been left overnight on a hilltop beside the plant where construction was due to begin. Sometime in the small hours, the clutch had slipped. The behemoth rolled downhill, gathering speed as it jolted over tree stumps, until by the time it reached the bottom it had acquired the momentum of a wrecking ball at full swing. It rolled straight through the thin brick wall of Solkemfib’s No. 2 Stretching and Spinning Shop and crashed into the delicate machinery for stretching the fresh viscose filament as it emerged from spin baths of sulphuric acid. Since the line was running at the time, the collision caused considerable spillage of acid, and it was some time before workers were able to separate the wreckage. At this point it became clear that, between the impact and the spill, the stretching machine was beyond the reach of even the most ingenious repair. The plant’s mechanical engineer had submitted a list of the crushed and damaged parts. Inspectors from the sovnarkhoz confirmed that the machine was, indeed, a write-off. Local police investigating the accident, with the help of the same Solkemfib engineer, had found that the brakes and clutch had been properly set when the earth-mover was parked. A flaw in its hydraulic system was to blame.
Enterprise-level difficulties were supposed to be dealt with at the sovnarkhoz, and the stage for bargaining over them was definitively over for this year. But the sovnarkhoz had behaved quite correctly in passing this particular problem straight on up. It had the potential to cause serious disruption. Without the stretching machine, the whole No. 2 line at Solovets was out of action. Half the capacity of the plant had suddenly become unavailable; and it was the half that produced tyre cord, not the half that turned out viscose fibre for clothing. Without Solkemfib’s contribution of tyre cord, the tyre cord balance would sink into deficit on the supply side; and that could have a knock-on effect on the output of tyres; and that in turn could cause a fall in the output of cars and trucks and buses; and so on, and so on, the original shortfall leaping from commodity to commodity, from folder to folder, propagating itself around the room and therefore around the economy, branching and multiplying and creating chaos. So many of the strategic commodities were themselves inputs in the production of other strategic commodities that a big change in the availability of one could, in theory, ripple on undamped, or perhaps even amplified, through areas of the plan utterly removed from the starting point, seeding all the balances it passed through with incompatibilities that would themselves require further disruptive waves of revision to deal with. In theory – Maksim Maksimovich had seen the mathematical demonstrations – you would need to revise all the balances a minimum of six times over, and a maximum of thirteen times, to make them consistent with one another again, and if all 373 commodities were evenly interconnected, each iteration would require 373 x 373, or 139,129 separate calculans. The academic would-be reformers of the economy made much play with this. It was the basis for Emil Shaidullin’s entertaining prediction that, by 1980, the entire population would have to work full-time on balancing the plan.
But here, thought Maksim Maksimovich, was precisely where the reformers showed their naivety. They missed the point entirely of the planner’s task; which was not to adjust passively to disrupting developments, but to take active steps to limit their effect. The art of the planner was to lead away a ripple of change through the balances in such a direction that it died down, with the minimum of consequences, in the minimum number of steps. Gosplan did not deal with alterations in the plan by repeatedly revising all 373 balances, or anything like it. And nor was he going to chase the consequences of a shortfall of tyre cord meekly through balance after balance. He would cut off the forward-running shortage before it could seriously affect tyre production, let alone run on into the balance for vehicles. Tyre cord could be made of other things than viscose, and quick orders for the substitutes would make up part of the gap. The rest he would fill by last-minute increases to the tyre-cord target for all the other viscose producers. They would groan and strain, but they would probably manage to cover most of the increase, and he could sweeten the situation for them by generosity with viscose’s handily generic raw materials; also, perhaps, with extra dollops of cash, under some suitable heading, to make up for the fulfilment bonuses those plants would probably lose. Alas, the effect of moves like these was always to tighten the plan a notch or two further than anyone had originally intended. It would be pushed (everywhere, as other colleagues did what he was doing) that bit more towards a state where its goals could only just barely be achieved. Thus it would be more vulnerable to bad luck, and even more susceptible to proliferating gridlock should anything else go wrong. But the alternative was the incoherent wonderland of the mathematicians.
First, though, he had to know just how big the shortfall of tyre cord was going to be. It depended, of course, on how long the No. 2 line at Solovets stayed down; which in turn depended very much on what he, Maksim Maksimovich, now decided to do about it. Again, not at all a mathematical problem. He had been sent numbers, but his task was to descry, through them, the human situation behind. What was going on at Solovets? The accident made him instinctively suspicious. He counted the pieces of bad luck required for it to have happened. Earth-mover parked just so; fault in the hydraulics; treeless path down the hillside; entry point through the wall exactly beside the machine; acid spill. Five separate unlikelihoods all lined up in a row, one after the other. Very neat. In the old days, heads would have rolled over this on principle. It would have been labelled as sabotage just to close the books on it. The organs of security would swiftly have uncovered a conspiracy of wreckers, vilely determined to cheat the people of their rightful viscose. But the policy now was not to compound the effects of an accident by losing, in addition, the expertise of skilled workers over it. After all, accidents did happen. It was not a very satisfactory objection to an event that it was unlikely, for in the nature of probability, unlikely things took place all the time. And then, to set ag
ainst his suspicions, there was the one great counteracting factor that he could not for the life of him see what motive there could be for deliberately doing such a thing. The risk would be enormous, even now. You would have to be desperate. A personal grudge of some kind, a disaffected individual? Hard to believe that they could have covered their tracks so well. Management? Hard to see what cause the management at Solkemfib would have for desperation. He slid the releva page in front of him. Some teething troubles with the tyre-cord line last year, and as a result a mix of output slightly awry from what the plan had called for, with a good gross output but too much ordinary yarn in it. But this year, solid progress: tyre cord output 2% above target in the first quarter, 3% in the second quarter, smack in the golden zone of plan overfulfilment which brought bonuses raining down. You wouldn’t imperil that voluntarily.
Mokhov sighed. The gorgon, whose hair was rinsed the red of old blood, smiled at him. He kicked off gracefully from the table and his wheeled chair flew backwards across the room towards the rank of cabinets where the balances for 133 types of machinery were kept. The replacement stretching machine Solkemfib was requesting, urgently backed up by the sovnarkhoz, was itself a strategic commodity. He riffled through a drawer and found it: the PNSh-180-14S continuous-action engine for viscose, exclusively produced in Sverdlovsk by a division of Uralmash, the giant of machine-building enterprises. Recent technological upgrade. The folder was thin, which suggested that this balance had hardly been altered at all. He was not surprised. With just one manufacturer, and a take-up determined by the rate new viscose plants opened, there would not be much volatility in the call for a PNSh-180-14S, unless something like this happened. But that might make it all the worse to introduce an alteration now. A viscose stretching-machine was not some handy lathe-sized object, three metres by two. It was a metal porcupine the width of a subway hall. Building one was a sizeable commitment of resources in itself, and for that matter a major capital cost too. He picked out the folder and propelled himself across the floor again, with paddling motions of his shining black shoes.
Ah yes: a total production of only seventeen machines for the whole USSR, and no revisions paperclipped to the original balance. The page in front of him was simplicity itself compared to some balances. On the left, under ‘SOURCES’, it gave production as 17, imports as nil, suppliers’ stocks as nil. On the right, on the ‘DISTRIBUTION’ side, it listed the plants receiving the machines, in order of their sovnarkhoz. Nil distribution for export, nil for suppliers’ stocks, nil for the special reserve of the Council of Ministers. Nil nil nil. Crisply pencilled words and numbers inside the smudgy boxes of the form; departmental authorisation code and operator’s initials down at the bottom. Maksim Maksimovich hesitated. If he added one more to the production side, he would be condemning the Uralmash division in question to squeeze out the equivalent of a 6% output boost, on top of the agreed growth for next year, just by that act. It would certainly stress their operations and disarrange their timetable for the year. But the alternative would be to lose one of the seventeen machines already on order, and with it a chunk of the longer-term output growth in viscose he needed to satisfy the targets of the Seven-Year Plan. He was supposed to get chemical-fibre production up to four hundred thousand tonnes per annum by 1965.
He could have wished that Solkemfib’s No. 1 line had broken down instead. True, clothing manufacturers were waiting for the ordinary yarn it made, but compared to the tire plants they were a distinctly low priority; because, one single step beyond them, you arrived at the consumer, and the consumer was an end-point of the system, and therefore a natural sink for shortages. All that consumers did with viscose was to wear it. No one stood beyond them in the chain, so there were no consequences whatsoever for inconveniencing them, no farther balances to consider. You could inconvenience the consumer with impunity.
He cast himself off once more, shuttling sidewaysto the central desk. The gorgon gave him a blank balance form, fresh from the mimeograph, and he signed for it. Then he sailed back to where the papers were spread out. He poised his pencil. He would, he decided, do a little something to keep Solkemfib’s minds on the job, by tautening their coal and salt and sulphur supplies a tad. Bad luck might spring from carelessness, and should be discouraged. A reminder of plan discipline would do no harm. But they would have their PNSh-180-14S, and so would all of his enterprises that were already expecting one. Uralmash could be soothed some other way. In the box next to the word ‘production’ on the left-hand side of the new page, he wrote firmly, ‘18’. There; there was the budget of pain shared out, and shared out more or less evenly, since there must be a budget of pain.
Maksim Maksimovich Mokhov was a very kind man.
Notes – IV.1 The Method of Balances, 1963
1 Maksim Maksimovich Mokhov was a very kind man: but an entirely fictional one. Deputy Director of the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods was a real job, but the relationship I have suggested between professional-bureaucrat deputies and political-appointee sector directors is conjectural, and I have no knowledge of anyone being called up from the middle ranks to serve in a ‘kitchen cabinet’ for the Minister, as Mokhov does here. He is acting in this book as a confabulated embodiment of the institution. His tone of voice draws on the exasperated Gosplan witness in Ellman and VolodyaKontorovich, eds, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, and on the Gosplan official interviewed in Adam Curtis’s TV documentary ‘The Engineers’ Plot’, programme 1 of Pandora’s Box, BBC TV 1992; but also, and especially on his return in part V chapter 2, on Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. There’s also useful material on official attitudes (at different levels) to property, in Hachten, Property Relations.
2 When he handed out the traditional bouquets on Women’s Day: International Women’s Day was celebrated (and still is in present-day Russia) on 8 March, with this flower-giving tradition by men as a kind of courtly grave-marker for the early Soviet Union’s feminism.
3 For chemicals were a vital sector at present: for the rapid build-up of the chemical industry, see Theodore Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
4 ‘Suppressed inflation’ or a ‘permanent sellers’ market’: two linked phenomena, though the first chiefly affected the Soviet Union’s perpetually low-priority consumer sector, and the second was true of the cherished industrial sector too. The USSR had ‘suppressed inflation’ in the sense that it had the classic conditions for runaway inflation in a market economy, with far too much money chasing far too few goods to buy – but insisted on fixed prices for the scarce goods, thus pushing competition for them into non-money forms. The ‘permanent seller’s market’ was the situation in which both individual consumers, and more significantly whole enterprises, were so desperate to be able to buy that they would accept whatever the seller gave them, almost irrespective of quality or convenience.
5 Across the herringbone parquet of the eighteenth floor: my visual sense of the Gosplan building comes from Curtis, ‘The Engineer’s Plot’, but I have no real information about its internal geography.
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