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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, FEBRUARY 24, 1984
During 15 months at the top, Andropov made no more than a partial
stab at confronting the problem.... Do-nothing bureaucrats, tra
dition-bound party officials and footdragging managers proved
stronger than the threat of coercion.
From a Western per
spective, one basic contradiction about the Soviet economy stands
out:
The U.S.S.R. outproduces the U.S. in steel, coal, natural
gas and oil.
Soviet shipyards and continuous-steel-casting
plants are first-rate. Siberian hydroelectric power stations are
worldclass. Yet the Kremlin, 38 years after the end of World War
II, still cannot provide enough food and consumer goods to meet
the needs of the Soviet people.
Instead, for four consecutive
peacetime decades, industry has been geared to serv'Ing the needs
of the military....
Today, the peasants' private plots total only
3 percent of
Russia's arable land. Yet these tin [ strips, usually less than 2
acres each, produce 60 percent £_ the nation's potatoes and
honey, 40 percent of its fruit and� and 30 percent of its
meat, vegetables and milk.
About
15 to 20 percent of the
nation's food is sold1n legally sanctioned private markets.
Most household repairs are done by moonlighters. Even getting a
spa�e part of a car is dependent on blat--influence....
Many elements built into Soviet society underpin this inertia.
For instance, the system of promotion from low to medium to top
level jobs in the Communist Party rests almost totally on loyalty
and trustworthiness to the party, not on competence.... New ideas
that
might
run
counter
to
existing
practices
find
little
favor....
This dread of change is making itself felt most vividly in
Russian factories.
The managers know that they will be blamed if
something goes wrong when new equipment or procedures are intro
duced, so they shy away from innovation. Supervisors think first
about protecting themselves and only second about improving per
formance.
Careers revolve around sacrosanct production quotas
decided years in advance by bureaucrats in far-distant Moscow.
Whether goods produced are needed seems to be of secondary
concern.
On the shop floor, indifference takes another form--alcoholism.
Each year, some 40,000 people die from alcohol poisoning in the
Soviet Union, compared with 19,000 in the United States. Experts
say alcohol abuse almost certainly is responsible for the decline
i� male life expectancy in� u.s-:S.R. from 66 to 62.
It also
lies beh�chronic absenteeism and the h°'Tgn"aTvorce rate..._
Another brake on reform comes from Marxist ideology.
Some
Communist-ruled nations--Hungary is an example--experiment with
such capitalist ideas as profits and private enterprise. But not
the U.S.S.R.
Instead, its leaders regard orthodoxy as a prime
virtue.
While the Soviet economy remains on hold, so do the so-called "Young Turks"
in the hierarchy, many of them trained technocrats who would like to
genuinely modernize the economy. These men have to bide their time, all the