The Washington Post has carried a report to the effect that a study has been prepared for the top Soviet leadership calling for a fundamental restructuring of the Soviet economy and arguing that its centralized management can no longer ensure the “full and effective use of the society’s intellectual and labour resources”. According to the report, only 70 numbered copies of the document have been printed. Apparently, the Post’s correspondent in Moscow has had access to a copy. Indeed, the quotations in the report leave little room for doubt that he has either seen the study or been told of it by someone who is in possession of it. Going by the reported version, the document does not concern itself with specific difficulties the Soviet economy faces. Its central thesis is that the system itself is holding up progress. The Soviet economy has, it contends, “passed the point where it is possible to regulate it effectively from a single centre”.
It describes as dated or irrelevant the ideological assumption that economic changes can be carried out “without social conflict” (the Brezhnev view) and holds that “a fundamental restructuring of the economic system touches significantly on the interests of many social groups….” That is not all. The study even argues that while some officials belonging to the Soviet communist party fear reforms because of their lack of education; the others are afraid that they will lose their lucrative jobs. The people in the first group are apprehensive that they may not measure up to the new demands, though a decentralization of the system would add to their powers.
The study speaks of the gulf between the state planning commission in Moscow and individual enterprises, and the failure of a vast array of intermediate institutions, ministries, commissions and inspection teams to bridge it. While the system spawns a vast non-productive bureaucracy, it inhibits productivity and it invariably fails to “take into account concrete conditions in various regions or individual enterprises”. Implicit in all this obviously is an indictment of the system Stalin built and Mr. Brezhnev kept going. But this inference is not left to the imagination of those who are participating in the current debate in Moscow. The study says explicitly, “that was a social system in which the people were consistently regarded as ‘screws’ in the economic mechanism and they behaved almost as obediently”. Since then the system has been “corrected, renewed and improved but it was not once subjected to a qualitative restructuring to reflect fundamental changes”. This criticism is familiar but by and large it has come from western critics of the Soviet system. Soviet reformers have been content with criticizing the detailed working of the system. More pertinently, it leaves little room for doubt that Mr. Andropov, like Mr. Deng Xiaoping in China, is wanting to introduce genuinely radical reforms in the system. But it remains to be seen whether he will be able to succeed, indeed whether he will not find opposition from the entrenched state and party bureaucracy too strong to overcome. This bureaucracy got rid of Mr. Khrushchev and it may do the same to Mr. Andropov. The bureaucracy in communist countries is the biggest vested interest anywhere in the world.