Breaking It Up

With its usual indifference to audience ratings, Radio Moscow doggedly droned forth the entire report, all 20,000 tedious words of it. Then, day after day, while Pravda, Trud and Izvestia printed interminable pages of commentary, Agitprop specialists fanned out across Russia to whip up support among the workers. Russia's bosses were conditioning their subjects to Nikita Khrushchev's plan for the most radical shake-up of Russian industrial organization since the early days of the Soviet regime.

Soviet industry is still far from having the capacity or complexity of U.S. industry, but it is big enough (more than 200,000 state enterprises, 100,000 more abuilding) to cause Western economists to wonder how it can all be managed from the Kremlin. The truth, revealed blunt Nikita Khrushchev, is that it has long been badly managed. In their desperate attempts to keep on top of the situation, the Moscow bureaucrats have created more than 30 industrial ministries--one for each major field of production. "Things have come to the point," grumped the First Party Secretary, "where the construction of eight apartment houses in Kuzbasskaya Street in Sverdlovsk has been entrusted to building organizations of seven different ministries and departments."

Local Needs. The remedy for these ills was plain to any capitalist, but difficult for any Communist: to develop more local and individual initiative. Khrushchev proposed to abolish the centralized industrial ministries and carve Russia up into a number of "economic regions" (not necessarily identical with the 15 Soviet republics). Each would have its own regional council to manage all state enterprises and do the region's economic planning.

Over the regional councils Khrushchev proposed a souped-up State Planning Commission empowered to "correct" the regional councils from such deviations as paying too much attention to "the satisfaction of local needs."

Bluebells & Bureaucrats. Khrushchev was cockily sure that abolition of the industrial ministries would free tens of thousands of executives and engineers for active managerial jobs. But they all have a reluctance to leave the bright lights of Moscow. And the regional councils, as the London Times noted, "are to be given so much planning and liaison work to do that bureaucrats will grow like bluebells."

On the surface the plan marks a major rebuff for 52-year-old Mikhail Pervukhin, who only three months ago was appointed the U.S.S.R.'s chief economic planner. (Khrushchev's report failed to mention Pervukhin's name, but urged the abolition of his job.) As for Khrushchev himself, his position in the Soviet hierarchy, though dented by Hungary and Poland, seemed to be changing more and more from first among equals to just plain first.

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