Power, Sovereignty & Success

Sovereignty is not a word often used in connection with a Soviet citizen. But First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev used it scornfully last week to describe the action of "Comrade Maximov," chairman of the Zhdanov Coke-Chemical works, who had built an 8 1/2-ft.-high slag-block wall 3,000 ft. long (cost: $50,000) to "defend his sovereignty" against the rival Azvostal factory. Although Russia's vast socialized industry works for one boss--the State--competition between ministries, divisions and plant managements is as intense and as predatory as anything to be found in the worst Marxist fantasies of the capitalist world.

Comrade Maximov was a horrible example in Khrushchev's cautious but crucial struggle with the technocrat commissars, who have been demanding less interference from boards of bureaucratic directors in Moscow, more autonomy in their plants and more control over the men under them, i.e., more freedom, which in Russia can only mean less bother with the party hacks. Recently Khrushchev produced a much publicized scheme for the decentralization of Soviet industry that seemed to answer the demands of the technocrat commissars (TIME, April 15).

The Unknown Man. On closer examination it was seen that the crafty Nikita had struck out 25 key industrial ministries in favor of control at regional levels, where his party hacks are strongest. Among those presumably to be abolished was the ministry of Khrushchev's predecessor and rival, the Ministry of Electric Power Stations, run by Georgy Malenkov, who set up and top-managed the Soviet industrial might in World War II and presumably speaks for the technocrat class.

It is a comment on the limits of Khrushchev's power (compared with Stalin's) that the issue was debated. In the Supreme Soviet four Deputies asked for changes. A government decree announced that Khrushchev's closest associate, Nikolai K. Baibakov, chairman of the Gosplan (top planning commission), had been demoted and replaced by Iosif I. Kuzmin, a complete unknown in the hierarchy of Soviet greats. Kuzmin was known only to have graduated from engine driver to boss of a Moscow experimental production plant. His modest history gave no hint of where he stood in the party power struggle except that he had been a functionary in the Moscow party organization (Malenkov's old stamping ground) and that his meteoric rise resembled that of many technocrat commissars. In his new job he ranks as one of the Soviet Union's six First Deputy Premiers (the others: Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Molotov, Pervukhin, Saburov).

Plan Revised. Last week, in a 3-hr.-40-min. speech to the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev admitted that his plan had not been all that it seemed. The "shrewdest" assessment had been made by a U.S. radio commentator, Nikita said, who had described the plan as "bringing centralism closer to the spot. Not a lesser but a greater degree of centralization." Stubborn Khrushchev did not give up on his plan but announced an important revision. Six of the ministries he had planned to dissolve would be kept; four others would be preserved by merger. The nature of the preserved and merged industries (e.g., aviation, shipbuilding, transport, probably nuclear development) and the fusion of the Ministry of General Machine Building into the Ministry of Defense, suggested that the army had held out against Khrushchev's plans. Among the ministries retained and enlarged: Malenkov's Ministry of Electric Power Stations.

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