Consumers' Budget

It took just 30 seconds for the Supreme Soviet, Russia's moot parliament, to dispose of the absent Deputy for the Moscow district of Kalinin. In two swift, silent shows of 1,400 hands, without a single dissent or abstention, the assemblage in the Kremlin ratified Nikita Khrushchev's dismissal by the party Presidium last October as First Party Secretary and Premier. But except for a change in style, the Khrushchev spirit was very much present.

More Fanfare. His successor as Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, delivered the state-of-the-Soviet-Union speech in 80 minutes, unrelieved by Khrushchevian corn pone, invective or grandiloquence.

He was brisk, businesslike, and in his remarks on foreign affairs, disappointingly predictable to Westerners looking for new departures under the new regime. He denounced the U.S. and Belgium for "intervention" in the Congo, promised Soviet aid in the event of "imperialist aggression" against North Viet Nam and Cuba. If the Western allies pressed ahead with MLF, he warned, the Warsaw Pact nations would be forced to "consult" on countermeasures. He gave the United Nations a passing plug as a valuable "international forum," but failed to mention whether the Kremlin intended to pay its U. N. bills.

Peaceful coexistence, Kosygin insisted, continues to be the policy of the Soviet Union. To prove it, he said, the Soviet Union plans to reduce its 1965 military budget by $555 million--from this year's $14.6 billion to $14.1 billion.

This was being done, claimed Kosygin, because the Kremlin had been told by Washington that the U.S. military budget for next year was being cut too.

If there had been an informal deal between the U.S. and Russia, Washington denied it. The Soviet defense cuts did suggest that Russia's new regime is not particularly beholden to the military, but just how real the cutbacks will prove to be remains to be seen. A year ago, when Khrushchev reduced military spending with great fanfare, he conveniently raised outlays on "science" by precisely the same amount--and government-sponsored science these days usually means rocketry.

More Capital. Kosygin's chief news tor the Russian people came in his presentation of a relatively sensible-sounding 1965 budget. It suggested that the new regime wants to go on with "goulash Communism"--but more efficiently, ,more evenhandedly and less flamboyantly than Khrushchev.

Kosygin announced increased emphasis on the production of consumer goods and construction of apartments. While the "metal eaters" of the steel industry are not to be stomped on as Khrushchev tried to do, metallurgy will get a smaller slice of capital outlays than consumer goods or food. The chemical industry is due for a sizable share of capital, though it will not switch to making plastics for consumers with the abandon visualized by Khrushchev. Heavy industry in general, said Kosygin, will have to move into some consumer lines such as "refrigerators, washing machines and television sets."

The new leaders also intend to follow Khrushchev by continuing the move toward a more market-oriented economy, letting consumer demand rather than a bureaucrat's plan dictate product design and quantity. By next year, Kosygin reported, one-third of all consumer-goods plants will make the changeover. Some day the Russians may even be able to afford to be consumers: Kosygin got his loudest applause when he unveiled a round of wage increases for next month.

More Mistakes. The debate following Kosygin's presentation was astonishingly frank. One delegate, to the manifest surprise of the leadership, even mentioned Khrushchev by name, accusing him of the mistake of not facing facts but "presenting the desired as reality" --otherwise known as wishful thinking. He then had the audacity to accuse Kosygin's budget of perpetuating some of the same "upsetting mistakes." Georgy Popov, Leningrad party boss, went even further and came flat out against the new regime's plan to return the control of heavy industry to Moscow direction from the local authority where Khrushchev had remanded it.

All this free speech was unprecedented in Supreme Soviet debates, and Kosygin himself seemed carried away, admitting that some of the criticism was valid. "Mistakes are made," he confessed, adding with masterful and no doubt unintentional understatement: "The structure of the apparatus is sometimes cumbersome."

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