Purposeful Budgetry

The Soviet Union is unsurpassed in the art of defense budgetry. The point of the game is not so much to lay out actual fiscal allocations as to demonstrate to outsiders the latest Kremlin international posture. Last week 1,500 delegates to the Supreme Soviet, Russia's rubber-stamp Parliament, met in the Great Kremlin Palace to approve the 1970 budget, and as usual, defense spending attracted the most attention. According to the official figures, the Soviet arms budget will rise only 1% to 17.8 billion rubles ($19.6 billion). The 1970 outlay will account for only 12.4% of the total $159 billion budget--the lowest share, the Soviets pointed out, in more than a decade.

The new, low-profile military figures neatly match the Kremlin's current diplomatic stance of a powerful but benign peacemaker. Yet there is far more to Soviet arms spending than appears in the budget. Funds for H-bombs and advanced weapons like multiple-warhead missiles are customarily tucked into budgets for "medium industry" and "scientific research." Additional allocations may well not be listed at all. Western analysts reckon that the true Soviet defense bill will come to about $60 billion in U.S. terms, or just about what the Pentagon spends now, excluding Viet Nam costs. Some speculate that, because of tension with China, the Soviets are, in fact, nudging ahead of the U.S. in defense spending as American outlays decline. In any case, judging from the way officials boasted at the Supreme Soviet about more cost-effective defense management techniques and benefits from increased use of computers, it seems clear that the Kremlin is counting on much more rumble per ruble next year.

High-level Whispers. The Soviet arms budget is, however, undeniably under pressure, because the Soviet civilian economy has been badly shortchanged as a result of Russia's costly military intervention in Czechoslovakia and the buildup along the Chinese border. Moscow urgently needs to increase its investment in agriculture, which suffered heavily this year as severe weather snapped a string of good harvests. Western experts scoff that some of the 160 million-ton grain crop the Soviets are claiming to harvest "must still be under the snow."

While Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev whispered in the gallery behind the rostrum, Chief Soviet Planner Nikolai Baibakov manfully defended the progress of the current 1965-70 five-year plan. He conceded that next year there would be only a modest wage increase of 3% for factory and office workers and 4.6% for collective farmers. Nevertheless, Baibakov boasted that in comparison with 15 years ago, "every 100 families in 1970 will have 71 radios as against 61, 52 washing machines as against 21, and 32 refrigerators instead of only eleven." His list, however, could not mask the fact that progress in the crucial area of consumer goods has been disappointing; shortages persist not only in autos, refrigerators and small appliances, but also in even such items as table crockery and knives and forks. Soviet planners have also been unable to correct chronic shortfalls in such basic industrial items as steel, coal, fertilizers, cement, paper and electric power.

This year Soviet industrial production did manage to meet its goal of 7% growth, which had already been marked down from an earlier target of 7.3%. Next year the growth goal has been set at a relatively low 6.3%. Why the unaccustomed modesty? Lenin's centennial comes up in 1970, and naturally there would be no better way for Soviet factories to honor the Founder than to exceed their quotas.

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