Indecision at the Top

According to party statutes, no more than four years are supposed to elapse between congresses of the Communist Party. The 23rd Party Congress was held in March 1966, but nobody was surprised that the 24th did not meet on time, for last March the whole country was getting ready for the numbing celebrations of Lenin's centennial. Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev kept assuring people that the congress would be convened this year. Last week, however, Brezhnev summoned the Central Committee for its second plenary session in a fortnight to announce that the 24th Party Congress would not meet until March 1971, a full year behind schedule.

There was nothing unprecedented about the delay. Joseph Stalin once let 13 turbulent years go by between congresses. Nonetheless, the fact that Brezhnev had announced only eleven days earlier that the congress would meet this year provoked a flurry of speculation. Kremlinologists in Moscow and other capitals, the more realistic of whom rate themselves and their confreres on their varying degrees of ignorance, produced several hypotheses:

> Planners and politicians have been unable to agree on the basic outlines of the 1971-75 Five-Year Plan, which is to be introduced at the 24th Congress. Accordingly, they have demanded more time to resolve disputes about the allocation of scarce resources among the many claimants in industry, agriculture, science and the military. Particularly difficult, according to Moscow observers, are decisions on allocating resources to scientific research and consumer goods.

< The leadership is still wrestling with an even more fundamental economic problem. Should economic stagnation be attacked by reapplying the all but forgotten liberal "Liberman reforms" introduced by Premier Aleksei Kosygin in 1965 and soon quietly abandoned by the conservative Brezhnev? Those reforms called for decentralization, increased authority for factory and regional managers, and careful use of market mechanisms. Or should the Kremlin move in the opposite direction by imposing even stricter discipline and central control?

> Some top-level changes are expected by the next congress, but an argument is still raging over who should move up. In the center of this speculation is Aleksei Kosygin. Only last week, along with President Nikolai Podgorny, he was unanimously re-elected by the rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet. Nonetheless, at 66 Kosygin has neither the robust health nor the untempered power hunger of some of his colleagues, and some Western experts believe he would like to step down at the 24th Congress.

> The leadership is currently deep in delicate and audacious manipulations in the field of foreign relations. There are the negotiations, due to resume in Moscow next week, with the West German government on a mutual renunciation-of-force treaty, which could lead to the long-overdue stabilization of Europe. There are the SALT talks with the U.S., from which any sort of agreement could drastically affect the domestic funds available. There is the attempt to order Moscow's relations with Peking.

Finally, there is Moscow's gambit in the Middle East, which could lead either to enormous Soviet influence in an area coveted by Russian leaders since Peter the Great or to a hair-raising crisis. Since all these operations are currently "going critical," the Kremlin's leaders want to avoid having to submit a progress report for a while.

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