Coddling the Consumer

The man from Moscow's Literary Gazette was putting some questions to an official of the State Planning Commission. Russia's 1971-75 five-year plan had just been made public, and because it called for a higher growth rate in consumer goods than in heavy industry for the first time in Soviet history, the reporter was anxious to find out what it meant. "Will the shelves be bursting with goods?" asked the newsman. The commission's deputy chairman, Nikolai Mirotvortsev, began rattling off a long list of items that would be available by 1975, though they have been in short supply in the past. In a highly unusual display of independence, the reporter interrupted. "In the past," he reminded the official, "people frequently had no clothes or shoes."

Under the new plan, which will be rubber-stamped in April by the 24th Party Congress, the consumer will get more--but not all that much more. The consumer-oriented industries are scheduled to expand at only a fractionally higher rate than the heavy industries. Furthermore, heavy industry will continue to absorb by far the largest share of the Soviet Union's $542 billion investment for the 1971-75 period while agriculture will receive 10% and the light and consumer industries about 15%.

The principal authors of the plan were Communist Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev, who personally signed the report in a departure from tradition as one more demonstration of his paramountcy within the Politburo, and Premier Aleksei Kosygin. Among the goals for 1975:

> An increase of up to 46% in overall industrial output, with steel up about 25% to a maximum of 150 million tons (projected 1971 U.S. production: 140.5 million tons).

> A rise of as much as 22% in agricultural production, a figure so modest that the Soviet Union will probably still be suffering shortages of meats, fruits and vegetables.

> An increase of 250% in auto output, to 1.2 million cars, which assumes that the trouble-plagued Fiat-built plant at Togliatti will have reached full production.

> A rise of 30% in per capita earnings. Since the average Soviet monthly wage is only $134, the modest increase probably indicates an official desire to hold down buying power as long as consumer items remain scarce.

Moving Backward. The Soviets have seldom lived up to their goals. During the 1966-70 plan there were shortfalls of about 10% in output of steel, electricity, gas and coal. The Soviets missed by wider margins their targets for television sets, refrigerators and wearing apparel.

To meet the new goals, Moscow is counting on greatly increased productivity by the Russian worker, who now turns out only 40% as much as his U.S. counterpart. The Soviets have just set up in Moscow an Institute of Business Management, which will train senior Soviet officials in modern business methods.

While many Eastern European countries are gradually giving managers more power and encouraging personal initiative, the Soviet Union appears to be moving in the opposite direction. One important indication is a new book by Soviet Economist Yevsei Liberman, whose earlier espousal of the profit motive and decentralized industrial management caused some experimentation with economic reform in the early 1960s. Liberman has now decided that free markets cannot function within a Communist society and are in fact "anti-Leninist."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.