Soviet Union: Something for Everyone

IN Moscow last week, a spotless, modernistic fish market opened on Komsomolsky Prospekt, enabling the average Soviet citizen to buy fresh caviar for the first time in recent years. Across from Moscow's city hall, an Italian-built, self-service supermarket went into operation, offering Bulgarian chickens, Spanish oranges, Moroccan sardines. Established shops blossomed with chinaware, meat grinders, bath towels and other goods that have long been scarce.

Muscovites loaded up while they could; they well knew the reason for the sudden abundance. It was obviously timed to impress Russian and foreign representatives in town for the long-delayed 24th Communist Party Congress. If the 20th Party Congress in 1956 was recorded as the Congress of Destalinization, the 24th may well become the Congress of the Consumer.

Main Event. Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny got the proceedings going by welcoming the 4,949 delegates and 101 foreign deputations to the handsome Palace of Congresses within the Kremlin's high walls. Then came the main event: for more than six hours, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev held the rostrum, and was interrupted by dutiful applause no fewer than 169 times. (Podgorny earned a round of "prolonged applause," too, when he declared a lunch break.)

At times, Brezhnev sounded like an American campaigner, offering something to everyone. As if in response to the consumer revolts that shook Poland last December, he promised every family a television set and refrigerator by the end of the new five-year plan in 1975. He decreed 5% wage increases for some 90 million salaried workers, premium pay for night work and a hike in pensions. He also introduced a family-assistance plan that will provide government subsidies for families whose monthly per capita income is less than 50 rubles ($55). Carefully avoiding words like poverty, he described such families as "underprovisioned." In all, the family program is likely to affect some 34 million Russians.

Despite the existence of so many underprovisioned Russians, there are also millions with money to spend and little to spend it on; savings deposits have increased from $20 billion five years ago to $50 billion today. Brezhnev stressed the importance of improving the productivity of Soviet workers to turn out the consumer goods* that are needed to soak up some of those idle rubles.

In the domestic area, Brezhnev pointedly praised the KGB (secret police) and called for greater vigilance against "bourgeois influences." He derided intellectuals who distort Soviet reality. All they deserve, he said, is "general scorn." Without naming names, Brezhnev upbraided Nobel Prizewinning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn for dwelling on "problems that have been irreversibly relegated to the past." Then, in an evenhanded manner, Brezhnev rapped ultraconservative Soviet writers who "attempt to whitewash the past" by praising Joseph Stalin. Among his other points:

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WARSAW PACT. Because the 24th Congress was the first since the 1968 Czechoslovak invasion, Brezhnev felt compelled to justify Soviet actions in quashing Prague's Springtime of Freedom. He insisted that the Czechoslovaks had called upon their Communist neighbors to help repulse imperialists and counterrevolutionaries. Should a similar situation arise elsewhere within the pact, he added, Soviet intervention would once more ensue. Later Czechoslovak Party Boss Gustav Husak slavishly thanked the Soviets for invading his country.

WEST EUROPE. Brezhnev reiterated the Soviet desire for a relaxation of tensions on the Continent--on Moscow's terms. He praised the cordial state of Franco-Soviet relations. But he warned that West Germany's failure so far to ratify the Bonn-Moscow renunciation-of-force treaty "would produce a fresh crisis of confidence over the Federal Republic's policies and would worsen the political climate in Europe."

THE U.S. Brezhnev complained that it has become more difficult to negotiate with the U.S. because of "the frequent zigzags in American foreign policy." Nonetheless, he declared that "we proceed from the viewpoint that it is possible to improve relations between the U.S. and U.S.S.R." The Soviet leader expressed the hope that the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks now under way in Vienna would succeed. His reasoning was economic: a halt in the missile race would "release considerable resources for constructive purposes."

CHINA. Soviet forbearance, claimed Brezhnev, has brought about a distinct improvement in Sino-Soviet relations. Trade has begun to increase between the two countries, and he expects a continued rise in the future. But subsequent Soviet speakers lambasted the Chinese --one described their brand of Communism as "repulsive"--creating a stir of disapproval among the North Korean, North Vietnamese, Japanese and Rumanian delegations.

MIDDLE EAST. Brezhnev reaffirmed Soviet backing for the Arabs and warned that Israel's 1967 victory may prove illusory. He urged the Israelis to accept a political settlement and said that Moscow was willing to join Britain, France and the U.S. in providing international guarantees to both Arabs and Israelis. It was not clear whether that meant the Soviet Union was willing to join the U.S. in the Middle East peace-keeping force suggested by Secretary of State William Rogers, though Moscow has hinted in the past that it might participate.

DISARMAMENT. Brezhnev dusted off several old Soviet propaganda ploys. There was some hope in the West, however, that his plea for a reduction of forces in Central Europe might lead to talks between NATO and the Warsaw Pact on mutual balanced force withdrawals. He also suggested a conference of the five nuclear powers (Britain, China, France, U.S. and U.S.S.R.) to discuss the total abolition of atomic weaponry--although both France and China sent regrets last time such a meeting was proposed in 1968.

On the same day that Brezhnev delivered his speech, the Soviet chief delegate to the 25-nation U.N. disarmament talks in Geneva unexpectedly adopted a hitherto rejected Western position on the outlawing of bacteriological warfare. For two years the Soviets insisted on lumping bans on bacteriological and chemical warfare together in one treaty. The U.S. and its NATO allies refused, because large chemical warfare arsenals are already in existence, which would require on-site inspection, a procedure that invariably is vetoed by the Soviets. The Soviet switch meant that a treaty barring the production and wartime use of germs and toxins might be ready for signing before year's end.

Kremlinologists in Munich described Brezhnev's speech as "relatively mild." In Washington, judgments ranged from "prudent militancy" to "controlled hostility." Most analysts agreed that what Brezhnev said reaffirmed his position as primus inter pares in what is still essentially a collective leadership.

Further clues to his position should become available this week when the congress "elects" a new Central Committee, which, in turn, will choose a new Politburo. The choices, of course, have already been made by the party leaders. The general assumption has been that few major shifts will take place. But Brezhnev dropped an intriguing hint in his speech that something dramatic and far reaching may be afoot. He noted that the Communist Party now has 14,455,321 card-carrying members --6% of the Soviet population--and that far too many of them, on all levels, are merely exploiting their positions. Accordingly, he said that for the first time in 17 years, there might be a "card exchange," the euphemism for weeding out the party membership. "You know, comrades," said Brezhnev, "none of us is entrusted with positions of authority in perpetuity."

* An interesting experiment in increasing efficiency and diligence is cited by Harvard Sovietologist Marshall Goldman in a forthcoming study for the Harvard Business Review: when a factory asked permission to increase its work force, Moscow told it to fire 1,000 people instead and to raise the salaries of those who remained. Productivity soon picked up, not so much because of the salary increases but because nobody else wanted to be sacked; getting another job might have meant moving to another town. According to Goldman, the experiment has spread to some 100 factories.

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