And Then There Was One

"Slava, slava [glory, glory]," echoed the cheers in Moscow's cavernous Palace of Congresses last week. The words ironically hark back to an anthem of another day that celebrated the power of the czars. As 4,963 Communist Party delegates rose in a standing ovation, General Secretary Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, 64, clasped his hands together like a prizefighter. The 24th Soviet Party Congress was nearly over, and the outpouring of praise for Brezhnev was by all odds the closest that the Soviet Union has come to the adulation of a single ruler since the collective leadership overthrew Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. In more practical terms of power, Brezhnev also emerged with a tighter hold on the levers of Soviet authority. As the Congress went through the motions of electing a new Central Committee and Politburo, they chose mainly Brezhnev men.

Unkind Cut. By contrast, Premier Aleksei Kosygin, who shared equal glory with Brezhnev at the last Party Congress in 1966, was cast in a lesser light, although he remains in a powerful position. In the new order of precedence in the Politburo, which was expanded by four members to 15, Kosygin dropped to No. 3, after aging President Nikolai Podgorny, 68, whose post is largely ceremonial. In an unkind cut for any politician, Kosygin's three-hour speech was carried only in edited excerpts on radio and television. Worse still, as he was speaking, Soviet TV was carrying a rebroadcast of Brezhnev's remarks from the day before.

It also fell to Kosygin to fill in the disillusioning details of the ninth Five-Year Plan, which Brezhnev had expounded in glowing generalities at the start of the Congress. Where Brezhnev, for instance, had announced a grandiose family-allowance plan for everyone earning less than $55 a month--which means one-sixth of the population--Kosygin brought the glummer news that the plan would not take effect until 1974. Even then, the value of free medical care and education would be added in calculating income. That would considerably reduce the number of Soviet citizens who stand to benefit.

"Metal Eaters." Similarly, Kosygin's dry statistics stripped much of the gloss from Brezhnev's promise that Russian consumer needs would be "more fully met." It will take until 1975 before 64% of Soviet families have refrigerators (compared with 32% today) and 72% have television sets and washing machines. That would be a considerable improvement, even if all goes according to plan--which has not happened in the past. But it still means that four years from now, more than a quarter of all families will still be without such appliances.

Moreover, the vaunted shift of production and resources to consumer goods, proclaimed by Brezhnev, turned out to be more apparent than real. Kosygin's figures revealed that such production is to increase between 44% and 48% over the next five years. But at the same time, the production of heavy industry--the "metal eaters," as Khrushchev used to say--will rise by almost the same amount. A considerable part of heavy-industry output goes to a defense establishment, which is roughly the same size as America's. Since the Soviet gross national product is only half as large as that of the U.S., the burden of defense is twice as great.

Elusive Goal. The real catch, however, came in Kosygin's disclosure that 95% of the increase in consumer-goods output is expected to come from "increased and more efficient labor production." Labor productivity, which currently averages only half that of U.S. workers, has always been an elusive goal for the Soviet economic planners. At the 1966 Congress, Brezhnev sought to solve the problem by demanding harder work, better discipline and an end to drunkenness. Now the Soviet rulers have dropped such exhortation in favor of incentives--the promise of more consumer goods. But the new incentives, unaccompanied by economic reform, are no more likely to increase productivity than Brezhnev's previous strictures.

The low level of Soviet output is due largely to an overcentralized and hugely inefficient planning system. The most promising Soviet reforms to date were the so-called Libermann reforms of the mid-1960s in which profit and market forces were allowed to play a role in judging the performance of industrial enterprises. At the time, Kosygin endorsed the reforms. In his speech last week, he pronounced the end of such "erroneous conceptions that substitute market regulation for the guiding role of state centralized planning."

Packed Politburo. In essence, the 24th Congress endorsed the leadership's present policies, which represented primarily a triumph of the status quo, or of "monolithic unity," as Pravda put it. It empowered Brezhnev to "cleanse" the party by expelling members, a device that would enable him to favor his backers. All present Politburo members retained their seats, but their order of seniority was changed, except for Brezhnev and Party Ideologue Mikhail Suslov, who remained No. 4. Dmitry Poliansky (TIME cover, March 29) rose from ninth to eighth position behind Kirill Mazurov, who advanced one step to No. 7. Gennady Voronov, Premier of the Russian Republic, dropped from fifth to tenth place. Aleksandr Shelepin, former head of the KGB secret police, slipped from the seventh to the eleventh spot, a clear-cut downgrading for a man who used to be one of the most powerful individuals in the Soviet Union.

The new men elected to an enlarged Politburo were Viktor Grishin, 57, Moscow party chief; Dinmukhamed Kunayev, 59, Kazakhstan party chief; Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 53, chairman of the council of ministers of the Ukraine, and Fedor Kulakov, 53, a party secretary and specialist in agriculture. All are Brezhnev proteges. By packing the Politburo, just as Stalin did in 1952, Brezhnev henceforth will be able to dominate it more easily. The collective leadership, which last year had begun to show signs of strain, appeared to be yielding ground to Brezhnev's drive toward undisputed preeminence.

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