Trying Again

Andropov wants reform, slowly

Since taking over Leonid Brezhnev's job last November, Soviet Communist Party Leader Yuri Andropov has talked a good deal about getting the Soviet Union's sluggish economy moving. At the beginning of the year he ordered police to round up "slackers," who were at the movies or at public baths when they should have been at work. He made a much publicized visit to a Moscow factory in which he told workers that "without discipline we cannot advance quickly." But there have been few substantive actions to match Andropov's words. Last week the government and the Communist Party finally unveiled a cautious but experimental economic reform program.

The announcement, published in Pravda, might come as good news to Soviet factory managers who complain that they are hamstrung by too many orders from Moscow. The new regulations, effective early next year, will apply only to five ministries that control transport and heavy-machinery plants, electrotechnical factories, and selected industries in the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania. But they will give local managers in these target factories a greater role in setting their own production goals. In an effort to halt the decline in exports of manufactured goods, which accounted for only about 13% of all 1982 exports, managers will also be expected to measure output more in terms of quality than quantity.

In addition, Soviet factory managers will have a greater say in giving bonuses and pay hikes to efficient workers and imaginative engineers. Reflecting a priority that Andropov has repeatedly stressed, they will be able to invest more funds in new technology. In a speech to the Central Committee last month, the Soviet leader pointedly criticized plant officials who were reluctant to modernize machinery because they feared that it would cause them to miss their production quotas and force them to dismiss workers.

Although the new program will introduce some changes in the Soviet Union's rigidly centralized economy, it falls well short of the reforms that have made Hungary a model of efficiency by Communist standards. Nor does the policy break new ground when compared with Premier Alexei Kosygin's largely unsuccessful effort to decentralize Soviet industry in the 1960s. It might take years before the changes could be applied outside the factories that were singled out last week. Said a Western diplomat: "Andropov is gently approaching the tricky question of how to decentralize a state-run economy." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.