Soviet Union the Reformers Lead the Way

By John Moody.

For hours on end, the small army with ice picks chipped away, trying to undo the winter's work in Moscow. Thousands of men and women, ordered to turn out for subbotnik, a Saturday of so-called voluntary unpaid labor, cleared streets and sidewalks of slippery patches. At the same time, tons of special food consignments were flooding into the city for proud display in store windows. Convoys of black limousines snaked through the streets or lolled at curbside. And everywhere throughout the country, from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, red banners and billboards appeared bearing the Roman numerals XXVII.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union last week was making final preparations to hold its 27th congress, which will open this week in the marble-and-glass Palace of Congresses behind the walls of the Kremlin. For the 5,000 delegates chosen to attend, it is a chance to watch Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev make history. Says one Washington-based Soviet diplomat: "This is the most important event in our history since the death of Stalin. People's expectations have been aroused."

Since he became General Secretary of the party last March 11, Gorbachev has been reshaping the power structure of the Soviet Union. He has broken the back of high-level cronyism that flourished for nearly 20 years under former Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev, until his death in 1982. The new man at the helm has given fair warning that he intends to wean the country from deeply ingrained habits, including alcoholism, corruption and sloth. Gorbachev's speech this week will show the direction in which he intends to lead his country.

In principle, the congress is the Soviet Union's ultimate decision-making body. Delegates were selected by the 17.5 million members of the Communist Party, from regions that stretch as far as 4,200 miles and ten time zones away from the capital. The representatives theoretically inform the party's leaders of the people's will, weigh the merits of proposals, and then return home to explain the program.

In reality, the vast majority of delegates does no more than listen to a string of speeches on foreign policy, economic objectives and the role of the party. When asked to vote on proposals, delegates raise red credential books in approval. The propositions have been hammered out long before in the party's Central Committee, where true power resides.

The Soviet Union today is being run by a man empowered to take radical action to rouse a lethargic country and fulfill its potential as a superpower. The changes Gorbachev has already imposed would have been unthinkable just a year ago. Three members of the party's eleven-man top decision-making body, the Politburo, have been removed since he succeeded Konstantin Chernenko. In their places are younger men who conform to Gorbachev's vision. A new Premier has been installed, and 21 government ministries have new bosses. At lower levels of the party, new chiefs have taken over 30% of the 147 regional organizations. Approximately 35% of the 319 party Central Committee members elected at the last congress, in 1981, have retired, died or been removed.

The new leader's message has been coming across loud and clear. In a May 27 speech in Leningrad, Gorbachev warned party officials: "Those who do not intend to adjust and who, moreover, are an obstacle to the solution of these new tasks simply must get out of the way, get out of the way and not be a hindrance."

Gorbachev is a realist who does not make grandiose promises. At a 1961 party congress, Nikita Khrushchev unveiled a program predicting that Soviet citizens by 1980 would enjoy free transport and housing, the end of manual labor and living standards that exceeded those of any capitalist country. Instead of placebos, Gorbachev's 15-year plan sets targets: industrial output and national income will double by the end of the century, and labor productivity must grow by 130%. To meet those goals, the economy is supposed to expand at a 4.7% annual rate, about twice the pace of the past decade.

Gorbachev maintains that this can be accomplished with better use of available resources. He insists that by putting the right people in positions of authority, the economy will perform better. He announced last June that the Politburo had rejected the Five-Year Plan for 1986-1990 because it encouraged waste. The longtime director of the State Planning Committee, which had drawn up the economic blueprint, was sacked.

Gorbachev has embraced new technology as a way to make the Soviet system work more efficiently. His country has fallen woefully behind the Western world, for example, in both production and use of computers on all levels. Gorbachev's team stresses the importance of introducing computer courses throughout the school system. Tentative steps to produce mainframe and personal computers, however, have not been encouraging. The Iskra machine weighs 110 lbs. and has less than one-tenth the capability of the 28-lb. IBM personal computer.

The Soviet Union's disastrous agricultural program, which Gorbachev headed during part of Brezhnev's years, is now being scrutinized and reorganized. Another serious problem facing the country is oil. Petroleum output, which provides more than two-thirds of foreign currency earnings, had begun to decline even before the petroleum glut, and lower market prices will further diminish income. Said Jan Vanous, a Washington-based analyst of the Soviet economy: "The decline in oil prices represents the most serious external challenge to the Soviet Union since World War II."

In addition to charting the future at the party congress, Gorbachev is likely to blame the Brezhnev regime for much of the corruption and inefficiency that has seeped into Soviet life. Public resentment has been building over the cronyism that Brezhnev fostered. Gorbachev's attacks on the mistakes of a past Soviet leader will bring back memories of the 20th party congress on Feb. 25, 1956, when Khrushchev presented a four-hour report that cataloged Joseph Stalin's use of mass deportation, imprisonment, torture and execution to eliminate real and suspected opponents.

In recent months Gorbachev has been removing Brezhnev-era holdovers with a blend of maneuver and muscle. Grigory Romanov, the Politburo member responsible for the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex, who reportedly tried to block Gorbachev's rise to power and became the target of a whispering campaign about alleged alcoholism, retired from the Politburo last July. One day later Andrei Gromyko, who had served as Foreign Minister since 1957, was promoted to the honorific post of President. Last month Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who had commanded the Soviet navy since 1956, was replaced. Nikolai Tikhonov, who had been Premier since 1980 and was closely tied to the Brezhnev era, stepped down in September on a common Soviet pretext: poor health.

Gorbachev has used propaganda organs to build public support before he strikes. In December, Vladimir Promyslov, the de facto mayor of Moscow for 22 years, was forced to resign after the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya ran a series of exposes on corruption in the local housing-construction industry. The same articles brought down Viktor Grishin, who was stripped of his job as head of the Moscow city party committee.

Gorbachev's new men, for the most part, share his background of higher education and wide managerial experience. These new leaders look more like savvy executives than rumpled and boorish political hacks. Some have traveled to the West, and all are familiar with the latest American or European trends in their fields. Their success has usually been built on innovation rather than a slavish adherence to established methods.

Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, 56, cut his teeth in the Siberian town of Sverdlovsk and gained a reputation as a forceful administrator. Boris Yeltsin, 55, who replaced Grishin as Moscow party boss, also came from Siberia. When Yeltsin heard grumbling about poor bus service in the capital, he reportedly rode the overcrowded vehicles himself, then ordered the head of the city transport department to do the same.

Aware that any Soviet leader needs the support of the secret police, Gorbachev arranged last April for KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov, 62, to become a full member of the Politburo. He also endorsed the popular Leningrad party chief, Lev Zaikov, 62, for membership in the Central Committee Secretariat.

If Gorbachev faces opposition in carrying out his programs, it may come from Yegor Ligachev, 65, who oversees party ideology and is believed to be more conservative than Gorbachev. He warned last year that economic reforms must take place "without shifts toward a market economy or private enterprise."

For the moment, Mikhail Gorbachev appears to have the prestige, backing and energy to enact his plans for revivifying the economy. But without basic changes in the rigid restrictions of a central planning system, it is doubtful that he can turn the country into an efficient economic competitor with the West.

With reporting by James O. Jackson and Nancy Traver/ Moscow