Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (1)
The poverty of bureaucratic planning[*]
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| Leonid Brezhnev |
We are not meeting the Five Year Plan in almost every aspect, with some exceptions.
People refer to last year’s weather as the reason why this is so. But this is applicable only for agriculture. Even there, we mostly overcame the difficulties. And we shouldn’t have raised panic with buying grain abroad. We would have made it. For example, there was an article in Pravda where a kolkhoz chairman in Kirovogradsk region was able to collect 2.5 tons even though his harvest burned out, while his neighbors ‘across the street’ collected only around 1 ton each.
As for excuses about the weather in the industries… Shame on you, Comrade [Ivan Pavlovich] Kazanets, for boasting that you smelt more metal than the U.S. What about the quality of the metal? Or the fact that only 40% of every ton goes to production, compared to the American standard, and the rest is slag and chips?!
Capital construction. Unfinished projects. An old problem. We calculated that for each one of the 270,000 projects there are about… 12 workers. So if there are 70,000 workers at the Kamaz project, it means that hundreds, if not thousands, of projects have no workers at all! I propose that we freeze all projects except for the ones that were supposed to be completed in 1972-73. But we finish those!
We still get about 90 kopeks per every ruble of investment, while the Americans get the reverse (90 dollars for every dollar of investment).
They blame the suppliers. But look at the facts. Comrade [Nikolai Nikiforovich] Tarasov (Light Industry), you have a million pairs of shoes in your warehouses. Nobody will ever buy them because they are styled like galoshes. But it took raw materials to make them, which you say are in short supply. This way you could buy all the raw materials abroad and put them under the knife!
Baibakov’s group decides the plan. Because people don’t need money, they need goods. Only if we have goods, saleable (!) goods, can we get the money from the people to build blast furnaces, etc.
How do we work? In August I was at a new tire factory in Barnaul. I asked the workers, ‘You have all the new equipment, both domestic and foreign, and you have the capacity to produce 9,000 tires per day, yet you produce 5,000. Why is that?’ They replied that Minister [Viktor Stepanovich] Fedorov gave them 30 months to reach full capacity. Alright. Recently I got a note that the Barnaul factory produced 9,000 tires per day already in November – the projected capacity. In other words, they took some measures after my talk. So: 30 months and 3 months! What is going on? Laziness, irresponsibility, stupidity, or a crime?!
We are not fulfilling the main resolution of the XXIV Congress – to raise productivity and efficiency. The entire Congress and the people present here today were applauding when we spoke about the new goal of simultaneous movement along the main directions of economic development (to raise the quality of life, productivity, and defense). What do we have instead? We have not made this shift and two years have passed since the Congress, that’s half the Five Year Plan! Now Comrade Baibakov reports to us that the plan for 1972 was not met, and we won’t meet the 1973 plan either, and after that who knows what will happen.
Gosplan is being liberal, while the organizations behind it are being irresponsible. We no longer have a Gosplan in the sense of an organization that would define our strategic perspective and tightly control the course of our economy!
Following this summary, Chernyaev writes:
The reaction to this speech was telling. Brutents told me about it, he heard it from Arbatov, one of the authors of the speech. “Our group was exiting the Sverdlovsk hall,” he said, “and we happened to be next to [Pavel Dmitrievich] Borodin (director of ZIL), one of the bosses of our industry. I ask him, ‘So, what did you think?’ ‘It was a beautiful speech. You were probably the ones who made it pretty and convincing, you are good writers. Except we’ve heard it all before more than once. The speeches get nicer and nicer, while things get worse and worse.’”
He said all of this out loud, in the crowd of CC members, but it didn’t turn a single head. The others must have been occupied with similar thoughts.
While the highest-ranking Soviet bureaucrats were engaged in such discussions behind closed doors, public statements aimed at domestic and international audiences insisted that everything was on track — that even if some minor difficulties existed, they could readily be overcome with a bit of effort and diligence. Meanwhile, the leaderships of Stalinist parties loyal to the Kremlin across the globe proudly reproduced these fundamentally flawed, rosy depictions in their own publications — sometimes partly, sometimes wholly convinced of their accuracy, and almost always without a shred of critical scrutiny.
[*] The title is mine.
See also:
Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (2): Selling off Siberia to the imperialist powers
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