“No intelligent student of the new Soviet Plan will fail to be impressed by the fact that many of the objectives set out in it are desirable and practicable and that they can be achieved regardless of ideological preferences. Much that the Soviet Plan sets out to secure for the Russian people in the fifth decade of the regime has long ago been achieved in West European countries and in America without a bloody revolution and civil war or the terrible regimentation of the people in the name of planning.”
JANUARY 31, 1959
Mr. Khrushchev’s ambition
ALLOWING FOR THE USUAL PERCENTAGE OF EXAGGERATION in Soviet statistics and the familiar extravagance in the claims of what Communism can achieve, the targets which Mr. Khrushchev placed before the twenty-first Soviet Communist Party Congress as the aims of the new Seven-Year Plan are certainly of world wide interest. It has long been the avowed aim of the Soviet leaders to catch up with the West and go beyond them in as short a period as possible. Mr. Khrushchev promised in his speech that if the new Plan’s targets were achieved the Soviet Union would have gone almost the entire way towards outstripping the United States. Whether by 1965 the Soviet Union will achieve the per capita output of the U.S. is extremely doubtful, though in terms of absolute output the Soviet may reach the levels of American production in steel, cement, oil, electric power and in agriculture. Although in the new Plan, the major part of the outlay is on heavy industry, there is a welcome shift in emphasis, compared to earlier plans, with regard to expansion of consumer goods industries. Mr. Khrushchev promised Soviet housewives more refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, electric irons and floor polishers. More and better food and clothing have also been promised. Above all, there is to be a big development of house building to make up for the terrible shortage of housing, which has been the most neglected aspect of Soviet economic development. A rise in the wages of the lower income groups, a reduction in the hours of work and advance towards a 5-day working week, an increase in pensions for the aged, and improvements in educational and cultural facilities are envisaged in the Plan. A 62.65 per cent rise in the national income in seven years envisaged in the plan is certainly a very high rate of development, though France and Germany have been able to maintain in the past decade an annual rate of expansion of over 8 per cent. It should not be forgotten, however, that the Soviet Union has always had the advantage of an enormous territory and in recent years Mr. Khrushchev has been concentrating on the development of hitherto little developed regions such as Siberia.
A major conclusion to be drawn from the magnitude of the new Soviet Plan is that the concentration on heavy industry in the three decades since 1928 has laid the foundations for a rapid growth of the economy and that, as in the U.S. and other Western countries, the economic system has developed the capacity for financing a high rate of investment from year to year. That all this capacity has been built up at a heavy cost, by imposing considerable sufferings and privations on the people, is past history. That four decades after the Revolution the Soviet people can look forward to a real – and it may be hoped a substantial – improvement in their living conditions is the most promising aspect of the new Plan. An even more significant conclusion to be drawn from Mr. Khrushchev’s speech is that the realisation of this hope depends on the prevention of a major war. When Mr. Khrushchev spoke about peaceful competition between rival social systems and their peaceful co-existence, he was not only emphasising his ideological belief that in the long run the Communist system will prevail, but also that in the short run he needs peace. Since the death of Stalin and more so since the famous Twentieth Party Congress, at which Mr. Khrushchev made the historic disclosures about the crimes and brutalities of the Stalin era, there has been considerable rethinking in the Kremlin in regard to internal as well as external policies. Internally there has been a steady relaxation of the rigours of the Stalin regime and a break with the methods of purges and secret trials and “liquidation of political opponents, which made the Soviet system so abhorrent to all freedomloving people. It is true that the way Mr. Khrushchev has been handling Bulganin, Molotov, Malenkov and others belonging to the so-called “anti-party group” has raised doubts whether it presages a return to Stalinist methods. But there is room to think that Mr. Khrushchev is genuinely anxious to break with the bitter legacy of Stalin and that Molotov and others are opposing him in this policy. The outside world as well as the Soviet people would be in a better position to appreciate the issues involved if the struggle that is apparently going on within the Soviet Communist Party were debated in the open. But such freedom of debate, with the natural prospect of two or three rival leaderships developing around rival policies and programmes, is anathema to Communists who have been wedded to ideas of a monolithic party and a monolithic State. The sturdy independence of Marshal Tito and the developments in Poland and elsewhere have compelled the Russian leaders to recognise that there are many roads to socialism”. Compared to the fanaticism of the Stalin period, when the familiar slogan was, “Whoever is not with us, is against us”, this represents a genuine advance towards an admission of differences in approach and policy among Communist and Socialist parties. But the Russian Communists and their followers elsewhere are yet to realise that there are many roads to human welfare and progress and that socialism itself is only one of those roads. No intelligent student of the new Soviet Plan will fail to be impressed by the fact that many of the objectives set out in it are desirable and practicable and that they can be achieved regardless of ideological preferences. Much that the Soviet Plan sets out to secure for the Russian people in the fifth decade of the regime has long ago been achieved in West European countries and in America without a bloody revolution and civil war or the terrible regimentation of the people in the name of planning. The striking progress which Mexico, Puerto Rico and other smaller countries have been making in recent years – not to mention West Germany and Japan – shows that rapid economic development can be achieved today by a disciplined people, with good organisation and the necessary external aid, within the framework of a democratic system. Thanks to the rapid advance of modern technology, the problem of development in any democratic community today is not any longer a quesion of ideology-eliminating one class or another – but of developing the right type of organisation and providing the right incentives. That frightful mistakes can be committed under the Communist system and that it is no automatic guarantee against inefficiency, waste or corruption, is borne out by Soviet experience. Democratic countries like India which have embarked on development plans to make up for the lapses of the past might learn much from the experience of the Soviet and other countries. But there is no escape from hard work, intelligent organisation and the widespread use of technical and scientific knowledge for raising productivity in agriculture and industry. This is the basic task, whatever the apparent character of the economic system, may be. The Soviet progress, such as it is, is success they have achieved in fulfilling the task than to the special character of the Soviet system.
Reference:
The First 100
A Selection of Editorials, 1878-1978, THE HINDU, VOLUME I