Gorbachev Calls for Economic Upsurge

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced Tuesday a visionary program that calls for almost doubling economic output over the next 15 years through “strenuous and highly efficient work.”

The Kremlin chief outlined broad targets for a speedy pickup in the sluggish Soviet economy at a plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

Western analysts said the goals are ambitious but more realistic than the last, overly optimistic party program promoted by then-Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1961. Khrushchev said then that the Soviet economy would outstrip the U.S. economy by 1970 and would be six times as productive by 1980, goals that fell far short of being realized.

Standard Rhetoric

Promises of more and better consumer goods and rapid economic advances have been standard Kremlin rhetoric for decades. Yet the Soviet press is still full of stories about shortages of such everyday needs as sewing needles and children’s shoes.

Gorbachev, without referring to his predecessor by name, said the new program is free of “groundless fantasies,” but he envisioned a historic breakthrough toward a higher standard of living.

“We are planning in the next 15 years to create an economic potential approximately in equal scale to what had been accumulated throughout the previous (68) years of Soviet government and to increase almost two-fold the national income and industrial output,” Gorbachev said.

(National income is a Soviet measure of output that is roughly equivalent to the gross national product, a yardstick for economic growth widely used elsewhere in the world.)

“Labor productivity is to go up 130% to 150% (by the end of the century),” Gorbachev told a closed session of the party’s 300 or so Central Committee members.

“This will help double the volume of resources directed at meeting the requirements of the people,” he said, according a text released by the Tass news agency.

Removed from Politburo

In other actions at the session, former Premier Nikolai A. Tikhonov, 80, was removed from the party Politburo after his resignation Sept. 27 from his government post for health reasons.

The new head of the State Planning Commission, Nikolai V. Talyzin, 56, was named a candidate (non-voting) member of the ruling body, indicating higher status for the commission, known as Gosplan, in the Gorbachev era.

In line with his preference for younger, technically trained subordinates, Gorbachev had already named Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, also 56, to the premier’s post.

Gorbachev’s speech, which gave few details about how the economic advance will be achieved, singled out the United States for criticism in the international field.

“We can all see that a very dangerous turn has emerged in the policy of the major capitalist power,” he said.

“The practical actions of imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism, ever more clearly elucidate the essence of this policy,” Gorbachev added.

He charged that U.S. policy was aimed at achieving military superiority over the Communist world and keeping international tensions high to justify creation of new weapons and militarization of states.

“The curbing of the forces of militarism and war, insuring durable peace and reliable security, is the cardinal problem of the present,” he concluded.

But Gorbachev devoted nearly all his speech to the new blueprint for economic and social development until the year 2000 and placed his prestige behind a “fundamental change” in the Soviet domestic sphere.

“This is a program of struggle for peace and progress,” Gorbachev said. “It is aimed at transformations of a truly historical scale--the implementation of a new technical reconstruction of the economy . . .”

Harder Work Needed

He made it clear, however, that Soviet citizens will have to work harder if they want to live better.

“It is noteworthy that in the new five-year plan period, (an) increase in the national income and the output of all branches of material production will be achieved entirely, for the first time, by raising labor productivity,” Gorbachev said.

“Comrades, however inspiring the drafted plans may be, the target set can be achieved only by strenuous and highly efficient work,” he added.

“We must continue speeding up the rate of our onward movement while improving discipline and order in everything . . .” Gorbachev insisted.

But he also said that the state will modernize and re-equip Soviet industry, focusing efforts first on machine building, chemicals, electronics and electric engineering.