No Surprises

A year after taking command in the Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev has his own team in key positions far sooner than most people anticipated. As was strikingly apparent at the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that ended last week, he has succeeded in creating a sense of vitality and movement that did not exist two years ago. But while the Kremlin is long on hope for solving its problems, it remains short on details.

Gorbachev used the party congress to throw some poison darts toward Washington, but the main business of the gathering clearly was to dramatize a sense of imminent change and to advance the process of stacking the power structure with younger, more flexible men and women who share his determination to get the economy moving again. Although there are still rumbles of resistance from change-resistant party functionaries, Gorbachev now has his own people in place in the Politburo, the Central Committee and the powerful committee Secretariat.

The party congress featured refreshingly open recognition of shortcomings in the economy and the country generally. Gorbachev talked repeatedly of the need for “radical transformation in all spheres of life.” In fact, however, the Soviet leader gave no clear indication that anything very radical is going to happen.

The new Kremlin team vows to allow factory managers more flexibility, to provide more effective incentives for workers and farmers, to set prices with greater regard for production costs and customer demand, to invest more heavily in high-technology equipment and to resolutely sweep away change-resistant bureaucrats.

However, it seems clear from the voluminous record of the daily sessions that there will be no retreat from central planning, and that there will be no market-oriented reforms of the kind that have occurred in China and Hungary.

In fact, the impression is growing among Western analysts that Gorbachev sees no need for systemic change, that he believes that his job is to make the existing system work better. There is currently so much waste and inefficiency in the Soviet system that tinkering at the margins might produce impressive results in the short term. But more is needed if Gorbachev’s goal of transforming the Soviet Union into an economic superpower is to be realized.

Former President Richard M. Nixon, addressing the Los Angeles World Affairs Council a few days ago, said that a top Chinese leader told him last fall that unless the Soviets are willing to make genuine rather than cosmetic changes in their highly centralized economic system they will “disappear” as a great power in the 21st Century.

That may be overstating the case, and in any event Gorbachev may yet surprise the skeptics by using his enhanced political position to preside over changes of a far more fundamental nature than were discussed during the party congress. But nothing in the record of the congress or of Gorbachev’s speeches leading up to the meeting points the way to any such surprise.