Creaks in the Soviet Structure

Most analysts are convinced by now that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s move away from confrontational policies toward the West grows from the need to concentrate on reforming the sluggish Soviet economy.

But proposals to decentralize the rigid central planning system and to tie pay more closely to performance is being stoutly resisted by elements of the huge bureaucracy whose power and privileges would be threatened.

The resistance to change is reflected in the mysterious but all-important area of Kremlin politics. Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, the Communist Party’s chief ideologist, made a speech the other day defending aspects of the late Leonid I. Brezhnev’s rule. Since Gorbachev has identified Brezhnev with corrupt and change-resistant elements of the bureaucracy, Ligachev seems to be positioning himself as a potential champion of the opposition.

Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost , or openness, is in part a strategy to stimulate pressures on the obstructionists from the general population. In fact, however, the reforms are likely to meet with considerable skepticism from workers.

Soviet living standards are the lowest of any advanced industrial nation. But artificially low prices for medical care, housing, food and other consumer goods, along with job security, offer protection against financial disaster. Unfortunately, subsidized prices create harmful distortions in economic investments and decision-making, and must be phased out if the reform program is to work.

An article in Pravda last week said that consumer prices will go up beginning in 1990. And Abel Aganbegyan, an adviser to Gorbachev, wrote in Izvestia that hundreds of inefficient Soviet enterprises should be put out of business soon.

Soviet officials say that higher prices will be more than offset by higher worker incomes and that displaced workers will be given employment elsewhere. But those higher wages will be tied to incentive plans that will leave some workers behind.

As the Kremlin is well aware, the emergence of Solidarity, the free trade-union movement in Poland, was directly related to public anger over higher prices. Hungary, though the most market-oriented of all Soviet Bloc nations, has found it hard in practice to close inefficient enterprises.

Bringing off the planned reforms promises to be a very ticklish job for Gorbachev and his allies.