Candor After the Quake

As recently as two or three years ago the Soviet government would probably have tried to minimize and obscure the extent of the tragedy that last week’s earthquake brought to Armenia. Now, not only is the full scope of that devastating event being displayed to the world but the systemic flaws that helped enlarge the toll of death and destruction are being openly discussed. What the earthquake and its aftermath have dramatized so clearly is what Western specialists have long known, and what President Mikhail S. Gorbachev constantly implies when he says that his country’s economic and political systems must be restructured. Soviet society is staggering under the multiple burdens of endemic inefficiencies, gross shoddiness, acute shortages and administrative incompetence.

All this comes through with great and--considering past behavior--startling candor in official comments and Soviet press reporting. The gist of what is being said is that lives could have been saved and destruction avoided if buildings had been better constructed, if adequate preparations had been made for handling a catastrophic quake in an area of known seismic activity, if medical services had been organized to deal with a predictable emergency. Instead there are charges, some from Gorbachev himself, of corruption that saw sand substituted for cement in the construction of buildings that collapsed in the quake, and of flagrant shortages of even the most basic medical supplies.

The Soviets are genuinely grateful for the post-quake help that they are getting from around the world. They are also genuinely impressed with the competence and organization that they see in the work of foreign rescue teams--so different, they say, from some of their own bungled efforts. Some attempt is being made to blame the poor quality of construction and the inefficiency of local rescue efforts on what is now called the “period of stagnation,” meaning the 18 years of the late Leonid I. Brezhnev’s rule. But Gorbachev and other government and party leaders know that the real problem is rooted in the rigidities, the indifference to social needs, the skewed priorities of the Soviet system. The Armenia earthquake and its aftermath have exposed conditions that exist throughout the Soviet Union. The people of Armenia have had to pay a terrible price for that revelation.