No Big Change, No Big Bucks : Soviet aid must be tied to unmistakable economic change

Soviet conservatives grumble that their government’s urgent calls for Western economic help humiliatingly threaten to make a superpower look like a super sponger. First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shchberbakov tried to mollify them with a statement this week that the regime’s real goal is to integrate the Soviet economy with the developed world, not become dependent on it. No specific requests for aid, he said, have yet been presented.

That may be technically true, but it hasn’t kept some top Soviet planners from throwing around numbers--for example, $30 billion to $50 billion a year for five or six years. That gets pretty close to specificity.

Whatever final request emerges, it’s clear, first, that Moscow will be seeking big bucks for years to come and, second, that any hope for winning such aid depends on making changes that Soviet conservatives won’t like at all.

HELP WANTED: Is it in the interests of the capitalist states to underwrite the long-promised Soviet shift to a free economy? It is, given the harrowing probable alternatives. Without a considerable transfusion of cash, credits and technical know-how, the chances are that spreading economic chaos could soon bring on an explosion of civil strife that wouldn’t remain within Soviet borders. Either that, or order would be forcibly reimposed through a military-led seizure of power that could well revive the most threatening days of the Cold War.

To a great extent then, an investment in Soviet economic reform is justified as an investment in stability that benefits everyone.

This is what President Mikhail S. Gorbachev keeps hinting at--he did so again in his Nobel Peace Prize address in Oslo Wednesday--when he asks Western support for perestroika .

How much foreign help is needed? The short answer is as much as the major industrial countries can afford and --a vital corollary--as much as the Soviets prove they are able to absorb. That leads directly to the most fundamental need of all: reform.

REFORM NEEDED: Help can only be conditionally given. It must be tied to unmistakable proof that the political will exists finally to begin making the hard economic reforms that have for so long been promised. That means encouraging privatization on a large scale. It means creating a comfortable and rewarding climate for foreign investment, ending the enormous subsidies that weigh down the Soviet budget and perpetuate inefficient industries and wasteful practices, and moving to full-scale market-pricing.

Economic progress in the Soviet Union is impossible until the country’s industrial base stops being preponderantly dedicated to support of the military and is recommitted instead to the output of growth-producing and consumer-satisfying goods and services.

It is a political non-starter for Moscow to seek help from the West while its oversize military consumes such a disproportionate share of resources, and as long as it continues to pour serious money into Cuba’s moribund economy.

Gorbachev has indicated he would accept no conditions on foreign help. Presumably that was meant to appease his right-wing critics. For it’s a delusion to think that aid on any meaningful level will come from Western donors unaccompanied by a hard-nosed insistence on prompt, comprehensive and inevitably painful economic and political changes.

That insistence is probably one big reason that President Bush wants to send the smooth but tough and practiced negotiator Robert S. Strauss as his ambassador to Moscow. High among his assignments will be persuading the Soviets that, if they’re serious about getting Western help, they must first get serious about getting their overdue economic revolution under way.