the USSR than doubt about the health of one corrupt bureaucrat.
If there was any doubt about the existence of a sharp struggle within the Soviet leadership then it was removed in September with the sudden fall from office of Marshall Ogarkov — the chief of the Soviet general staff. The crisis of leadership in the Kremlin, which began in the last 18 months of Brezhney'S rule, continues as deep as ever. And the longer that Messers Chernenko and prime minister Tikhinov cling tenuously to life and power, the most likely development is that this leadership crisis will assume a convulsive form.
The reason for this is plain enough. The top leaders may approach the succession problem mainly as a contest among ciques for personal power, for the Soviet establisment as a wnole about something much more tundamental Within the official intercensta there widespread awareness that the entire svstem ot power as evolved under Brezhnev cannot continue and must be substantially changed One of the first public of deep disenchantment within the party intelligentsia was the arrest in 1981 of a group of young, successful, working in plum jobs Moscow social science institutes They were charged WILs forming an illegal, leftist group.
the summer led to And in the spring of this year another little incident cast a shaft of light intellectual of the Soviet establishment. paper presented to a seminar involving economists from the Central the Academy of Sciences and Gosplan (the central planning agency) was published in the West. It was presented by Tatyana sociology cas avskaya castavskaya. professor and full member of the Academy Sciences. And it calls for a sweeping change in the en. tire mechanism for CON trolling economic social life in the USSR Zaslavskaya's paper is not blue-print for reform. Instead it is an attack on some fundamental principles OI thodoxy its central point iS that revival in the USSR the current system is buttressed by the interests of social groups which are antagonistic to the needs of industrial workers.
She argues that there is a profound contradiction between a system or pro duction relations established in the 1930s under Stalin, involving a regimentation poverty-stricken passive working class, and Ine great development 01 productive forces above al of ine workers themselves - in the fifty since the present system was set up. Anti-social She points out that the present system seeks 1 asc output by ever stronger controls over the workers and adds: 'Is it indeed, that the more strictly controlled the workers' activity, the more successful its results? For a whole series of reasons, TOES question has to be answered in the negative. She then shows the workers respond to these controls by directing their creative impulses into 'anti-social modes of behaviour' Zaslavskaya then polemicises directly with both the Encyclopaedia o with the Dictionary Paulosopr their failure to link economic problems with social problems, and for 'openly afthat under socialişm there is no group possible to improve the mechanism econome management arrived at many aLU by gradually replacing the outmoded of its NUIC elements with more effec tive ones' but she ends wistfully by saying this raises a 'complex and deep matter.
The only hope, she says, for overcoming what she calls 'the degeneration of the social mechanism of economic development' which 'at present. 'tuned' not to stimulate but to inwart une popula tion's useful economic activitv is through the work.
strate of for we Soviet strategy the Soviet This is indeed the problem. Zalsavskaya, naturally enough, hopes in her paper - • addressed to some seventy estab sil ment intellectuals - that this political problem cal be túrned into a technical task to be carried out collectively by the party in telligentsia. But she gaines ample proof, both of the of her diagnosis of naivete of her political approach by what happened after she read her paper enemies leaked the document to the Washington Post, it was published by Radio Liberiy and Survey, and she lost her teaching job.
Selfish we wish more precise characterisation the social group Zaslavskaya mentions as being hostile to retorm.
can use the following detinition: 'The tration of enormous power hands of bureaucrats has most serious political implicathe and side a l to acquisition special social stratum of a relative autonomy in relation to the ruling class as a whole, and to its being in conflict with thrusting upon it selfish in. terests of its own.' These are the words, not of Trotsky but of prominent scientist, V.G. Kalensky, in his book The State as an Ob of Sociological Analysis (Moscow 1977) Chernenko Faced with bureaucratic caste the Zaslavskayas in the Soviet intelligentsia placed great hopes in Yuri Andropov believing that perhaps he might be the enlightened strong man who would break the grip of the Brezhnevite bureaucracy from above and usher in a renaissance of Soviet life It was very likely such hope that prompted Zaslavskaya herself to 'come out' at Novosibirsk seminar the Kremlin clique cannot soon produce another o the Soviet Fabians lil Laslavskaya, then such people will have to look elsewhere — in search of a Soviet equivalent of Atthur Scargill.
The torpor, corruption, waste petty brutalities of the Brezhnevite era cannot go on for ever.
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THE DISAPPEARANCE from view of Soviet president Chernenko during widespread speculation in the western press about a new leadership crisis' in the Soviet Union. OLIVER MACDONALD, editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, argues that far deeper forces are stirring in