Russia: Tomorrow Is Three Suits

(8 of 10)

as they call it. However, the many-layered system of prices and priorities is not based on costs and profits, but on a host of imprecise criteria such as the "social usefulness" of a commodity. Not even the wiliest commissar—let alone a properly reared computer—can always untangle the subtle skeins that veil the simplest economic decision in Russia. "Stalin," observed Brandeis University's Economist Peter Wiles, "has often been described as Genghis Khan with the telegraph; as creator of the planning system, he figures here as Kafka with an abacus."

The Solid Gold Nail Factory. In 1964, logs from the Urals go to Siberia to be milled; Siberian logs go to mills in the Urals. More than $3 billion worth of manufacturing equipment ready for use lies around waiting to be installed. Completion of Siberia's vast (3,600,000 kw.) Bratsk hydroelectric complex, five years abuilding, had to be postponed last month in order to release urgently needed funds and engineers for other housing projects. Production quotas are nearly always set simply by gross weight, value or units, so that if a nail factory's output is measured by millions of nails, it tends to concentrate on the smallest sizes; if it is computed by weight, it will turn out nothing but big nails; if the quota were in terms of rubles, Russia would have its first Solid Gold Nail Factory.

So desperate are some Russian officials for solutions to their system's chronic inefficiency that they have begun dickering with a British management consultant firm for capitalist-style advice. The system at times actually penalizes initiative. At Moscow Cable Factory (slogan: "Know the Value of Nonferrous Metals"), economy-minded employees last year managed to cut the plant's copper consumption by 260 tons. But their triumph was short-lived. The factory, which sends its waste metal to be made into other products, learned to its dismay that the 1963 production plan called for it to supply 590 tons more waste metal than it could possibly deliver without deliberately manufacturing scrap. As it turned out, the factory's reward for a sizable savings in copper was to be fined $102,000 for nonfulfillment of its waste quota.

Birds & Watches. The frustrations and illusions that pervade the Soviet economy are more familiar to President Brezhnev than almost any other Kremlin leader, for he rose through the bureaucracy and typifies the new technocratic breed that runs the country. A self-styled "fifth-generation steel-worker," he is tough as a T beam and as elusive as a Black Sea eel. As Khrushchev's No. 2 man, he needs to be, for as a Western diplomat points out: "The logical heir must always be the most insecure man in Moscow." In fact, Brezhnev seems tense only when he is away from Moscow on frequent "good will" trips (14 since 1956), hovers fretfully by his private phone to Moscow.

Otherwise, he is usually composed to the point of colorlessness. He collects antique watches and rare songbirds, suffers from high blood pressure, possibly a heart ailment. On doctor's orders, the President seldom drinks or smokes. But unbending at a formal banquet during his state visit to Iran last

November, Brezhnev toasted everything under the sun, then lifted his vodka glass to cry "Down with protocol! Long live freedom!" In