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While there is hope that the food situation will improve, the present scarcity of quality consumer goods is built into the new five-year plan. According to Soviet statistics published last month, Brezhnev's promise in 1971 that production of consumer goods would be raised by at least 44% during the five-year plan fell 11% short of its goal. In the next five years, the plan allows for a rise of only 30%. In general, it calls for a much slower rate of improvement in living standards than did its predecessor, as well as reduced rates of growth in virtually every sector of the economy. The Soviets do not plan to increase significantly the manufacture of trucks, tractors and passenger cars. Economist Nove thinks that this may be because the Soviets anticipate a fuel shortage, even though the U.S.S.R. leads the world in oil production (491 million tons in 1975) and since 1971 has invested more than $13 billion in developing its northwest Siberian oilfields. Nonetheless the rate of increase in oil production will drop during the next five years because huge, older oilfields in the Urals-Bashkir region are being exhausted. Also, the Soviets are being forced to export more and more oil to the West to help balance debts caused by their massive foreign grain purchases.
As Western experts pondered the 1976 Soviet balance sheet, some long-term achievements seemed all but lost in the welter of present economic woes. The inflation that has plagued the U.S. and other industrialized nations has thus far been contained in the U.S.S.R. Under Brezhnev, there has been an average annual increase of 5% in per capita consumption—a very creditable advance even by Western standards, which have suffered somewhat because of the recent recession. The Kremlin's greatest accomplishment, however, has bypassed the Soviet consumer. According to the master plan pioneered by Stalin, the U.S.S.R.'s prime resources have been concentrated in the military-industrial sector. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and Russia's leading dissident, recently commented that the U.S.S.R. has created "a permanent militarization of the economy to an unprecedented degree in peacetime—something that is burdensome for the population and dangerous for the whole world." It has also been spectacularly effective. The buildup of Soviet forces and weaponry in recent years has been so great that defense analysts around the world are virtually unanimous in concluding that the U.S. is losing its quantitative edge.