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Confronted with the Reagan Administration's commitment to an improvement in U.S. defense, the new Kremlin leadership will face tough choices as it decides how to allocate resources in its new Five-Year Plan, due to begin in 1986. There are already signs that the Soviet military-industrial complex may be feeling the squeeze. Among the 25 principal classes of armament, production has declined in 13 between 1977 and 1981. That drop may indicate that the Kremlin has built its arsenal up to strength. But it could also reflect the stagnation in the civilian economy, as producers fail to supply quality steel and as bottlenecks in rail transport hold up vital raw materials needed by defense contracts.
If the military is impatient about the inefficiency and corruption that have settled into the Soviet civilian economy, that concern has not resulted in changes that will challenge the status quo. Explains a Soviet analyst: "Whatever its deficiencies, central planning served us well when we had to mobilize the energies of the population in World War II. Is this really the time to start trying experiments when the nation is again in peril? This is what the military will be asking."
For the foreseeable future, the long-suffering Soviet consumer will have to continue paying for the inherent contradiction of Soviet society: the desire to be a military superpower while having the economy of a semiadvanced nation. Says Economist Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "The Soviets have the slimmest waistlines in the world. They can always tighten their belts another notch."
But the new man in the Kremlin will have to face a fundamental if revolutionary fact: the Soviet Union will be able truly to change only when it is ruled by people who realize that there are measures of international prestige other than numbers of missiles, tanks and men. —ByJohn Kohan. Reported by Erik Amtitheatrof/Moscow and Bruce van Voorst/Washington