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The most striking results of Gorbachev's many initiatives since he took power have been in the cultural field (see following story). But his ultimate goal, and the real reason behind last week's scathing criticism of past regimes, is to get the country's economy moving again. After growing at an estimated 4% annual rate for much of the postwar period, the Soviet economy in recent years has expanded at only half that rate.
Gorbachev's efforts at economic reform have been surprisingly timid, and his experience in this area may give some clues about his future political reforms. In the industrial sector Gorbachev has taken a few tentative steps toward basic cost effectiveness. Some large state enterprises, including the huge Byelorussian railroad system, have been required to operate on a "self- financing" basis, meaning that they can no longer cover operating losses with subsidies from the state and may spend only as much money as they earn. In a wage experiment under way in Estonia, workers are being paid a share of their employer's income rather than a set salary, in much the same way partnerships in the West divvy up the pot.
Gorbachev's initiatives have already given the Soviet economy a temporary boost. The annual growth rate officially announced in early January was 4.1%, higher than the level called for by the current Five-Year Plan. But few Western experts believe that the economic reforms Gorbachev has introduced to date will solve the country's basic problems. Says Arthur Hartman, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Moscow: "The Soviets use the words radical reform. But if you look at the decrees that have been issued, they are very pale things. It is not radical reform if you look at what has happened in China or Hungary." Those two countries have adopted capitalist incentives and given farmers, workers and managers much greater freedom to run their economic lives outside the dictates of central planning.
Even if Gorbachev's reforms were more far reaching, he would face tremendous opposition from a society and a system that, despite their revolutionary rhetoric, are not accustomed to change. He clearly hopes that the cold-water approach of glasnost, combined with its twin, perestroika (restructuring of the economy), will inspire Soviet society to mend some of its less redeeming ways. But to some, the endless emphasis on problems and the seamy side of Soviet life sounds like alarming admissions of failure. "I don't like hearing about so many bad things," says a 38-year-old Moscow secretary. "We never had this when I was young."
Most ominously for Gorbachev, a growing resistance to the glasnost ethos exists within the Soviet Union's vast bureaucracy. Gorbachev conceded that this opposition was strong when he told a private meeting of Soviet writers last June, "Between the people who want these changes, who dream of these changes, and the leadership, there is an administrative layer: the apparatus of the ministries, the party apparatus, which does not want alterations and does not want to be deprived of certain rights connected with privileges."