Khrushchev in Belgrade
From SARAH GAINHAM
BELGRADE
MR. KHRUSHCHEV came to Yugoslavia as soon as the Sino-Soviet ideological talks were over, as he had said he would, to emphasise a political position. The position is political merely because everything in Russia is always political; its real aspect is economic. Mr. Khrushchev himself said, inspecting a triple motor factory in Belgrade using British machines to make under licence British trucks, tractors and diesel motors (Leyland, Massey-Ferguson, Per- kins, respectively), that the issue of the struggle between capitalism and Communism would be decided by mass production.
The great problem of the Soviet bloc is pro- ductivity, the relation of investment and .man- power to the production of goods. Just as a Westerner in Yugoslavia must, to understand anything, abandon the whole complex of 'cold war' thinking and cease to attach to politics what is determined by geography, history and other objective facts, so a Russian must make the jump from accepted to objective economic thinking. But this entails dropping concepts on which Soviet organisation has been based as .a matter of religion since the late 1920s.
When Yugoslavia was abandoned by the Soviet bloc in 1948, a revolution of thinking took place under the pressure of the breakdown of expected aid and trade contracts which de- stroyed all their planning; under the military threat of encirclement by very hostile powers; under the impossibility of getting help from the West immediately except at the cost of their independence. This last is not a phrase—Yugo- slavia before the war was really plundered by foreign owners of its natural wealth. The Yugo- slays like to believe now that the system of workers' councils, self-rule in enterprises and the production of food and goods as 'incentives to work were always contained in their thinking for the future. That may be partly true (there are signs of it in their partisan programme of war days); but from 1945 to 1949-50 the State planning was of the monolithic, detailed, rigid kind associated with Russian Communism. In 1950 it was changed. The needs of the people in food, clothing and housing were given a high priority; and the system of self-administration tied to rational bookkeeping was started. The system is simple in essence. Every enterprise keeps its accounts itself; after taxes, re- investment and public amenities payments have been made, the net surplus is divided up as rewards (they no longer call it pay), so that gradually, and indeed fast, everyone concerned can sec the clear relationship bctweep his work, his parsimony with materials, his care of machinery, and the size of his pay packet. The management boards and workers' councils found their interests similar instead of opposed. In other words, incentives.
This system was improved in 1961, and rewards are now assessed by the efficiency of departments as well as of the enterprise as a whole. This, though it is clearly still dominated by party members, brought work-democracy down to the single worker; the same system is in force for local administration of public affairs, and with the same obvious reservation is widening every year the genuine co-operation of citizens in their own lives. State planning is now quite loose, laying down priorities and holding control by banking; but businesses have considerable free- dom of action and competition, they make their own 'contracts and do their own buying and selling with each other. On their success depends their prosperity.
The details of the success of this form of socialism—a kind of syndicalism—are fascinat- ing and undeniable. There is no space to recount them, but production has made leaps—housing and the production of household goods, textiles and food processing (to release women for work), the reduction of the peasant population as a reservoir of manpower and the opening up of the country to the outside world have all been successes. The national income rose by 14 per cent in 1962 (Yugoslav statistics are accepted by international bodies such as OEEC) and a further rise is expected ' this year. To the observer the changes arc striking, though a holidaymaker would still find the standards of textiles and such goods behind Western Europe's. The replacement of the shanty town I remem- ber to the west of Belgrade by a complex of tall modern blocks and new roads, which has taken place in seven years, is an achievement in itself, and that is only an outward sign of the production of wealth from mineral resources and industry. At the time of the quarrels inside the Yugoslav party—they belong to the first period - Mr. Dedijer and Mr. Djilas from their different points were right, and their opposition may have influenced the rethinking; Mr. Djilas is still right about the New Class. But a new class of managers was bound to arise once the economy of the country began to operate on sound lines of modern economics; the chance to belong to it is one of the biggest incentives.
The Russian visit has been characterised by a determination on Tito's part not to be patronised; the Yugoslays are aware that they have nothing to fear from comparisons with their huge friend. Mr. Khrushchev's speeches and comments have shown an almost total lack of knowledge of economics, which he shares with other political power-wielders. On the Russian side there is fascinated rejection of a concept of socialism that throws away everything the Russian State is built upon. They want productivity, and they must get it; but they cannot admit that this is the way to it. This system, indeed, was the whole ideological base of the long quarrel between Russia and Yugoslavia, though certainly not its real cause, which was the rejection of the weighted Soviet-Yugoslav trade treaties. More- over, the character of the Russian people and forty years' indoctrination in personal irresponsi- bility probably make it impossible for any such system to work in Russia.
Officially, the Russians propose that Yugo- slavia should enter the Comecon group; nothing is less likely. They want a loose observer status like the status they still hope to get from EEC. They cannot abandon their successful system to ally themselves with one that is constantly proving its own failure; the apparent ignorance of this obvious fact is one of the things that makes Mr. Khrushchev's speeches and comments sound so curiously out of date. Faced with the full shipyards, the varied orders of Yugoslay. ship- building, he suggests that they should stick to one or two designs and co-ordinate them with Comecon shipbuilding. But the words have no meaning to Yugoslays, for they are suc- cessfully competing with older and bigger ship- building industries, at world prices. Just as in Austria he was intensely irritated by the incon- trovertible fact that 90 per cent of Austrian primary and secondary industry is 'socialised,' as the Yugoslays call it, so he is confounded here by a success that makes nonsense of every- thing he has always believed in. In the end, one feels an impudent but quite genuine pity for his bewilderment, which is not concealed by that massive tactlessness of his.
Previous page
