REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: CHEERS AND BARBS IN RUSSIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000705870005-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 7, 2011
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: March 10, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000705870005-3
ARTICLE APPqW NE: YORK TIMES
ON PAGE 10 March 1986
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
Special to The New York Times
MOSCOW, March 7 - There is
something awesome about the vol-
ume of words generated at a Soviet'
Communist Party congress.
Over nine days, with a day off on
Sunday, the 5,000 delegates to the 27th
party congress sat stoically in their
assigned rows in the cavernous Pal-
ace of Congresses through some 100
speeches, as well as 31 by foreign
Communist leaders.
Each speech was printed in pages
of solid type in the party newspaper
Pravda and the Government newspa-
per Izvestia, with "applause," "pro-
longed applause" and sometimes
"tumultuous, prolonged applause",
marked in at appropriate spots.
The only other interruptions at the
congress, which ended Thursday,
have been for "votes," all unani-
mous, to adopt the party program,
the economic guidelines, resolutions;
and other reports.
Signals From the Podium
But if Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his
lieutenants meant the congress to set
the Soviet land on a new course, then
the signals from the podium were
often confused and contradictory.
Virtually every speaker pledged
himself to join in the bold turn toward
greater initiative, dynamism and:
candor demanded by Mr. Gorbachev.
Each dutifully criticized his own
work as well as outdated ways, bu-'
reaucratism, corruption and all the!
other "negative phenomena" at-
tacked at length in the leader's five-
and-a-half-hour keynote speech.
Yet beyond the ritualized unanimi-
ty, few speakers seemed prepared to
test the limits of candor or to match
their leader in sharpness, and those
Muscovites who bothered to follow
the endless speeches found them less
provocative than the letters and arti-
cles in the press that had preceded
the congress.
"I was totally disappointed by the
level of discussion," Roy A. Medve-
dev, the dissident Marxist historian,
said. "None were a match for Gorba-
chev's report. The Politburo mem-
bers were cautious, and the delegates
were often talking as they would at a
normal meeting, complaining about
the lack of some machine or tool."
;Reporter's Notebook: Cheers and
A Fiery Critique
The one exception was Boris N.
Yeltsin, the new Moscow party chief,
who followed a fiery critique of the
party's Central Committee by admit-
ting that he had hardly been so bold at
the last party congress, when criti-
cism was not so popular. This was, he
said, because "I apparently lacked
the courage and political experi-
ence."
The speech made Mr. Yeltsin some-
thing of an instant celebrity.
Barbs in Russia
Yet many other speakers, far from
following Mr. Yeltsin's lead, voiced
distinct displeasure at the lengths to
which openness had gone. Yegor K.
Ligachev, the chief ideologist in the
Politburo, accused Pravda of "allow-
ing mistakes" in publishing overly
critical letters.
To these was added the voice of
President Andrei A. Gromyko:
"Criticism as a mighty and effective
weapon of the party, and running
down honest Communists - these are
not one and the same thing."
There seemed to be a sense among
these delegates that too much public
criticism would undermine the au-
thority of the party from within.
Many older Russians remain un-
comfortable with the memory of the
impact of Nikita S. Khrushchev's de-
nunciation of Stalinism at the 20th
party congress 30 years ago.
For others, like Mr. Gromyko, it
was the thought of Westerners hear-
ing all the criticism that seemed
particularly galling. Nobody reading
the internal criticism, he declared,
"should rush to conclusions about
cracks in our party, our society."
Perhaps because of the thought that
the outside wor was watching, the
K.G.B. seemed to remain immune to
criticism. The sneer v Viktor M.
Chebnkov, head of the intelligence
and internal security organization
,
was rull o raise for the "che fists."
as the K.G.B. likes to stile its agents,
after the organization s first acro-
nym, a a. Butte speech focused
ctiticrs o on t e implacableTm-
penalist "special services" that the
X.G.B. as to co
with
To drive home his point. Mr. he-
bnkov disclosed that the K.G.B. had
recently uncovered "a g ents of im-
penalist Intelligence services" in
several ministries and a encies who
had so important professional se-
crets to forci or anization."
He gave no further details of the
dragnet.
The K.G.B. chief said another prob-
lem that demanded attention was
video recorders. These recorders, he
said, were being used by some to
spread "ideas alien to us, a cult of
cruelty and violence and amorality."
It was a problem likely to expand.
On the day before Mr. Chebnkov
spoke, Mr. Ligachev had announced
that "measures have been formu-
lated to start large-scale production
of video technology."
?
One delegate who did not address
the congress, but who seemed none-
theless a major presence at the pro-
ceedings, was Abel G. Aganbegyan,
the economist whose reformist ideas
seem to have become the policy of the
land under Mr. Gorbachev.
In talking of new methods of man-
agement, economic levers, financial
incentives, more local autonomy,
rapid introduction of computers and
in general most his modernizing
ideas, Mr. Gorbachev has been draw-
ing on ideas long advocated by Mr.
Aganbegyan and his former col-
leagues at the Siberian branch of the
Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.
Since Mr. Gorbachev came to power,
Mr. Aganbegyan has been in Moscow
as head of the Commission to Study
Production Forces.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Aganbegyan
was possibly the most sought-after of-
ficial at the congress. Mr. Agan-
begyan, a large man of impressive
girth with the jet-black hair of his
Armenian ancestry and the conserva-
tive suit of a successful executive, fi-
nally made an appearance Wednes-
day with a group of Western report-
ers.
Mr. Aganbegyan seemed refresh-
ingly untroubled about how the West
would view the problems, prospects
and statistics that he freely shared.
He seemed to speak with the confi-
dence of a man who has often fielded
the same questions before.
Glimpses of the Future
Mr. Aganbegyan gave some in-
triguing glimpses into future plans.
He said a commission was working
on measures to permit some limited
private enterprise in services like re-
pair shops, auto garages or household
renovation. One idea was to let entre-
preneurs keep a fixed percentage of
their gross income. Another was to
have them pay a fixed sum to the
state, keeping everything above it.
Mr. Aganbegyan openly hailed the
limited private enterprise permitted
in East Germany, Bulgaria and Hun-
gary. "It's a healthy practice," he
said. "My personal idea is that we
need to develop it."
He explained that the Soviet Union
required "radical reforms" at this
juncture of its development because
it could no longer count on endlessly
tapping new resources, and because
of the projected sharp drop-off of new
entrants into the labor force.
The result, he said, is the drastic
need for more labor productivity and
automation, two of the cardinal
points of Mr. Gorbachev's program.
Mr. Aganbegyan also described
some of the problems in changing an
economy as complex as the Soviet
Union's. "We'd need several years to
put any reform in practice," he said.
"It won't happen tomorrow."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000705870005-3