550 



Improvements in Soviet transportation have depended heavily on 

 imports of technology from abroad. Cooperative ventures with West- 

 ern European companies have aided in the construction of pipelines 

 from Siberia to Europe. The Soviet automotive industry is importing 

 large quantities of Western machinery, equipment, and know-how. 

 Major imports of Western technology, including American, have 

 aided in building the Kama River Truck Plant. The Kama Plant, cur- 

 rently under construction, is a massive project which will produce 

 150,000 trucks a year plus 250,000 diesel engines. About three-fourths 

 of all the machinery, equipment, and technology for the project is ex- 

 pected to come from Western firms. 42 



Improvement in Planning and Management 



Soviet interest in foreign technology extends to planning and man- 

 agement techniques. Moreover acceptance of the conditions required 

 in joint ventures with Western market economies will tend to push 

 the Soviet economy further in the direction of economic change needed 

 to improve performance. 



A new Five- Year Plan and a Soviet Party Congress are the usual 

 occasions for an assessment of past performance, current problems, 

 and future prospects of the world's second largest economy. The 

 discussions preceding the Ninth Five- Year Plan were of particular 

 interest because of the Party leadership's preoccupation with lagging 

 economic performance. The discussions in Party and professional cir- 

 cles ranged from issues relating to resource allocation policy to 

 changes in the system of planning and management. 43 While plan 

 figures provide evidence of Soviet resource allocation policy, it is diffi- 

 cult to assess the leadership's dedication to economic reform. 



The key elements in the economic reform discussions are the creation 

 of a new role for economic enterprises and a new approach to central 

 planning. 44 The reformers propose more independence for enterprise 

 managers to decide on what and how to produce. Fewer guidelines and 

 success indicators would be handed down to enterprise managers from 

 the central bureaucracy. One new indicator would be profitability: 

 each enterprise would be required to take demand factors into consid- 

 eration and to generate sufficient sales to earn a profit. An important 

 aspect of the reforms is a renewed emphasis on material incentives — 

 profit incentives to encourage enterprise efficiency and wage incentives 

 to stimulate worker productivity. New planning techniques, a more 

 flexible price system, and increased reliance on market forces are key 

 aspects of the reforms. 



The reform proposals represent a dramatic departure from past 

 Soviet practices and have predictably run into opposition from con- 

 servative elements in the Party and government bureaucracies. The 

 Party Congress was apparently delayed from the fall of 1970 to the 

 spring of 1971 to accommodate further debates on resource allocation 



"Imogene Edwards, "Automotive Trends In the USSR." In U.S. Congress. Joint Eco- 

 nomic Committee. Soviet Economic Prospects for the Seventies. 93d Cong., 1st sess. Wash- 

 ington, DC. U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1973. 



** Prnvdn Feb 4 1970- Interview of Mr. Gorecllnd of Gostilnn. \Io»kor»kaui Praraa, 

 Feb. 21, 1971 ; Pravda, July 4, 1971 ; Pravda, Feb. 14, 1971 ; Sovietskaia Rossiia, Feb. 4, 

 1970 



«* See Richard Judv "The Economists," and John Hardt and Theodore Frankel, "The 

 Industrial Managers," In H. Q. Skllllng and Franklyn Griffith, eds., Interest Groups m 

 Soviet Politics (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1971). 



