Pravda since the Central Committee plenum SINCE THE January Central Committee plenum that marked the consolidation of Gorbachev's new course, the Soviet CP's official organ, Pravda, has been continuing and widening a campaign for the new policies.
Articles and statements dealing with domestic matters have ceased to be merely bureaucratic litanies, and give the impression that the leadership is actually trying to talk to, and convince, at least the cadres and the intelligentsia.
Unattractive realities are being admitted. That was notable in the material published on the all-union congress of trade unions at the end of February, the most important event since the Central Committee plenum. GERRY FOLEY
USSR without the participation of the work collective. Sociological studies have shown in a number of enterprises that a large part of the workers lack any clear idea of how the wage fund is accumulated and distributed.... In such circumstances, how can we seriously expect the participation of all the workers in the introduction of new methods of management?"
At the same time, Shalaev called for political control going deeper into the working class. "We must support the efforts of the workers themselves to introduce discipline and order. In this connection, it is especially important to support in every way the initiatives of brigades that have accepted responsibility for giving a collective guarantee of productive discipline.
"In the Severskii pipe factory in the Sverdlovsk oblast' since the initiative was introduced, lost worktime in the factory has decreased by seven times, absenteeism by eight times, and the number of violations of social order by 200 per cent.... The VTSSPS and the USSR State Labor Committee [Goskomtrud], along with the local party organs have taken measures to propagate the experience of the Sverdlov oblast' people in other territories of the country....
"That makes the Production and Social Discipline - Collective Guarantee Movement an important factor in reinforcing the collective bases of our life. The trade-union councils and committees are obliged to take the principle of organizing this movement to every collective."
Further on in this section of his report (entitled "Resolutely Reconstruct the Educational Work of the Unions"), Shalaev stressed: "At the center of our attention must always be the questions of patriotic and internationalist education."
What he meant by internationalism" immediately became clear: it was combating national feeling among the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. There has in fact been a lot of combating "nationalism" among non-Russian peoples and not much sign of fighting Great Russian nationalist sentiments, evidence of which is hardly difficult to find.
The example that Shalaev chose was that of the Kazakhs, the outburst of nationalist feeling touched off when the Kazakh party secretary was removed in December and replaced by a Russian:
"Not infrequently, trade-union organizations, especially among the student youth, as was the case in
Alma Ata [the capital of Kazakhstan], have taken passive positions toward manifestations of localism, narrow nationalism and nationalist vainglory."
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In his report to the congress, published in the February 25 issue of Pravda, the union chief AS Shalaev stressed the poor performance of the economic authorities in providing housing:
"We can no longer reconcile ourselves to the fact that many ministries, departments and building organizations systematically, year after year, violate the government's plans for housing construction.
"In the last six years, not once have the housing construction plans of the Ministry of Coal Mines, of Light Industry, of Machine Construction for Light, Food Industry and Household Appliances, of the Machine-Tool and Instruments Industry, of Appliance Construction, Means of Automatization and Management Systems been fulfilled."
Furthermore, there had been numerous and serious violations of the rules governing management of housing funds.
"In the recent period, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions [VTSSPS] organized a review of 14 thousand enterprises. Some facts came to light about violations of the housing law and various departures from the established rules. And in most cases, they occurred with the complicity of the unions, owing to a lack of principle on the part of the union committee chairs and a lack union committee chairs and a lack
International Viewpoint 23 March 198 of collective leadership and openness."
The union chief also pointed to corrupt practices in allocating vacation trips: "In many union organizations in the Tadzhik and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics and in Astrakhan, Tiumen and Orenburg oblast's and the Khaborovsk territory, trips have been alloted purely on the say so of the union committee chairs; there has been a lack of collective leadership and openness in this area. It has even happened that some union workers have been assigned vacation trips on the basis of personal relationships. That has aroused just remonstrances from the workers. Call for greater working class political control
Shalaev devoted a special point to women: "In the next five year plan there are already real possibilities for actually freeing women from physically hard and harmful work."
He evoked the need for democracy in general terms several times. For example: "It is impermissible for questions around improving the forms of economic and social work and planning to be decided by narrow circles of administrative personnel, L
It should be remembered that up until now the bureaucratic rulers have faced active and enduring mass opposition only from defenders of the national rights of non-Russian peoples. For example, there were tens of thousands of people in Georgia and Armenia who demonstrated openly against the draft of the new Soviet constitution, adopted in 1977, which originally would have removed Leninist guarantees for the languages of non-Russian peoples.
Attacks on "nationalistic" articles
It is notable how often the names of the Central Asian republics come up when the Soviet press is mentioning problems of corruption. Of course, it would be logical that in conditions of national oppression, standards of public morality would be lower. All over the world, the local agents of an outside power tend to be charlatans and thieves. But it is also generally true that oppressed peoples prefer that these agents at least be of their own nationality.
The December 18-19 demonstrations in Alma Ata obviously alarmed the Gorbachev leadership. This theme came up many times in Pravda in February and early March.
In the February 11 issue, for example, there is a long article under the rubric "Party Life, Review of the Press, " entitled "The Price of Self-Love." It was an attack on the Kazakh language press for failing to combat "nationalistic" moods. The author, T. Esil'baev, wrote: "The majority of the [Kazakh] papers and magazines have not had a system for teaching about the questions of internationalist education As a rule, these publications did sort ••. of campaign on the occasion of holidays. But this is not a subject to be taken up occasionally, but a vital political task that requires constant attention....
"It is clear that most press organs treated this important question only in a formal way."
Some did worse: "In many newspapers and magazines published in the Kazakh language — especially Kazakhstan Ayel'deri ["'Kazakh Women"/, Madinet Zhane Turmys ["Culture and Life"l ... only Kazakh names are to be seen, and the pictures generally only show representatives of the original nationality. This one-sided representation of the life of the multinational republic hardly helps educate people in an understanding of the unity of interests of all Soviet people." 10
Worce still. "On December 10, Worse still: "On December 1986, the article Welcome to Er-
Tostik' was published in Vechernaya Alma Ata [in Russian] . . • about the opening of a kindergarten. The author did not hide a feeling of enthusiasm... "There they are, the future masters of this splendid stone palace. Black-eyed, smiling, happy.'
"Further on, the paper reports that 'all instruction ... will be in
Kazakh, as the children themselves and their parents wanted' .... And that is said about two five-year-old kids who have hardly learned to talk
.... One wonders, is it necessary to publish such material propagating national specificity even from kindergarten age?"
In the March 5 Pravda, a so-called
Kazakh national writer, Abdizhan
Nurpeisov, seems to try to strike a balance. There is a problem, he says, about rural Kazakh's learning Russian. But many Kazakhs in the cities are losing their native language. In the style of "national writers" in the
USSR he says that the languages of the "two brother peoples" are like
"two breasts of a common mother,"
both of which are needed to sustain a "healthy infant." But he does not say anything about Russian infants needing Kazakh, and they are certainly not losing their language.
long "theoretical article" in the February 13 Pravda took up the problem of nationalism on a more general level. It pointed especially to two problems. "Every third person in the non-Russian nationalities does not speak it [Russian] fluently.
Moreover, the spread of Russian among the original populations of the union republics has proceeded unevenly. Therefore, improving the quality of the knowledge of Russian remains a task of the day, especially among the rural populations of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Baltic."
The second problem was that "the normal process of internationalization of culture and mixing of populations can sometimes be perceived in an unhealthy way. Some representatives of the different nationalities where this is especially intensive see this process even as a threat to the survival of their national character, culture and language."
It might be noted that Esil'baev also baulked at accepting "normal processes." One of the things he objected to in the Kazakh press was a reference to the fact that the birth rates showed that the Kazakhs were becoming a majority again in Kazakhstan.
In fact, Gorbachev's first tour after the January plenum was in the Baltic republies of Latvia and Estonia where there have been strong feelings and protests against Russianization.
The Soviet leader's speech to the Estonian "aktiv" of the party, soviet and economic leaders, published in the February 22 Pravda, raised the national question in a prominent way:
"I have already had occasion to say during my stay in Latvia, and I want to tell you, that the united efforts of all the nations and nationalities of the USSR have many times over increased the possibilities of these peoples to accomplish every sort of task."
Gorbachev went on to say that the Leninist nationality policy had not always been applied without difficulties, but "the important thing is that we have created a powerful multinational flourishing state, in which extensive possibilities assured for each nationality ... We are all bound together by indissoluble ties."
"Patriotic and internationalist education"
In the March 2 Pravda, an interview appeared with I Kubilius, hero of socialist labor and rector of the
Kapsukas University in Latvia. The first question put to him was about "patriotic and internationalist education." Kubilius said that it had not been a great success:
"Not long ago, the party committee at the university analyzed the work of giving the students an internationalist and patriotic education. The conclusion was not very reassuring. Not sion everywhere have we freed ourselves from from dogmatic declamatory stereotypes...
"In the opinion of the students, teachers shy away from analyzing the complexities of national policy; and, using boring and useless phrases, talk about Latvia's contribution to the all-union chest, about the fraternal aid of the other republics and about the internationalist duty of the Latvian people."
"Patriotic and internationalist education" is obviously going to be a focus of tensions and contradictions in the "reconstruction." Judging from the Soviet press, "reconstruction" in this area seems to mean tightening up rather than liberalization. In fact, in general "liberalism" is used as a pejorative term of laxness of all types, from corruption, to undue toleration of expressions of national feeling among the non-Russian nations.
A frequently recurring theme in the weeks since the January plenum has been the need for a press that seeks out abuses and offers objective information and education in apolvino intormation and education in applying
International Viewpoint 23 March 1987
new techniques. The upcoming all
US union union congress of the journalists' union will probably be an important event.
Three journalists' congresses were held on lower levels in February -in Byelorussia, Ukraine and Moscow. The criticisms raised at the first, as reported in Pravda, concerned the failure of the press to educate about the "transformation of the material-technological base, the deepgoing reconstruction of the national economy on the basis of advances in science and technology."
The Moscow congress, on the other hand, raised more sensitive and fundamental questions:
"The journalists of Moskouskaya Pravda started a feature study on