The World: The Soviet Union: The Risks of Reform

WITH its modern marble façade and its sleek steel-and-glass lines, the Palace of Congresses seems out of place amidst the ponderous 15th century walls and onion-shaped domes of the Kremlin. In the palace's vast, streamlined auditorium Russia's rulers next week will stage one of the regime's most important political extravaganzas in some time—the 24th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. The Congress was to have been held in early 1970. It was delayed for a full year, indicating that the eleven-man Politburo, which constitutes Russia's collective leadership, has been locked in debate over some issues of major significance to the future direction of the world's second most powerful nation. The most important of these issues is bound to be whether and how the Soviet Union, in order to fulfill the rising expectations of its 242 million people, can reform its economy without risking unacceptable changes in its political system.

The vast majority of the 6,000 delegates who will file into the Palace of Congresses next week will have no say about how the problem will be resolved. But they will be given some clues—as will the rest of the world—about what the men in power may do. The Soviet delegates do not debate issues. They are elected to their posts only after careful screening and final Politburo assent. When a resolution is presented, they automatically approve it, for they know that the Politburo has already accepted it. Yet they perform a significant if largely ceremonial function. The rulers of a dictatorship need an apparatus that seems to confirm their legitimacy, a formal link to the party rank and file, and a sounding board, however limited, for their pronouncements. For the leadership, a Party Congress is an occasion to defend its record, assess the country's condition and chart the course ahead.

Congresses have frequently served as watersheds in Soviet history. At the Tenth Congress in 1921, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, which for a time allowed the peasants to sell their produce on a free market. At the 15th, six years later, Stalin consolidated his hold on power by purging Leon Trotsky from the party. At the 20th in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered the famed "secret speech" that started the wave of destalinization.

Politburo Gerontocracy

The 24th Congress may also find its way into history, for a number of far-reaching problems are coming to a head at once:

>The economy, which according to Khrushchev's boast was to have surpassed the U.S. economy last year, may stand half a trillion dollars behind America's G.N.P. by the end of 1971. More important, the Soviet consumer wants more and better goods, and he is not getting them.

>Political dissent, long forbidden in the Soviet Union, is being openly expressed not only by students and intellectuals but also by such pillars of the regime as scientists and even nuclear submariners.

>The Soviet Union has scored some impressive foreign policy successes, but they have entailed huge costs and new, perhaps dangerous responsibilities. Furthermore, in Eastern Europe it faces a potentially explosive situation.