Yet this was the major novelty of the post-Stalinist period and certainly contributed to the regime’s vitality in the 1960s. But the fact that the bureaucracy which managed the state obtained (or, more precisely, extracted) more than others, and reached an entente cordiale with the political leadership, was difficult to reconcile with satisfying the interests of workers and other social strata. Any hopes of maintaining social peace and developing the country were frustrated by a sluggish, wasteful economy. Bureaucratic planning did succeed in modernizing the economy and the ‘deal’ made with the bureaucracy enhanced its power, but did not improve its performance. Informal agreements with the bureaucrats did not constitute a policy; they amounted to a drift in a direction that aggravated the system’s ailments.
Readers are now well aware of the system’s malfunctioning and presumably keen to know what the Anti-Waste Commission proposed by way of remedies for government ministries and other agencies. For some conservatives, the indicated road was clear: the solution consisted in greater discipline – ‘law and order’, as they say in other political contexts. But this was a delusion.
From the outset, the history of state administration had been dominated by the Politburo’s endless battles to contain (and even reduce) its expansion and improve its efficiency. The Anti-Waste Commission, which had redefined its function from ‘eliminating waste’ to the rather less offensive formula of ‘saving state resources’, met with representatives of the central and republican ministries to prepare a draft proposal, taking account of the mass of data and information it had gathered on each and every branch. Its attempt to find ways of making savings in expenditure on state administration was seemingly rather courageous. Reducing the proliferating cohorts of the bureaucracy had hitherto seemed utterly impossible, given that each administrative machine was run by one of the most powerful figures in the regime. Persuading them to make cuts would be no easy matter. Moreover, some members of the Anti-Waste Commission (its membership is listed in footnote 4 below) themselves ran sizeable administrative departments.
N. Rogovsky, a noted expert and head of Gosplan’s labour department, reported on the discussions that took place during the Commission’s sessions, and they certainly involved quite a battle.[4] The Commission initially proposed to reduce administrative costs by 1,015 million roubles, but after some long and hard bargaining agreed to the lower figure of 905.3 million. For their part, the central and republican ministries would accept no more than 644 million. Detailed discussions on expenditure and staffing were conducted with each ministry separately and the same pattern invariably emerged: in each instance, the Anti-Waste Commission made concessions on the requisite cuts, while the other side gave little or nothing. Rogovsky informed the government that the majority of central ministries and republics opposed any change, preferring to leave things as they were.
As regards the number of state employees – another sticking point – the Anti-Waste Commission wanted to abolish 512,700 posts – a sizeable chunk of the total administrative workforce projected in the 1967 plan – which would have saved 590 million roubles on wages. Needless to say, the ministries affected would not hear of it.
In the defence of budgetary cuts that he addressed to the government, Rogovsky stressed one of the biggest obstacles faced by the Soviet economy: the problem of finding a balance between the population’s income and the supply of consumer goods. Reducing administrative costs would help. It is difficult not to register a certain perplexity here: eliminating half a million jobs would certainly reduce the sum total of monetary incomes, but those who lost their jobs would swell the ranks of the poor.
What actually happened? Some job cutting did occur here and there, but most of the officials affected found administrative work elsewhere or even in the same ministry. The hope entertained by some – that officials made redundant would turn to manual jobs (where there were real shortages, especially in remote regions) – was a pipe dream.
Another valuable source on the bureaucratic universe derives from the State Control Committee, which surveyed it in 1966 and made its contribution to Baibakov’s Anti-Waste Commission. It also offered a series of suggestions as to how to reduce state administrative costs. We may start with a proposal that was hidden among various other items: abolition of the benefits offered to certain categories of top officials, which would of course have produced significant savings. The State Control Committee drew up a list of the various perks that officials awarded themselves, calculated in roubles (millions of roubles, naturally) for each category of ‘service’. The list is revealing. Officials and departmental heads received a so-called ‘healthy diet’ allowance, as well as an allowance (equivalent to a month’s salary) for ‘social needs’, with vouchers for stays in sanatoriums and rest homes at reduced prices. They had at their disposal dachas, whose maintenance and repair were carried out at government expense. The State Control Committee proposed abolishing all these benefits and some even more outrageous ones enjoyed by senior military officers and their families. It was alarmed by the fact that administrative personnel had increased by 24 per cent in the last five years, bringing their total to more than 7 million (let us recall that this number referred to the hard core of the ministerial network) and the overall wage bill to 13 billion roubles. This rate of growth surpassed that of employment in general and curbing it would easily save a billion roubles.
An especially profligate branch when it came to staffing was the network of various supply agencies maintained by most ministries. The State Control Committee offered some examples, which should not be neglected if we wish to grasp Soviet realities.
Without counting those employed in stores and canteens, these departments and directorates for ‘supplying workers’ employed 36,700 people, receiving 40 million roubles a year. They could often have been closed down, and the stores and canteens directly supplied by the state’s own commercial network.
The Central Committee and Council of Ministers decreed that the problem of ‘workers’ supply’ should be addressed by a single unified system, which was already in the process of being constructed, in the hope that it would be less expensive and more efficient. But a number of ministries refused to rely on other organizations and preferred to retain their own supply channels for food, raw materials and machines, continuing to create and maintain depots and offices for supplies and marketing. Some of them bought materials and products of general industrial use from enterprises and marketed them through their own networks in other regions or republics. To take one example: the Ministry of Chemical Industry was shipping all manner of equipment and semi-finished products from its Sverdlovsk marketing office to Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Donetsk, even though such articles were available there in the local warehouses of the bodies responsible for supplies. This system, which employed many thousands of superfluous workers and issued in such irrationality, was an endless source of good jokes (we do not need the archives to know them).
We shall return to these issues of supply and marketing (snaby-sbyty),[×] in connection with one of their unforeseen consequences. First, however, let us turn to further examples of the ‘excesses’ indulged in by the ranks of the bureaucracy, and condemned as such by the State Control Committee. Among them were the ‘official trips’ (komandirovki) to Moscow – a million a year – for seminars or conferences, or even (in 50 per cent of cases) in the absence of any reason or invitation, which cost the state some 600 million roubles a year. The State Control Committee proposed to reduce the number of such trips by 30 per cent (which once again would not be easy, given that going to Moscow and enjoying its pleasures was one of the most sought-after perks). Another practice that had assumed unacceptable proportions was sending all sorts of intermediaries (khodatye i tolkachi) to finalize deals and find materials. In general, the State Control Committee deplored the fact that the measures and efforts undertaken to reduce bureaucratic ‘mobility’ had yielded no results.[5]
4
RGAE, 4372, op. 66, d. 670, LL. 175–6, 3 September 1966: the report of a session of the ‘commission for saving state resources’. Vested with considerable powers, it was chaired by Gosplan’s head, Baibakov, and included: Starovsky, head of the Central Statistical Office; Finance Minister Garbuzov; the head of Mattekhsnab (a powerful agency responsible for supplying enterprises with raw materials and technological resources), Martynov; the head of the State Bank, Poskonov; and Tchikin, one of the heads of the State Control Committee. The Committee of Labour and Wages was represented by Volokov. The report on the meeting, which took place on 21 September 1966, was signed by Deputy Prime Minister Poliansky.
*
An expression rerring to the phases of the process: the supply of goods (