One of the major industries in a planned economy is the planning industry. Itself in essence immune to planning, it lives parasitically on the whole economy, developing vested interests of its own, as shown by the resistance of the planning bureaucracy to economic reforms that cut into its prerogatives.

      It is glandular in growth, this planning industry, outrunning all others in rate of expansion by wide margins. The disease has been reduced to an arithmetical formula by a well known mathematician, Professor V. M. Glushkov, vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Science—a formula that, significantly, is very widely quoted in the USSR in these worrisome times. If unchecked, he calculated, the volume of planning tends to increase at least as the square of national output, so that by 1980 it would have grown 36-fold, requiring the services of the whole population!

      The prospect is intriguing: a society in which everybody plans for nobody. Already there is an element of truth in the fantasy—so many of the planners are engaged in useless motion. The system generates armies of clerks, accountants, controllers, all splashing about in a paper ocean; armies of bureaucrats raveling and unraveling red tape.

      Official statistics show administrative personnel of 1,300,000 in the central planning apparatus and its direct agencies, but there are hundreds of republic, regional, and local committees, bureaus, party commissions involved in the planning process. Western specialists place the aggregate planning bureaucracy at between seven and ten million. (177) Some Soviet experts go even higher—N.P. Fedorenko, head of the Central Institute of Mathematical Economics, estimated about twelve million persons in "the sphere of administration" related to planning. But additional millions in all enterprises, down to the lowest, must give part or all of their time to keeping up with the vagaries of the plan.

      Every private business director knows how much time and money goes into formulating even short-range planning and budgeting for a single firm. It is an obligation inherent in ownership.

      But the USSR is history's most colossal super-monopoly, the single owner and manager of everything, attempting to prescribe for and synchronize the whole economic universe of a big nation. Here, too, it is an obligation deriving from ownership. Total state ownership was not instituted to make possible total planning, but the other way around: a single plan was needed to serve and fortify a single state-owner. Under communism, political planning, as Djilas has made clear, takes precedence over economic planning:

      The same handful of men at the apex responsible for the economy, it should be borne in mind, must also manage the multitudinous activities of the ruling party and government, education, the armed forces and oversized police establishments, foreign affairs and (insofar as it can) the world communist movement. Each of these in itself calls for planning and for coordination with one another and with the economy.

      How can they possibly carry out such a gargantuan, task? The answer is that they can't and don't. At most they try to plan the small part of the economic iceberg above water. The rest unavoidably is left to its own devices, theoretically in harmony with plan guidelines, in practice distorting and nullifying much of what is planned. All the same, the dimensions of the job keep growing until, as now, they threaten to choke the economy.

      Those abroad passionately sold on planning (there are few in the Soviet Union) take a naively superficial view of it all. Instead of leaving things to the "anarchy" of a free market, directives are issued from on high, and millions of enterprises carry them out. (178) What could be simpler?

      The reality is more complicated. The relations between resources and supply allocations, between specialized skills available and production targets, between consumer needs and producer capacity, the fixing of prices on an infinite number of commodities and services—in a free-market economy these and myriad other inter-relations are adjusted almost automatically. In a planned economy they represent monumental problems which the forty-year Soviet test has shown to be insoluble.

      Ever since Stalin made it famous, from 1928 forward, intellectuals in the advanced West and in backward areas alike have been dazzled by planning as an idea. It was "the mystique of planning," more than Marxism as such, that gripped their imaginations. It seemed to promise "order" in place of a freewheeling economy marked by inequality of income and occasional recessions and depressions. Theory was de-emphasized in their thinking in favor of the supposedly "practical" side: a command economy under a Supreme Bookkeeper. Like all converts to a new belief, they closed their eyes to its shortcomings.

      In late 1932, an eminent American economist, Stuart Chase, published a book, A New Deal, which ended with these amazing words: "Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking the world?" From the context it was clear that he was referring, in the first place, to the planned economy. The lucky Russians were then "having fun" in extraordinary ways: dying by the million in a man-made famine, crowding into hideous slave-camps, queuing up for hours in all weathers for their meager rations. 1 was among them as a reporter and didn't find the amusements too hilarious.

      At a later time, when he was moved to deplore certain Soviet atrocities, the celebrated French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre, was careful to reaffirm his faith in planning. Even if there is "absolute horror" in Russia, he declaimed, "we shall not condemn them while they continue to assure access to Reason in the conduct of economy."

      These are just two samples of irrational confidence in the magic of planning. "It is an extraordinary testament," one analyst sadly concludes, "to the power of words over facts, of ideas over evidence, that these views should be so strongly held." (179) Dr. Colin Clark has written: "It took people a long time to understand that the word 'plan' in Soviet Russia did not mean what we call a plan at all, but meant a sort of manifesto, designed primarily to provide a political stimulus, but bearing little relation to the ascertained facts of the situation, or to any prospects which might intelligently be expected." And he, too, wondered why it "aroused such uncritical enthusiasm among Soviet well-wishers in the Western countries."

      In the more rational mood of recent Soviet years, forced upon the regime by its economic troubles, the costlier defects and contradictions of the system have been up for public examination. No matter how painstakingly various adaptations of elementary capitalist techniques are trimmed with "socialist" labels, every uttered criticism casts doubt on the basic principles of total planning and is another nail in its coffin. But the funeral is still far off. No one in the USSR proposes, no one dares propose, as long as Marxism-Leninism is official state dogma, that the whole business be properly buried.

• Built-in Fallacies

      There are, in the Soviet Union, according to the official journal Planned Economy, close to two million enterprises. The top 200,000, classed as census industry, produce about twenty million separate items. The central planning apparatus, "Gosplan, works up annual and long-term directives for only 18,000 commodities, less than one-tenth, of one per cent of the total.

      The rest are fitted into the overall plan, in theory at least, at lower levels-—countrywide, regional, local—through species and sub-species of trusts, commissions, committees, bureaus, comprising what one American economist calls "a crazy-quilt of subordinate and supplementary planning agencies several layers thick." Egregious failures in gathering and processing information, often falsified at its source through fear or greed, lead to unrealistic targets.(180) In the nature of a process so complex and overlapping, error, self-serving distortion, and duplication breed inefficiency and at points full chaos.

      But the figures cited above do not compass the entirety of a huge nation's economy. In the London Survey of April, 1956, Dr. Leon Smolinski explores the all but incalculable number of economic activities that lie outside the patterns of planning—compensating in some measure (at shocking cost) for its inadequacies.

      First, there is the universal practice by factory management of fabricating their own secondary supplies, because they dare not trust other sources to make deliveries at the proper time or of the proper kinds. To fulfill plans, "Soviet factories tend to grow into highly integrated empires which, instead of getting their semi-manufactured products, such as castings, forgings, spare parts, from large-scale, efficient, specialized outside suppliers, produce them in their own plants, on an uneconomically small scale ... at a prohibitive cost."

      Every factory thus is likely to maintain a series of auxiliaries. It costs ten to twenty times as much, for example, to produce screws and nuts on a tiny scale than in big specialized plants. But what is cost when the plan itself is at stake? Practically all machine tool factories have their own forge shops, whereas in the United States only fourteen in a thousand have them.

      Second, along with the industrial "giants" there are large numbers of small, outmoded units. In the Russian republic alone, supplementing the dozens of huge modern rolling mills, there are in operation eighty small ones, dating from the nineteenth and even the eighteenth century. Their productivity per worker is fantastically low, but in its anxiety for plan fulfillment, the trust dares not close down even the smallest and most inefficient operations under its control.

      The same holds true for other trusts. In the electric industry, the planners focused on large district stations and their output has steadily increased. At the same time there are 53.000 pygmy stations with average capacity of 50 kilowatts, maintained and added to despite the fact that their power costs ten to twenty times more.(181)

      "Eighteenth-century steel mills and 50-kilowatt stations," Dr. Smolinsld attests, "continued to crowd the path of Soviet industrialization and lower the overall efficiency with which Soviet industry operates." He does not add, because it is implicit, that in a competitive economy, the uneconomical antiques would have been driven out of existence.

      Even in the most modern undertakings, as Soviet economists constantly point out, auxiliary functions— shipping, office work, repair facilities, etc.—are often as primitive and costly as in the distant past. The abacus, a medieval wooden calculating frame, can be found in many an industrial "giant." In some offices, Professor A.L. Liusternik has written bitterly, the main change since Peter the Great's time is that pens are used instead of quills.

      Inflation is "the syphilis of a planned economy," Trotsky once warned, because money values "express the will of bureaucracy and not the amount of socially necessary labor expanded." And inflation has been a constant, ever worsening, in the Soviet Union. Soviet planners fix as many as eight million prices (seven hundred for cherry preserves alone, Pravda reported). But the prices are arbitrary and useless to management, since they do not reflect true costs. A French economist and socialist, Andre Philip, was astonished to learn during a Soviet visit in 1956 that prices for various commodities were often decided by consulting foreign mail-order catalogs.

      It was possible to pretend that overall planning made logic in an earlier stage, when quantity was the only criterion of accomplishment. Rewards and punishments (including the death penalty) could be distributed by merely weighing and measuring. Obviously, the more primitive an economy, the more easily it lends itself to central direction. But as the economy grows larger and more complex, more and more concerned with quality, precision, diversity, synchronization of its parts, planning becomes more difficult—until it approaches impossibility.

      A cartoon in an East European communist country has a child saying, "Mom, I want to read a fairy tale," and Mom replies, "Then read your daddy's plan fulfillment reports."(182) The temptation to fill out with doctored bookkeeping the margins of failures in actual output is too strong for thousands of managers.

      Stalin set the style when his Izvestia said, in November, 1929, "Let us put statistics on socialist rails in order that they shall not be detached from the class struggle." This meant lying in figures to confound the enemy and the public. It is the economic counterpart of "socialist realism" in literature, depicting Soviet life as it should be, not as it is, and it plays havoc with a plan. Finally, the Kremlin, while, holding to this rule in literature, has disowned it in economics and is now engaged in a campaign against "successes" on paper that mask failures in reality.

      It is a matter of official record that for decades factories have exaggerated their needs, then hoarded the materials, equipment, and spare parts as insurance against shortages in the future. Many plants have stockpiles sufficient for two or three years of future production. Mountains of capital goods are thus tied up unproductively.

      At the same time management of enterprises has underestimated capacity. The lower it can keep the planned goals, the more easily it can over-fulfill them to win praise and bonuses. It has steered clear of innovations, since retooling is time-consuming, and temporarily at least, retards output. In general, initiatives are risky—there is always the chance of failure that might be called sabotage—and industry directors prudently avoid them.

      Enterprises skimp on variety in commodities, holding sizes, shapes, and colors down to a minimum. The smallest possible assortment makes for larger bulk production.

      Above all, they give quantity the priority over quality. Better quality can be commanded and exhorted, but it cannot be minutely planned for millions of products. Under true market conditions the customer is the judge: if he cannot obtain what he wants from one supplier, he turns to another. There is no such natural selection of the best in a monopoly economy.

      Without the balance wheel of demand and supply, the state swings between deficit and excess! (183) Some years ago, for instance, the government took note of grumbling about the lack of simple sewing machines, and orders went out for their production. In due time so many flooded the country that they are still being bought up to use as small tables, of which there is a great shortage.

      The difficulties of national planning have been mirrored in unceasing revisions of its structure and apparatus. It has shifted repeatedly from centralization to de-centralization and back again, in the quarter century from the start of the First Five-Year Plan, six different men held the top planning post, that of chairman of Gosplan USSR. Of these, four were executed and a fifth, Kuibishev, died under unexplained circumstances while he was under investigation. Under Khrushchev and his heirs, the planning chiefs, in theory seeing far ahead for a great nation, have held their posts for an average of only eighteen months.

• A Self-Perpetuating Moloch

      Can these and endless other inherent ills of planning be cured without killing the patient? Today, that is the heart of the Kremlin's economic dilemma.

      Examples of the chronic ailments and the proliferating bureaucracy have filled the Soviet press and official lectures year after year, without the slightest effect. Western analysts with access to the communist press have no dearth of authentic data in this area. Professor Albert Parry of Colgate University, in his book The New Class Divided, published in 1966, could write:

      This kind of thing is not exceptional but fairly standard. According to the Soviet Economic Gazette (November 17, 1962), construction plans for one region were changed five hundred times in a single year. The Ministry of Lumber asked its client enterprises to fill out 118 different forms, containing 400,000 indices. The Moscow Likhachev auto plant, in order to obtain its annual supply of ball bearings from the GPZ factory next door, had to furnish four hundred pounds of supporting evidence. About 100,000 tons of metal are shipped out of the Leningrad region and about half of it is then re-imported for local uses.

      No one, from the highest to the lowest, makes the slightest decision without piling up documents to prove that it had been authorized by the proper instances. Should things go wrong, you must be in a position to disown responsibility. If you can possibly avoid decisions entirely, by passing the buck to a higher planning level, so much the better. "Moscow doesn't believe in tears," an old Russian saying has it.

      The result is self-protective paper work and perpetual meetings—a Soviet director spends from half to two-thirds of his working time outside his factory "conferring," though he knows from experience that the conference will yield only more resolutions agreeing to do better. Documents on the distribution of tires go through thirty-two separate units; and with every change in plans this whole road of thirty-two stations has to be traveled again.

      Speaking at a meeting of workers from industry and construction, on April 24, 1963, an official declared: "Many important affairs, continue to flounder in a pile of paper. In the first quarter of the current year, the Sovnarkhoz [Council of National Economy] of the RSFSR, for example, sent off to the oblast and krai [smaller political regions] more than 120,000 letters, resolutions and directives; that is, daily out of the Council came 1,600 documents."(185)

      The authoritative journal Planned Economy attested in 1962: "There are so many corrections made that the plan as it was drawn up by the planning organ and approved by others no longer exists." Pravda, on July 25, 1963, confirmed this chaos: "In 1962 alone, Gosplan RSFSR changed the gross output plan of the Leningrad Sovnarkhoz 32 times, made 65 changes in its commodity production plan and 52 in its cost-of-production plan. We are still feeling this year the repercussions of such planning." Izvestiya reported on April 6, 1961: "The issue of a new model of footwear or clothing has to be sanctioned by the Artistic Council, the Commerce Ministry, the Bureau of Prices of the Gosplan, the Institute of Scientific Research."

      One textile plant received plan orders and counter-orders forty times in a single year. A factory making parts for tractors was rewarded for over-fulfillment of its target figures, then punished when it was discovered that it had done so by cutting the useful life of its products by half. Workers in the ZIL auto plant in Moscow were commended for reducing the weight of the car by one hundred kilograms, then had their wages clipped because the planned goals were set up in tons.

      In some machine-building factories, the plans have included as many as 40,000 "indicators," requiring three months of effort by large staffs to process—after which revisions begin pouring in from various planning groups. In the end, many industrial specialists complain, the plan ceases to make much sense and the director does the best he can, ignoring some directives and interpreting others to his own purposes.

      Technological ignorance, compounded by hectoring pressures from many uncoordinated offices, muddles everything. Inadequate and insufficient transportation, recognized by the government as one of the weakest links in the economic chain, often pulls the very foundation from under planned activities. Mining enterprises have been caught adding rock to ore in order to meet their quotas for output. (186) The famous Magnitogorsk steel complex, "The Pittsburgh of Soviet Russia," receives its coal from sources two thousand kilometers away. Mines of enormous potential have been put out of use through the exploitation of easily accessible areas in such a way that access to the rest was blocked. The White Sea Canal, "the longest canal in the world," constructed with slave labor at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, still has pathetically little traffic.

      While lowlier activities, say those of window-cleaners and charwomen, are not planned at all, most aspects of national life are hopelessly over-planned. Even the work of research laboratories, in most cases, is still blueprinted to the last detail. A scientist or technologist who stumbles on a new idea has to cut his way through forests of red tape before he is allowed, if ever, to deviate from the plan to pursue it. One can understand why, as the Moscow Voprosy Ekonomiki revealed in 1963: ". . . from the time of a scientific discovery to the time of its industrial acceptance takes about eight or nine years." This is at least twice the lead-time in advanced non-planned countries.

      The ever-proliferating bureaucratic machinery produces such a nightmarish maze that one wonders, in reading about it, how anything gets done. In the system of distribution, the intermediary organizations run literally into thousands. In a single year (according to Planned Economy, 1963) the Chief Supply Directorate of the USSR added 229 new units: "The number of supply and sales organizations in separate districts, territories and economic regions is reaching astounding proportions. For example, as of October 1, 1962, there were 669 supply and sales organizations employing 11,600 workers in the Rostov area, and in the Don district, 523 of these organizations employing 16,000 workers."

      No one item of red tape, misbalance, delay, confusion, excess and shortage, loss in capital and in raw stuffs, may mean much In a gigantic economy. But thousands of them taken together, manifest in every branch of economic endeavor, make a tragic joke of the extravagant claims for centralized planning. (187)

• Fighting the Injection

      Every infection or bodily disorder, we are told, tends to produce antibodies to fight its ravages. Soviet agriculture has been saved from complete debacle by a tiny private sector-—about three per cent of the nation's cultivated acreage. Planned industry, too, has its antibodies, in part tolerated but mostly illegal. They take up some of the slack in the planned economy. They provide an outlet for enough individual initiative to cushion the impact of socialist failure and scarcity, some means for "getting around" the roadblocks and absurdities of planning.

      At least four of the antibodies are perfectly familiar to every Soviet citizen. They are the tolkach, blat, vzyatka, and most important, the "underground capitalist," or black-market economy. These are all interrelated, one shading into the other.

      Tolkach means a "pusher," but in the Soviet setting may be more accurately described as a "fixer." Every payroll large enough to accommodate some extra employees has one or a few fixers. Sometimes they are paid by one enterprise but assigned to work at another, or to maintain helpful liaison with many outfits in another city. At other times they are headquartered in the employing organization and available for trouble-shooting wherever it may be needed.

      This ubiquitous and invaluable tolkach enables producing or distributing units to deal directly with one another, bypassing the slow-moving bureaucracy of planned state channels. He scrounges for deficit parts, materials, tools, when the authorized sources do not have them or are too immobilized by red tape to make deliveries. He unclogs bottlenecks. He makes sure that supplies for his factory are not diverted to another, or conversely, diverts products earmarked for someone else to his own employer.

      The value of the tolkach (who often manages to draw several salaries and expense money to match) depends on his skill as a manipulator, his wide acquaintance among key officials and managers in his field of operation; on competence, contacts, charm, and an easy conscience. (188)

      While the fixers from time to time get lambasted in the official rhetoric, they are not illegal. In any case, the tolkach is far too useful in keeping an unwieldy machine running to be repressed. Nobody can know how many of them there are, but hundreds of thousands is a safe guess. In the city of Dnepropetrovsk, the metallurgical complex employs four thousand, the machinery industry, three thousand.

      Blat, in its Soviet usage, is a catch-all word that covers infinite varieties of influence and "pull" to get things done. Friendly mutual help on a quid pro quo basis is part of it: the manager of a plant, for instance, exchanges nails of which he has a surplus for glass from a manager who needs nails. Whom you know counts for more than cash in the pocket in circumventing the road-blocks of bureaucracy, obtaining permissions, documents, admission to special schools, a hundred other favors. At the time I resided in Russia, a popular synonym for blat was bukva Z: the "letter Z" standing for znakomstvo, "acquaintances."

      Vzyatka means simply bribery. Illegal in any form, it is tolerated at the lower financial levels. A few rubies slipped to the clerk will speed up the issuance of a document— nothing is done in the USSR without some official piece of paper. When a railway or airplane ticket is not available, twenty or thirty rubles to an intermediary quickly produces one. Well-heeled parents of scholastically backward children can get them into college notwithstanding; the payoffs, if the Soviet press is to be believed, have run into many thousands of rubles.

      There is hardly anything, in the words of Krokodil, a Moscow satire journal, "that the bribers do not make into a business proposition. They accept money for everything, for a petty little service and for their friendly attentions, for a ray of hope and for a lost conscience . . . . You want to work in a beauty parlor—you pay. You want to get a diploma for so-called courses for raising qualifications— again, you pay. You want to insure yourself against being dismissed—pay over and over again." All of it is outside the bounds of the state plans, of course, yet it saves the planned society from utter paralysis. (189)

      So while it is unlawful, it is permitted up to a point. But large-scale or persistent bribery is another matter. Always subject to heavy punishment, a decree issued in April 1962 made it a capital crime "under particularly aggravated circumstances." The system thrives despite death penalties, as Soviet press reports make quite apparent, and the guilty include highly-placed party and government officials, prosecutors and court functionaries.

      Finally there is that nether world of private enterprise. Beneath the planned surface, a runaway Soviet diplomat wrote, "There are immense processes that defy the Marxist theories—processes to which the Soviet leaders, like it or not, have to accommodate themselves." That this anti-regime phenomenon has become wider and more daring in the intervening period has been sufficiently evidenced, in the last decade, by decrees making some of this private zeal punishable by death.

      A thick book chronicling the ingenious and frequently prodigious schemes for self-enrichment could be drawn from the Soviet press, though it reports only the worst cases. Red China has had a field day in its anti-Kremlin propaganda by simply disseminating such proofs of capitalist tendencies picked from Soviet sources. Groups of artisans, supplied with materials and machinery by conniving functionaries who share in the profits, make and sell every conceivable consumer product that happens to be in special demand. Factories divert substantial portions of their output to the black market, with the help of conniving accountants. There have been instances of private trade in horses, grain, and especially building materials now that the state permits the construction of small country houses for personal use.

      In one case in the Kirghiz Republic, leading officials condemned to death had stolen "state and social property to the value of more than thirty million rubles" (three million in the devalued ruble) and disposed of it through underground channels. Firewood and lumber are sold privately by groups set up like conventional capitalist companies, and they do a business to the tune of hundreds of thousands of rubles a year. (190) "In the building trades," a report by the Institute for Study of the USSR, based on Soviet sources, has stated, "shady deals are on such a scale, that whole towns have been built from stolen materials, originally intended for the construction of state-owned housing." References to "underground millionaires" in the press tell the story.

      In hoodwinking and defrauding the state the sky is the limit. Most of the esoteric private economic schemes could never be launched and maintained without the help of influential officials and inspectors. Frequently the public prosecutors are themselves deeply involved. Corruption in government is no novelty under any system of life. But in a country where everything from a newsstand to the largest industrial trust is "government," and where the economy is planned, corruption has deeper implications. In a crude fashion, it represents the supply generated by demand, where the plan does not do the job. The basic motivation, of course, is personal aggrandizement and the moral fiber of the nation is obviously weakened. But the inner justification is that the state is the enemy and "people must live."

      Perhaps the most significant fact, sociologically, is that a state can plan the economy, but not the response of human beings. A Norwegian scholar, Professor T. Frederick Barth of the University of Bergen, speaking in Pittsburgh recently, said, "No matter how detailed central planning may be, at one point local individuals take over and try to mold the system to their needs." He was not referring specifically to Soviet Russia, but there his words are exemplified every day and in every place.

      The vast majority of the Soviet citizenry have been born and raised under Soviet communism, taught from the kindergarten up to despise private trading, yet the instincts for personal gain are as strong as in any other part of the world, perhaps stronger because of the universal poverty. Even young children, Komsomolskaya Pravda complained, seem to develop a merchandising impulse. (191) They start innocently by collecting and swapping postage stamps, for instance, then begin to trade rare specimens for cash and accumulate the proceeds with adult passion. The Kremlin blames its indoctrinators, foreign broadcasts, leftovers from the past, but maybe the biggest leftover is human nature.

Ë Electrons to the Rescue

      To avoid being swamped by the sheer volume of planning imposed by the size and growing technological nature of the economy, some Soviet economists and scientists look hopefully to electronic computers, whole battalions of them. Notes of desperation run through their proposals and conjectures. In the background is recent Soviet experience with automation, and it hardly sustains optimism. The same sloppiness of state operation that generally affects production takes its toll from automated branches. Breakdowns are, if anything, more frequent, due to unclean lubricants and general inefficiency in maintenance.

      Besides, the very magnitude of the task defeats the hope. All the world's computer manufacturers combined could not fully meet. Soviet needs, even if the country could afford the costs and provide the trained personnel. A Western student of the problem, Jan S. Prybyla, has said:

      Of course, limited areas of planning could, in theory, be assigned to computers. Again, effectiveness would depend on the accuracy and pertinence of the inflow of information, which, however, has been notoriously inaccurate, frequently tainted by misrepresentation at its source, and further tampered with on its long and circuitous journey to the top. (192) One Soviet professor has declared that to play a meaningful role computer output would have to be increased thirty-six-fold—but its reliability would have to be increased a thousand-fold.

      A top cybernetics specialist, writing in Izvestia (July 11, 1966), complained about "the low reliability of computers and ancillary devices, and the sub-standard quality of magnetic tapes." The best Soviet-made computers, he said, "operate only a few hundred hours between failures, while ancillary devices break down practically daily, and the information stored on tape cannot be stored without some loss for more than a month." It is easy to understand why the Kremlin, is so eager to import Western and Japanese equipment in this field. By its own admission, the Soviet Union has not yet learned to make dependable electronic tubes.

      The dream of an electronic Leviathan to pull them out of the swamps of planning is a symptom of the spreading panic, as skepticism about the whole system grows. While wonder machines might accelerate the tempo of an economic procedure, they cannot overcome the inherent fallacies. The computer is a tool, not a substitute for economic reason.

      Meanwhile, obsolescence of plants and equipment and the slowness of the processes of replacement further confuse the planning. At some point, in a normal economy, the construction of new productive capacity, which accounts for so much of Soviet statistical "triumphs," must be slowed down in the interests of consumption. That point apparently has not been reached in the USSR. It had been expected, from Stalin's initial plan forward, that construction of heavy and intermediate industry would, in proper time, automatically start a flow of consumer products. The expectation has not been realized. It is as if the big industry were cannibalizing itself—construction for construction's sake. There is, so to speak, no end-product.

      On the Soviets' fiftieth birthday, with nearly forty years of planning to look back upon, the belief seems unanimous in the country that it is not functioning well, and, in many respects, growing more unwieldy. (193) The differences of opinion are those of degree.

      The responsible leaders can no longer hide the paradox of huge stocks of unsalable goods along with chronic shortages; mountains of equipment being outdated while awaiting installation; unfinished construction deteriorating as bureaucrats try to remember what it was intended for; surging technological change in the outside world which the Soviet system, frozen by bureaucratic habit and indifference, can absorb tardily, if at all; transportation snags of every variety. Among the more knowledgeable citizens allusions to the magic of planning is good for a laugh.

      One need not preclude the theoretical possibility that some nation somewhere may one day apply successfully some of the basic principles of planning. It is being done on a reduced scale, through money controls and other devices, in the mixed economies of certain capitalist countries— how effectively is a subject of serious debate in every one of those countries. But all-out central planning, nationwide and monolithic, has proved itself, after four decades, as essentially impractical and inoperative.

      On the frozen swamplands of Siberia close to the Arctic Circle, swept by cruel blizzards, there is a ghost railroad— some 550 miles of rusted rails, caved-in stations, bridges and barracks, a few derelict locomotives and cars. The Dead Road, Izvestia called it on July 14, 1960, and this is the title of an article in the magazine Novy Mir in 1964 by A. Frobozhin, an engineer-surveyor who worked on the project.

      The railroad, abandoned and decayed, is of no earthly economic use. It was built entirely by slave labor, from early 1949 until Stalin's death four years later, in temperatures of 60°F. below zero under conditions of horrifying hardship. Every stick of wood and pound of metal had to be hauled across thousands of miles of almost impassable terrain and through waterways that are ice-free only for a few months in the year. (194) The slaves died like flies, but new contingents were brought in from the huge Arctic prison camps to take up their futile and murderous task.

      How did this man-killing monstrosity come to be?

      Stalin, with some fatuous notion that a railroad paralleling the Arctic seas would support his Far North maritime trade, where the waters are open only about two months a year, had ordered the construction. No one dared question his wisdom and the job went on, year after year, almost forgotten in Moscow, taking its brutal toll in death and suffering.

      Today the Dead Road stands as a sinister symbol of the inhumanity, the wastefulness, and the essential imbecility of industrial activity under totalitarianism—of the arbitrary decisions by "infallible leaders" that pass for centralized planning. Neither Izvestia nor Novy Mir spelled out these lessons, but their readers, we may be sure, drew the proper moral from the fantastic story. Its publication was intended as an example of Stalin's "mistakes," but it is no less an example of the dangers of economic enterprise without natural market controls. (195)