The Trains That Couldn’t

The Soviet Union’s promised era of reform threatens to become an era of material disaster. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s plans to modernize the long-faltering economy, rather than providing Soviet consumers with a more comfortable life, have so far only produced a harsher one. Not for 30 years have state-run food stores had so few products on their shelves. Despite a 10% increase in investment in consumer goods, shortages of the most basic household items have become acute. Anything that is available is hoarded for future use or barter. Moscow is being swept by rumors of imminent food rationing.

How could matters have become so bad? Among the few things not in short supply are plausible explanations. One is that recent steps to decentralize planning have thrust much of the burden of economic decision-making on inexperienced managers and bureaucrats, with predictably unhappy results. Another is that last summer’s strikes and ethnic unrest continue to disrupt normal economic activity; among other things, coal is in short supply, possibly portending heat and electricity rationing this winter. Still another is that Soviet workers, seeing almost nothing to buy with the hundreds of billions of rubles they already hold, have no motivation to work harder or produce more. Finally, a major explanation is that the nation’s distribution system is at a point of near-paralysis.

Distribution has always been a weak link in the Soviet economy. The inadequacy of the country’s road, railroad and storage systems is dramatized anew year after year as a significant percentage of the food the country’s farmers produce rots before it can be delivered to consumers. Right now, according to railways minister Nikolai S. Konarev,25,000 fully laden freight cars are spread out across the country, stalled because freight yards are filled to capacity and key junctions are congested. One consequence is that enormous quantities of cargo are piling up at ports and on the country’s western borders for lack of transport. Among the imports yet to move to market are 500,000 tons of potatoes from East Germany and Poland, 350,000 tons of wheat, and heavy tonnages of sugar, coffee, tea and rice, along with billions of dollars of non-food consumer goods.

Konarev has not hesitated to suggest that the rail tie-up may be due to “sabotage,” a word heavy with political significance in Soviet history. In the 1930s and ‘40s, failure to meet work norms, breakage of tools and equipment and the like was as often as not attributed to deliberate sabotage, and punishments were severe. Konarev has in mind political sabotage by conservative enemies of Gorbachev’s restructuring program. As Times correspondent Michael Parks reports from Moscow, no one has felt compelled to dispute him.

In another time, the shortages and the mood of despair they are fueling might well have been seen as precursors of violent upheaval. The current dismal situation seems to be producing something else. As Mikhail L. Berger, a respected economic commentator for the government newspaper Izvestia notes, he and many like him “don’t have any trust any more, any faith that the government is going to get (us) out of this.” The Soviet Union is experiencing a consumer crisis, but there is a deepening crisis of confidence as well, and in the long run that could be decisive in determining whether Gorbachev will be able to muster the popular support he must have if his hopes for major reform are to succeed.