Soviet Technology
The dominant figure in Soviet technology is a gray-haired fiftyfive-year-old physicist whose task is to introduce reason and order into a bizarre mélange of superiority, mediocrity, and ordinary deadwood. Vladimir Alekseyevich Kirillin has been described by an associate as “technology commissar.” In his spacious office on Gorky Street in midMoscow, Kirillin works beneath huge portraits of Marx and Lenin, chain-smoking Kent cigarettes unavailable to the average Russian. As chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology, he administers an $8.8 billion annual investment, and supervises the efforts of about 2.5 million people. Kirillin wields authority the unprecedented scope of which matches the dimensions of the problem he is ordered to solve.
The Russians are proud of their accomplishments in science and technology, but they are becoming impatient with the pathetically small benefits that accrue to their domestic economy from their technological investment. The contrasts stem directly from the split personality of Soviet technology. There is little flow of superior techniques or talent from military-related fields to the generally backward civilian sectors. Nor is there much traffic in the opposite direction — a flow of daring, original ideas of the kind with which small, flexible American companies prod the slower-footed industrial giants into technological change.
Buying know-how
To maintain military parity with the United States, the Russians, whose gross national product is only about 40 percent as large as ours, have had to neglect important sectors of civilian technology. Thus their supersonic airliner, though the first to be test-flown, relies heavily on British electronics; their color television, still an infant industry, is based on a French system; their biggest automobile plant is being designed around equipment supplied by Fiat, the big Italian concern.
It is Kirillin’s job to keep such foreign technology available. One method is a chain of technical “exchange” agreements with countries and companies around the world. Usually the exchanges are one-sided As a European participant describes his company’s arrangement with the Russians, “We exchange our knowhow for Russian money.”
Trade patterns support this observation. While achieving notable successes in developing missiles, nuclear explosives, and swing-wing warplanes, the Soviet Union has been pursuing a trade policy typical of underdeveloped countries. It is a net importer of machinery and licenses, and an exporter of raw materials. From Poland and Hungary, two of the less industrialized countries of Eastern Europe, Soviet imports of machinery and equipment exceed exports by more than 2 to 1. The disparity is 4 to 1 with Czechoslovakia and 6 to 1 with East Germany.
The Czech trade pattern, in fact, is probably one reason for Moscow’s military intervention in August. Czech industry, while productive enough to supply trucks and heavy industrial machinery to the Russians, cannot sell most of these products competitively in the West. Czech economic reformers seemed determined to modernize their country’s industry with Western technology and pay the West with specialized production of consumer articles.
Such a shift away from Soviet trade would deprive the Russians of a source of heavy equipment and would loosen their hold over the Czech economy. Worse, it could lead to even greater Western influence on Czechoslovakia’s politics.
With developed capitalist countries, the imbalance in Soviet trade is even more pronounced. Equally revealing is the Russians’ failure, despite enormous effort in recent years, to sell technology abroad. Japan, for example, bought 8000 technical licenses abroad from 1945 through 1967, but only half a dozen were obtained from the Soviet Union, despite a flourishing trade between the two countries.
Ball-points and the pill
Although it has no official role in trade, the State Committee on Science and Technology holds tight rein on practically all Soviet transactions involving new foreign processes and equipment. The agency played a crucial role in the 1966 contract under which Fiat is set to supervise the construction and equipping of an $800 million automobile plant on the Volga River.
The Fiat deal may be the most significant ever made by the Soviet government. It represents a massive commitment to the long-deprived consumer sector, and it constitutes a technological revelation to the Russians in that it provides their first large-scale supply of modern Western equipment since World War II. Breaking with tradition, the usually penurious Russians have ordered ample supplies of spare parts — in some instances far more than ample — in all probability for laboratory analysis.
Potential suppliers hope the new Soviet enthusiasm for consumer products will soon spread to staples which are household words in the West but collectors’ hems in Russia, such as wrinkle-resistant fibers, aerosol containers, food preservatives and coloring, effective inks for ballpoint pens, specialized rather than all-purpose detergents, dry-cleaning chemicals in which buttons and delicate fabrics have a fighting chance for survival, and perhaps even a birth-control pill.
Toehold
Foreign firms are well aware that the Russians won’t buy what they can copy. Most Companies mind such Soviet violations of capitalistic business ethics — but not enough to relinquish tenuous toeholds in the potentially vast Soviet market. A producer of dry-cleaning equipment who has been selling to the Russians for nearly a decade says he recently saw exact copies of his earlier machines displayed prominently at a Soviet trade exhibition. “The only thing they changed was the nameplate,” he adds. But he plans to continue making periodic sales trips to the Soviet Union.
Although civilian technology constitutes the major — and officially the only — interest of the State Committee, foreigners who deal with the group generally suppose that it has an important if informal function in the realm of military intelligence. Cynics recall that Oleg Penkovsky, the celebrated double agent, used his job with the committee’s predecessor as a cover for his other activities.
Another source of information about foreign technology is the trade exhibition, which in Russia bears little similarity to Western events of the same name. A Soviet trade show is a way to familiarize Soviet specialists with foreign technology without sending the Russians abroad.
Secure in the knowledge that theirs is an attractive market, the Russians can afford to demand that prospective sellers bring the best and latest equipment for display. Recent exhibitions have been built around packaging, food processing, and municipal services such as laundries and dry-cleaning machinery — sectors of the economy where Soviet expertise is particularly weak. At the fair, one task force of Soviet specialists tries to squeeze every ounce of information and expertise out of the exhibitors while another group systematically makes photographs and sketches of the machinery. At a later stage the Russians send in a fresh team of vigorous negotiators to confront the harried exhibitors; by now the latter arc anxious to get away as quickly as possible without having to crate too much merchandise for shipment home. From the Soviet point of view it’s a favorable atmosphere for a quick purchase on easy terms.
Besides acquiring foreign expertise, the State Committee supervises the development of Soviet technology and tries to hasten its notoriously slow progress from the laboratory to the production line. Three years ago a group of design engineers won a gold medal for their plans for a taxi called a Minicab; but the vehicle still exists only in prototype.
To reduce such delays, and to discourage too much diversification of technical effort, the committee has isolated 246 “priority problems” that it thinks deserve special attention. The committee’s “priority problems” cluster tightly in the fields of new materials, transportation, the generation of energy, and computers. To permit sharper focus on fields deemed most important, Kirillin’s committee can create research institutes or veto establishment of an institute anywhere in the country. “But we’re scientists too,” the chairman adds, “and sometimes we lack the willpower to resist new institutes.” The committee also apportions funds among existing establishments and lobbies for more money whenever state budgets come up for consideration.
Kirillin is in a powerful lobbying position. His committee is responsible directly to the Council of Ministers, the country’s highest executive body, where Kirillin holds the post of deputy to the chairman, Aleksei N. Kosygin. D. M. Gvishiani, Kirillin’s top deputy and chief of the committee’s international relations, is Kosygin’s son-in-law.
Through a network of interlocking directorates, Kirillin maintains alliances with other centers of Soviet scientific power. His committee’s sixty-five-member steering group includes chiefs of the Academy of Sciences and the prestigious but autonomous Academy of Medical Sciences, as well as influential figures in such “off-limits” fields as defense, space, and nuclear energy.
Kirillin avoids friction by emphasizing the “technology” part of his job. “In general,” he explains, “our main function is the introduction of new technology and of applied research and development. Our interest in basic research begins only when there are results which can be used in practice.”
Oversights
Unused results abound in the Soviet economy, even in such priority areas as computers. Visitors to the renowned Academic Town near Novosibirsk late in 1967 were amazed to encounter the Soviet Union’s fastest electronic brain, designated BESM-6, idle and only partially assembled. They learned that the machine, whose name is an acronym for “Rapid Electronic Computing Machine,” lacked magnetic disks and that none of these vital components were manufactured in the Soviet Union at that time. The center’s director, as cheerfully as possible under the circumstances, described the situation as “a bureaucratic oversight.”
Another bureaucratic blunder is blamed for the fact that only one half of the ten BESM-6 computers in existence early in 1968 were fully operative. It seems somebody in Moscow had revamped specifications for peripheral equipment — the means for tapping the computer’s store of information — too late to assure delivery on time.
Communist planners insist that such problems stem from human errors rather than from any basic defect in the system of central planning. The system does permit administrators like Kirillin to apportion the country’s human and natural resources in what seems to be the most rational manner, they emphasize. How else, they ask, could the Soviet Union have moved from backwardness to world technological leadership in such fields as hydroturbines and nuclear accelerators?
But central planning imposes drags, too. As with any large organization, a decision finally made at the top of the Soviet technology hierarchy is extremely difficult to rescind or modify. Thus, despite rigid control over education and apportionment of specialties in future graduating classes, there are shortages of trained personnel in some no longer new fields of technology. When a machine language for the BESM-6 was being developed in Moscow, only ten trained programmers and analysts were available for the task. There were wistful references to the resources available to IBM for such projects, including the services of thousands of programmers.
Another built-in obstacle in the Soviet technology system is powerful resistance at lower levels to innovations and risk-taking advocated at the top. This problem is dramatized in Moscow’s most talked about film, one which provides a rare and apparently realistic glimpse into the corridors of power in the Soviet chemical industry.
Your Contemporary depicts a conscientious executive’s losing struggle to halt construction of a huge synthetic-fiber plant which he learns is based on an obsolete process, file is overruled by planners who refuse to admit they wasted precious foreign currency on the project; by industry czars who insist that the facility, however outdated, is necessary to fulfill production norms; and most of all, by a Communist Party official who is concerned with the Party’s prestige.
At a high point in the drama the Party boss reminds the troubled executive that thousands of workers pulled up roots and moved to Siberia to build and then man the plant. “Have you thought about the authority of the Party?” he asks, pacing back and forth in front of the seated executive. “It was not you and I, but the Party which called upon them and made promises to them. Just try now to tell them that you woke up one night and realized it was all for nothing, that all their labor was wasted!”
Sure winners
This reluctance to risk capital has long plagued Soviet efforts to update their chemical technology. There is enormous pressure in favor of a sure winner; under what they call a certitude requirement, the Russians demand guaranteed production at a given level at a given time. Even in a field of such rapid technological change as chemistry, they seldom feel able to afford to take a chance on a process that has not yet been fully proven. As a result, some newly acquired technology is obsolete by the time it is put to work in the Soviet Union.
Innovation and technological progress have been most successful in single-customer fields such as defense and space, and in industries where the Soviets started virtually from scratch, such as steel, shipbuilding, and aviation. With iittle investment in old methods there were few obstacles to adopting modern techniques.
Where national security is less directly involved, and where a nationwide industry already exists, resistance to change runs deep. This is particularly true in consumer industries. Two years ago the Russians bought expensive papermaking machinery in Finland, but they still have not developed suitable feedstock as raw material for the quality equipment. Last year they bought conversion plants from a Swedish company for making paper products, but the equipment uses materials which the Russians still cannot make and which are sold only by the Swedish firm.
Rediscovering the consumer
But disregard for the consumer is dwindling. As more resources are diverted to production of household articles, the Soviet buyer is confronted, often for the first time, with the phenomenon of a selection. Occasionally he even has an opportunity to compare a domestic product with a foreign version. One embarrassing result is a mounting backlog of unsold Soviet merchandise.
Since its creation in 1962 in a modest building in suburban Moscow, the Institute of Industrial Design has expanded to include 1150 workers in ten centers across the country. Some of their designs have earned the respect of Western specialists, but few have found their way into the hands of Soviet customers. One obstacle is a shortage of quality production technology in the consumer field. As a step to remedy this, the Russians are beginning to divert some equipment and technical talent from higher-priority industries to the service of the consumer.
This infusion of top talent into the consumer field is bound to broaden Soviet technology where it is narrowest — in adapting new materials and new concepts to a greater variety of products. If the belated attention to the long-suffering Soviet consumer provides die elusive spur to technology, Kirillin and other leaders may wish they had paid more attention to the people long ago.
— Howard Rausch
REPORT CONTRIBUTORSJohn Hughes is the Christian Science MONITOR’S Far Fast correspondent. Henry Leifermann covers the Southern racial heal for UPI. Adele Smith has been a Tunisian-based reporter for the ECONOMIST.Howard Rausch writes from Moscow for the McGraw-Hill World News service.