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FOR THE PAST few months, the Soviet news media have been full of reports
on the implementation of plans to convert the nation’s defence industries
to the production of consumer goods. The examples have varied widely. On
9 October for example, the Moscow World Service reported that a factory
in Volgograd which made SS-20 missiles is now turning to the production
of consumer goods, and has begun to produce washing machines.

A news item transmitted five days earlier had a slight air of unreality
when it told listeners that an experimental factory in Sverdlovsk which
used to make launchers for cruise missiles had been transformed to civilian
production, and that one of the first results will be ‘a production line
for making chocolate truffles’.

Throughout the Soviet Union, industrial enterprises which for the past
few decades have been dedicated to producing equipment for the Soviet military
now find themselves under instruction to diverttheir activities towards
producing items for civilian markets.

At present, consumer goods make up about 40 per cent of the output from
enterprises in the military sector, mainly because the military has the
best access to advanced production technologies. Under plans approved by
the Council of Ministers last month, this figure will be increased to 60
per cent by 1995.

The move has been widely welcomed in the Soviet Union, where the defence
budget has consumed not only between ten and fifteen per cent of the national
budget, but also the best of the country’s scientific and technical resources.
Indeed, many in the West, who have been urging similar conversion programmes
for many years, see the Soviet Union’s attempts to put such ideas into practice
as a vast experiment which could have global implications.

Yet the change is not proving to be an easy one. Conversion policies
are meeting opposition from within the military, which sees them as a potential
threat to its own long-term technological capabilities. And a growing body
of opinion in the Soviet Union is arguing that ill-considered efforts to
shift production from military to consumer goods may not be the best use
of resources.

During a debate of the Supreme Soviet Committee for Defence and State
Security, Yevgeni Velikhov, vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences,
said that it was important to focus conversion on areas where advanced technology
was already to hand. ‘We should sell competitive goods at competitive prices
on the world market and purchase required consumer goods with the currency
we earn,’ he said. ‘If we try to make everything on our own, this may result
in expensive and low-quality goods at our shops.’

A similar warning has come from an economist, A. Kireyev. In a recent
issue of Pravda, Kireyev said that ‘actions taken regardless of consequences
can lead to the destruction of existing links between technology and production’,
and what he described as ‘the swamping of technological islands in a vast
sea of mediocrity’.

The Soviet Union’s defence budget has been cut by almost 8 per cent.
Defence spending in 1990 will be 70.9 billion roubles (about Pounds sterling
70 billion), a drop of 6.4 billion roubles from the 1989 figure. Soviet
defence budgets are now much more realistic than the figure of around 18
billion roubles annually admitted by the Brezhnev regime, although they
almost certainly do not include all military expenditure. The Lithuanian
Popular Front for Perestroika, ‘Sajudis’, recently estimated that 100 billion
roubles would be needed to cover those items in the defence budget of the
US.

The Gorbachov reforms have attempted, among other things, to put the
defence establishment on a self-financing basis. This is a colossal task.
The Soviet armed forces own an enormous noncombatant support sector, including
farms, hospitals, holiday homes and kindergartens. Large numbers of national
servicemen work in civil engineering battalions, even though civilians could
do their work just as easily.

The cuts have switched much of the ‘support industry’ of the military
sector from supplying their servicemen to civilian production. In many cases,
the products have stayed the same; for example, factories making refrigeration
equipment for the military now sell it to civilian establishments. This
shift has produced a number of anomalies. The military sector has acquired
some 300 extra industrial enterprises in the process. The managers of former
military plants are not happy with the change. Not only do they have to
observe the principles of khozraschet (economic acountability); they can
no longer demand priority treatment in the supply of raw materials. At the
very time that they are being pressurised to produce more and earn a profit,
they find themselves less and less able to meet their production targets.
The Red Army daily, Krasnaya Zvezda, which covers the conversion issues
in depth, is a frequent rostrum for their complaints.

In the research sector, the situation is even more complicated. Military
research has traditionally been carried out in ‘closed’ institutes and laboratories
mainly devoted to non-classified work. But a single ‘closed’ section in
a large institution could cause difficulties for all staff and students
if, for example, they wished to travel abroad.

A number of these institutions have recently been ‘opened’ – notably
the Moscow Physico-Technical Institute at Dolgoprudny, just outside Moscow.
It sent a group of students to the Conference of the International Association
of Physics Students in Fribourg, Switzerland, this summer for the first
time.

For other institutions, the problem of military contracts still creates
difficulties. Traditionally, spin-off between military and civil science
in the Soviet Union has worked the opposite way to the West; a military
‘observer’ monitored research in a university or institute, and snapped
up anything of potential military interest. This meant that a large number
of military research contracts went to the more ‘sophisticated’ areas of
the Soviet Union, in particular the Baltic republics and Byelorussia.

It is not clear what will happen when these republics transfer to the
promised system of economic autonomy. Already, there are problems. The University
of Vilnius in Lithuania, for example, has run into difficulties after the
university authorities demanded the right to grant their own higher degrees,
rather than relying on the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK), which covers
the whole of the Soviet Union, to approve them.

Some 40 per cent of the university’s funding comes from defence-related
research contracts, and the Lithuanians have been told that if they pull
out of the VAK network, they will lose this support.

Some student activists have announced that they would, in that case,
be willing to pay for their own tuition. But this could also create difficulties,
since free higher education (repaid by three years’ work in an assigned
job) is one of the basic rights enshrined in the Soviet constitution, and
any attempt to abrogate it would be seen as dangerously ‘anti-socialist’.

One undoubted gain, albeit unquantifiable, of conversion and of the
glasnost which has made it possible is the declassification of information
essential to civilian safety. The most notable example is that relating
to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

Although it was the Army that bore the brunt of the emergency work following
the disaster, those working at the site did not have access to the know-how
acquired by those who, 29 years earlier, had dealt with the explosion at
the Kyshtym nuclear storage facility in the central Urals. Even the fact
that the Kyshtym event had taken place was at that time a military secret,
and those who had dealt with it were not called to Chernobyl until three
weeks after the accident. By that time, the mechanised techniques used by
the Chernobyl squads had actually added to the contamination by stirring
up radioactive dust which was then carried considerable distances by the
wind. If there had been less secrecy at the time, the Kyshtym ‘veterans’
are now able to say, they could have given the Chernobyl teams the benefit
of their experience from thefirst day.

An even more bizarre fact was revealed recently by the head of the Chernobyl
Information Centre, A. Kovalenko. He told a reporter from Argumenty i Fakty,
a weekly news magazine, that secrecy in 1986 was so strict that those operating
nuclear plants could not even be told that if all the control rods were
withdrawn it could lead to an explosion. All that they were allowed to know,
he said, was that it was ‘forbidden’ to draw out all the rods.

Although there had already been a similar incident at an identical reactor
in Leningrad (which just missed resulting in an explosion), such information
was considered a military secret. The top managers at Chernobyl were allowed
to know, but they were safe at home in bed when the operators made their
fatal decision.