The Congress of Caution

An eerie electronic whistle whined through Moscow's huge Hall of Congresses, and suddenly the unmistakable bars of the Internationale floated through the hall. The music was transmitted from Luna X, a Soviet moon probe that had been launched a week before and only twelve hours earlier had become the first spacecraft to go into orbit around the moon. At the sound, tears welled in the eyes of Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev. Jumping to his feet, he led the 6,000 Soviet and foreign delegates in rhythmic applause.

On that note, the 23rd Communist Party Congress moved into its second and concluding week. Some observers had expected it to be the watershed meeting of world Communism, where the Red Chinese would be read out of the party. Others had anticipated that it would mark a return to Stalinism. Instead, the 23rd was likely to pass into history as the Congress of Caution.

Clearly No. 1. On the Sino-Soviet front, Brezhnev had regretted the Soviet Union's "unsatisfactory" relations with Red China, but had carefully left open the door to reconciliation. Brezhnev also swapped his title of First Secretary of the Communist Party for the old Stalinist title of General Secretary, and the Presidium, or eleven-member steering committee, was renamed the Politburo--another Stalinist label. But party speakers emphasized that the names derived from Lenin's time, not from Stalin's, and would only strengthen collective leadership.

Brezhnev was confirmed by the Congress as the Soviet Union's No. 1 leader: as party chief, he was elected unanimously to the top post in the new Politburo. As chief of government, Premier Aleksei Kosygin was named to the Politburo's No. 2 post. Into the No. 3 spot moved Mikhail Suslov, 63, the lean Stalinist ideologue, whose position is enhanced by the fact that he holds a key post in the important party Secretariat.

Sharp Curtailment. The Congress, first to be held under the Brezhnev-Kosygin duumvirate, made it clear that the two men prefer to concentrate on domestic issues. They gave Khrushchev full raps for "amateurish" planning, stressed gadget Communism, which, with its emphasis on consumer goods, outdoes Khrushchev's goulash Communism. Among the production goals for the new five-year plan: 18.5 million refrigerators, 30 million radios and phonographs, 27 million television sets and 2,500,000 personal autos. Kosygin's message also disclosed how widely the free-market ideas of Soviet Professor Evsei Liberman (TIME cover, Feb. 12, 1965) have spread in the Soviet Union. Though the concepts were introduced only two years ago, 300,000 workers already work in plants run according to the profit motive. The number will increase to 700,000 by midsummer and, according to Kosygin, to 9,000,000 by 1967.

Libermanism in economics does not necessarily mean liberalism in politics. In fact, the 23rd Congress signaled a sharp curtailment of intellectual freedom, a curtailment presaged in last September's arrest and subsequent imprisonment of Authors Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky. Even as the Congress met, new reports came from Russia of the arrest and secret trial of two more literary figures: Ukrainian Literary Critics Ivan Svetlichny and Ivan Dzyuba, who were accused of smuggling anti-Soviet literature to the West. Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of the liberal literary monthly, Novy Mir, was dropped from the Central Committee. Said Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva: "Reactionary propaganda is making savage attacks on socialist culture." She warned that the party was going to crack down both on antisocial intellectuals at home and cultural exchanges with foreign countries.

Culture also suffered from the ridiculous backing and forthing over Stalinism. The Moscow Philharmonic had been scheduled to perform Sergei Prokofiev's 1937 cantata, which uses texts from Marx, Lenin and Stalin as lyrics. At the last minute, the orchestra decided to skip the Stalin sections, forcing the musicians to flutter frantically through their scores to find the non-Stalinist passages.

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