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Means. If the up for by a sudden rush of USSR are attributed to drinl doors. The work in the last ten days, problems. them from which means overtime, lost maalandr "thanar 1. --.- L-mu ri Andropov m behind closed is imposed on lity. The facts and figures Basile Kerblay (Methuen, ety in the USSR' (second in their attitudes to the ISSR statistics.

'omen also face a tremen; burden of housework. ruse of the frequent les, they spend an average six hours a week on ›ping. In industrial worker ilies, the husband is oned to have an average of ours' free time a week -wife 20. easant women till.

Production t the point of production condition of the USSR king class compares unfavIbly with that of workers in capitalist societies. viet-style centralised ning" , as Kerblay puts it, incompatible with workers' agerhent... the rank and have no say in objectives or luction norms. unishments in the official our Code include fines, otion, sacking, or deportato a labour camp. Bureauic mismanagement makes stress of work worse. The work rate is frequently upted by shortage of spare s or absence of supplies The slackness of the first days in the month is made up for by a sudden rush of work in the last ten days, which means overtime, lost weekends... the poor quality of certain goods is a consequence of the relaxation of inspection procedures towards the end of the month.

"Since strikes are forbidden and since wage-bargaining is not in union hands ... the trade union is not an organ for the pressing of claims ... but a mechanism in the service of productivity and the welfare of the workers". It is in effect a department of the management, organising social security, holiday camps, theatre tickets, sports and other cultural facilities, etc.

Barred from any collective action to improve conditions, workers respond by individual rebellion: low productivity, absenteeism, crime. Alcoholism in particular is a major problem in the USSR.

Consumption of alcohol per OiL FAUDRAIT REMPLACER "Andropov should be replaced by a young man". "What?" head is three times higher than under the Tsars, when vodka was already a notorious scourge. Fully one half of all the numerous divorces in the USSR are attributed to drink problems.

'But', the reader may reply 'But' , the reader may reply, 'there have been improvements. Sixty years ago the USSR was desperately backward; today material living standards there are comparable to, say, Spain or Ireland. In some respects material standards compare favourably with richer western countries, and in the USSR there are fewer very poor people'.

True, though many capitalist states have also had period of rapidly rising living standards.

But a socialist judgement on the USSR must surely adopt the viewpoint of the worker who curses his or her miserable and unequal position, rather than of the bureaucrat who points complacently at chosen economic statistics.

Moreover, the 'good' statistics are often misleading. For example: people in the AMITROPOV PAR UN JEONE HEiN?

USSR read, study, and get educated more than in France. But what can they read and study?

Quite apart from the inequality in the education system, it is also very restrictive. As Lane reports, 'In contrast to [the imaginative and libertarian] methods employed in the early years of Soviet power, the present techniques are based on formal class teaching.

The system is highly examoriented: as in the US, students have to repeat a year if they fail the end-of-year exam, and teachers are also assessed by exam results..

Then the libraries, the publishing houses, the press, the radio, the TV, the school Anti-clockwise: Stalin curriculum, are all controlled by the totalitarian bureaucracy. No idea is permitted to live unless it comes from above.

Censorship is, indeed, quite an industry in the USSR, employing some 70,000 people.

The self-liberation of the working class demands that aspirations and ideas emerge from below; are clarified, filtered, and integrated through free debate; and become a material force through class organisation. The bureaucracy in the USSR is an absolute obstacle to that self-liberation.

The nationalised economy created by the 1917 revolution is a basis worth defending; but for half a century now that basis has had standing upon it a consolidated, self-perpetuating bureaucracy which stifles and crushes every progressive impulse.

As Leon Trotsky argued as long ago as 1939, the revolutionary • overthrow of that bureaucracy by the working class is the precondition for any socialist progress in the USSR:

'We are not a government party: we are the party of irreconcilable opposition, not only in capitalist countries but also in the USSR. Our tasks, among them the 'defence of the USSR' • we realise not through the medium of bourgeois governments and not even through the government of the USSR, but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow ...

"In order that nationalised property in the . . . USSR become a basis for genuinely progressive, that is to say socialist, development, it is necessary to overthrow the Moscow bureaucracy.

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Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko