Consider then our surprise when after less than fifteen minutes the double doors burst open and a red-faced Minister Bukin stumbled into the forehall. His voice was hoarse with humiliation as he summoned his administrative secretary. He required, he stormed, a digest of his speech, maximum length of fifteen minutes. All hard fact and… the word “truth” bubbled on his lips but refused to erupt into our Soviet world of make-believe.
Bukin was the first of many that morning. Natalya Roginova had struck, and in a way which Russian bureaucrats could not handle. She had demanded a true accounting. A short blunt statement from every minister. They reeled one by one from the conference chamber, lost as village illiterates required to recite Pushkin. My friend could hardly contain himself. The following is the text of Roginova’s attack on Bukin.
Comrades, Members of the Politburo, comrade ministers, comrade marshals… I base my text on the pamphlet of the ever-illustrious V. I. Lenin: What Are We to Do? because analysis of the economic, social, military and foreign position of the Soviet Union indicates that we have reached yet another of those great divides which history in its inevitable progress presented to our forebears in 1921 or 1941 and now to us as we move into the second part of this decade.
Comrades! No future can be more golden than our own. But we must know how to apply our principles to that future. This is what V. I. Lenin tried to teach us. This is what we ignore at our peril. In my village the peasants say the future is a lump of unformed clay. Perhaps they’re right. But we know in the theoretical echelons of the Party and government that history decrees that clay cannot go unshaped. It will be molded by the arbitrary forces of market capitalism. Or again, here in the Soviet Union, by the effort of Socialist will that we alone can produce.
Yet the Russian peasant will be the first to admit that to mold and knead that unshaped clay we must know much about it. Will it crack in summer’s heat or the first frosts of winter? Does it contain stone? Is it mixed with moss or straw? Will it redden in the kiln of history? Or feebly lose its color?
These questions we must apply equally to the substance of our own future. Comrade Minister Bukin spoke first this morning of the oil-energy resources of the Union. He gave us figures of exploration drilling by the projected foot. Figures for current reserves and production targets into the 1990s. Afterward we applauded the efforts of himself and his ministry.
According to Comrade Bukin our oil-energy future is safe in the hands of Comrade Bukin.
Why is it then that our military so often discusses the problem of an ever-reducing fuel supply? Why is it that our Foreign Ministry contingency planning is entirely based on access to foreign oil supply? Why is it that our Nuclear Power Program is predicated on oil-energy shortages? Do these Comrade Ministers perhaps not believe the statements of Comrade Bukin?
Comrade Bukin tells us that the Soviet Union is the world’s largest oil producer. And we applaud. But Comrade Bukin forgets to tell us that our oil production has not increased since 1980. He forgets to tell us that for five years production has stagnated or declined in all major oil-producing regions except Siberia, and that even there the massive Samotlov field last year passed peak production.
Comrade Bukin invites us to applaud a production level for this year of 10.5 million barrels a day. But he fails to remind us that in 1980 Soviet production was running at 11 million barrels a day.
Let us look to the future. Even with all the exploration successes in the Barents and Kara seas is it not true, Comrade Bukin, that Soviet oil production will continue to decline? And as we struggle for oil in the deep waters of the Caspian Sea, is it not certain that production will never again reach the high point of 1980?
Comrade Bukin points to our massive drilling program. This year the Petroleum Ministry has established a target of 70 million feet. Again we all applauded. But Comrade Bukin has not told us that his ministry has never achieved a drilling target since 1976!
No matter, our reserves are surely vast. Is not the Tyumen oblast in western Siberia a true source of hope for the future? Perhaps, but only once we have mastered the techniques of oil recovery through the permafrost of the north. American Intelligence sources put this at 1990 or after. Are they right, or is the ever-optimistic Minister Bukin?
Comrades! This year for the first time since the days of Joseph Stalin we have been unable to export oil. Next year the Soviet Union must become a net oil importer. In order to meet our own requirements and nearly 2 million barrels a day promised to the Democratic Peoples’ Republics we will require to import over 25 billion dollars’ worth of oil. Even adopting the levels of optimism of Comrade Bukin, it is certain that we will be unable to pay without using reserves for more than half the oil imports we need.
And what then if we choose not to import oil supplies on this level? Then comrades, the shape of the Soviet future, that peasant clay I spoke about, becomes clearer. Without oil, both industrial and agricultural production must decline. Shortages, more serious than we now know, will be faced by every Soviet citizen. Has Comrade Bukin considered that? Has Comrade Kuba considered how security will be maintained? Have the Marshals of the Armed Forces considered that a declining gross national product must mean a declining military budget? Has the Foreign Ministry considered the effect of draconic reductions in our support efforts to Ethiopia, Cuba and Vietnam? Or how the Peoples’ Democracies in Europe will survive on a fifty percent reduction in Soviet oil imports?
Comrades, this crisis is upon us. It will require from us no less than a complete reshaping of our Soviet goals. My belief is that we face a future no less uncertain than in the interventionist period of our glorious past or than in the days when the Fascist armies were launched across our frontiers.
I have chosen to speak only of the problems facing our oil industry. Yet there are others in agriculture, transportation, mining and metals. In all these vital areas we are faced with the necessity of a massive program of structural reform. Again I will take as an example our energy problems. At this moment they are managed by no less than sixty government departments and ministries. Chief among these are Comrade Bukin’s Petroleum Ministry, the Ministry of Coal Industry, the Ministry of Chemical and Petroleum Machine Building, and the Ministry of Construction of Petroleum Enterprises. When I am asked by foreign visitors who is our Energy Minister, Comrades, I cannot even remember the names of all those who bear responsibility for this crucial area of our economy.
Let it not be thought that I have singled out Comrade Bukin for unfavorable comment. There are many others whose Ministries invite similar examination.
Comrades, the Party has much dead wood to clear away. Only then can we face a Socialist future with the confidence that our history and our Soviet people deserve…
Natalya Roginova’s analysis, based on a research paper published by the Central Intelligence Agency as early as August 1981, was largely accurate. What we did not know until the Archangelskoye Conference was that she had chosen the Soviet oil problem as the arena in which she would launch her bid for power.
Essentially she had divided the Soviet senior leadership between the bureaucracy, including Kuba’s KGB, on one side, and the Party and its own analysis of the future on the other. Perhaps she had reason to believe that the military would remain neutral in the struggle. She already knew from her flying visits to Party Secretaries throughout the Union that she had their support. As the resignations and retirements and sudden illnesses of senior ministers began to be announced at the conclusion of Archangelskoye, it seemed as if Natalya Roginova was carrying a majority of the septuagenarian Politburo along with her into her version of the Soviet future.