Description:
USSR : The Modernizers' Clan and East-West Relations, by Robbin F. Laird and Erik P. Hoffmann The new Soviet orientations link domestic modernization - economic growth and productivity - with improved East-West relations. The competition between today's Soviet "conservatives" and "modernizers" represents a conflict between defenders of the traditional Soviet industrialization model and advocates of an advanced modernization model. Conservative modernizers seek to rationalize centralized planning and management by reducing CPSU supervision over the day-to day activities of the major non-Party bureaucraties and of the production and industrial associations. Reformist modernizers, in contrast, call for greater regional coordination and decision-making by Party and State organs, still greater responsibilities for the associations and entreprises and greater emphasis on "transnational", as distinct from "State-centralized" international economic relations. There is an increasing conflict in the USSR between the primacy of military priorities and the preconditions for economic modernization. Soviet modernizers are confident that the USSR can deepen economic ties with the industrialized capitalist States without fear of excessive interference in socialist development - that is without making the USSR unduly vulnerable to harmful political, economic or social influences. They perceive the Soviet-American rivalry to be unfolding in a rapidly changing international system, in which economic factors of powers are of increasing significance to the exercise of global influence.