Documents / FOIA release
This is a Central Intelligence Agency record dated 26 April 1990. It carries a TASS International Service account, sent from Sverdlovsk in several parts, of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to the Urals. The text covers his meeting with Uralmash workers and managers about economic reform, housing, market transition, unemployment and party unity. It also describes his visits to a supermarket, war veterans, a defense conversion exhibition and the Urals Scientific Center. It contains no UFO material.
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## UNCLASSIFIED economic experience. We have acquired experience; we have started thinking differently and we have started talking to each other differently. An environment has come about in which one can solidly and radically begin economic reform. Therefore talk is important, from these angles too. What is more, I see anxiety. It has appeared both in the press and here. How are we going to live? And in general it touches precisely upon what we are going to do in order to live better, so that the situation should change for the better. Evidently people's patience is already at its limit. So from that point of view the trip is very important for me. [Excerpts] (Stroganov continues) Under the existing state of affairs and with the very low rents the association sustains losses each year amounting to 7 million rubles [R] on housing alone. Children's preschool establishments and a number of other facilities are loss-making, too. We have 45,000 apartments on our books, but today there are 12,000 people in the housing line, because we build housing but are also obliged to give it to other people who do not work at "Uralmash." We have conducted two USSR Presidential Councils, joint sessions of the USSR Council of the Federation and the Presidential Council. We will return to that again, and then, as they say, we will go to the people in order to weigh everything up thoroughly. Such a change needs to be made by everybody, together, if we understand each other. Sharp turns are calculated in what is envisaged to be proposed to the working people, to the country. But we need to do things in such a way that we travel this road with the least losses. I.I. Stoganov, general director of the Uralmash association who spoke next gave a short description of the enterprise and told of the tasks and problems facing the collective. [passage omitted: Stroganov quoted supporting free market, listing things which hinder progress to that aim] LD2604205290TAKE1 5 (Gorbachev) Wherein lies the sickness, and not just that of "Uralmash," but of the other works in the Urals economic region too? (I.I. Stroganov) We made a major mistake when we created additional jobs; for a time we forgot about the person, about the social base. The regional sickness seems to lie in precisely this. And second. All of us together, we made a real mess of agriculture. It's the time not to give help, but for everyone to restructure themselves fundamentally in this way... (Gorbachev) I noticed that labor productivity is-nevertheless quite decent at your enterprise. Is this linked with modernization of production, price formation or with the intensification of labor? 18 (Stroganov) Unfortunately with intensification... 19 (Gorbachev) When you say that according to your calculations the changeover to the new economic relations could ruin machine-building, which calculations do you have in mind? (Stroganov) These calculations have been done on the basis of the deductions that are being planned: 30 percent to the Union budget, 27 percent to the Republican budget, plus new types of payment for land, electricity and labor resources. If you add all of this together, then we are left with less than 30 percent. That is to say that nothing remains for forming capital funds. And this is a key question for us. 21 (Gorbachev) Do you compare your products with similar competitive models? What is the difference between them?
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 15 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.