Gorbachev Addresses Uralmash Workers

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## UNCLASSIFIED

Therefore talk is important from these positions, too. What is more, I see anxiety. It has appeared both in the press and here. There is also what we are always discussing and want then to put forward for judgement with you -- the working people, specialists, and scientists -- and the whole country: the proposals we need to implement now in order for us to embark on sharper changes and more serious turnabouts, to put it bluntly. Misunderstandings and anxiety have arisen here. Primarily, all people have gotten the idea that it is planned to do something to prices, so how we are going to live? 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 the people's patience is already at its limit. We have conducted two Presidential Councils, joint session of the Presidential Council and the Council of the Federation, and we will assemble somewhere around the 10th. The government will carry out the critical observations and evaluations that have been expressed on the proposals we discussed, all the things I have just been talking about. 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. You have your own wishes, desires, demands, and judgements here on all aspects of our life, both domestic and foreign policy, on everything that worries you and that you would like either to put forward or to ask directly, in a spirit of openness, truth, and glasnost.

## LD3004111190TAKE1

[Excerpts] [Uralmash General Director Stroganov] [Passage omitted: problems and barriers in the way of transition to free market] The third thing on which I would like to dwell is taxation, which already is being examined by the government today. To be frank, we have prepared a letter to you and would like to ask you to examine it. What do I want to say in connection with that? I think that the system has not yet been thought out deeply, and I mean taxation as a whole. As for the approach with which we are familiar--we participated; I was at a meeting with Nikolay Ivanovich Ryzhkov on the transition to a free market, and our specialists participated--if we put it into practice, then I am not afraid to say, Mikhail Sergeyevich, that it will be the end for machine- building because there simply will not be any money left for development, not expanded reproduction, but normal development of the enterprise. In other words, for us to develop normally, to develop normally and to live, it is necessary for us to be left with--I do not want to calculate this percentage precisely today--but at least no less than 60 percent of our earned profit.

[Gorbachev] I noticed that labor productivity is growing decently at your enterprise. Is this linked with modernization of production, price formation, or with the intensification of labor?

[Stroganov] Unfortunately with intensification...

[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 planned deductions: 30 percent to the union budget, 25 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