It is apparent from the preceding three chapters that carrying out the Brezhnev programs in the southern USSR has been anything but easy. Moscow's efforts have been plagued by conflict and dissipation of effort, which the central authorities have been unable so far to remedy. The southern strategy is already costing far more, and returning far less, than Khrushchev's hopeful successors could have believed possible in 1965. But in this respect it is faring no worse than the agricultural program in most of the rest of the country. What is the explanation? Why has implementation proved so difficult?

Three main problems, as we have seen in the previous chapters, account for much of the difficulty in implementing the southern programs. The first is evasion. Local managers bend new priorities and rules by taking advantage of weak enforcement, uncertainty, and the leaders' competing objectives. We have seen many examples: Industrial plants spill accumulated wastes when they think they can get away with it; waste-treatment facilities often lag behind primary construction and are not maintained even when they are in operation; power-station operators use uncertainties in streamflow to manipulate reservoir levels to their own advantage; reclamation construction crews take advantage of the fact that most project completions are scheduled for the winter quarter to cut corners, because the project cannot be properly inspected in deep snow, irrigators exceed their quotas even if it damages the soil or causes the farms downstream to run dry. The injured howl; the press denounces the selfish; a few individuals – remarkably few – are punished, but over the last decade the situation does not seem to have changed much.