Trishka's Coat

Out in the district of Kustanay in remote northern Kazakhstan, a Russian wrote a despondent note to Moscow's Pravda, and for its own reasons, Pravda decided to publish it:

". . . Machinery lies all around the railroad stations. One can see everywhere mounds of broken parts lying in the mud . . . Many things get spoiled. Gasoline, lubricants, hay, spares, combines are being kept together in one backyard; hay mowers rot in the compost . . . Some spare parts are just thrown into the middle of the street, and the tractors which go by crush them to pieces . . ."

In Komsomolskaya Pravda, another complained: "The soil begins to dry . . . The cause is lack of manpower. Things are managed the wrong way. Seventeen-year-old girls from the city who have never held a pitchfork in their hands work in the hayfields, while two husky kolkhoz fellows just sit by the stove, drink vodka and tell funny jokes . . .''

And in Ivestia, another: "The Tarangul Motor Tractor Station began its work in the fields about half a month later than last year . . . Not a single furrow has been made in our kolkhoz. The director of our MTS, Comrade Petrov, forgot to give even one single plow to our brigade . . ."

One of Two. These small-fry complaints (and the big treatment they got) were the visible signs of a great internal problem which was besetting Russia's topmost leaders last week. Russia's vast new emergency farm program was going badly. The outcome may well determine the future of Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party secretary who in one year has risen so high that he now stands side by side with Premier Georgy Malenkov in a diumvirate ruling Soviet Russia.

On the burly shoulders of Khrushchev rests responsibility for a great gamble of men and machines that the Kremlin calls "development of virgin soil and wasteland." Since February, tens of thousands, mostly young Russians and Ukrainians--many of them never before close to a farm--plus hundreds of the best Soviet agricultural engineers and scientists, have been dragooned into a great eastward migration to convert 32 million acres of untilled land into a new Communist breadbasket as great as the Ukraine. Big percentages of Russia's farm-machinery output (e.g., 120,000 tractors this year, just about all that Russia can produce), spare parts, and the fuel to run them have been consigned to the virgin lands. Some of the toughest commissars in the party were chosen to oversee the gamble, which is taking place in 16 regions across the Volga, in the Urals, in western Siberia. It is concentrated on the sometimes arid, sometimes frozen steppes of Kazakhstan (see-map).

Past Failure. In his 25 years of brutal collectivization and regimentation of the peasantry, Stalin failed to wrest enough food out of the Russian soil to feed his people; the output of some agricultural products (e.g., meat, milk, butter) fell below the 1916 levels of czarist days. Last September Nikita Khrushchev admitted the shortcomings of the Stalin program and announced a program of incentives to persuade the peasants to grow more. The Kremlin said consolingly that there was enough bread grain, but Khrushchev complained of severe shortages of livestock, vegetables (particularly potatoes), coarse grain and other fodder.

In February, Farm Boss Khrushchev had to confess to the Central Committee of the party that the output of bread grain was also insufficient. "The quantity of grain that remains on collective farms" after the state has collected its quotas, said he, was not enough to pay off the workers on the collective farms. And what the state got, grabbing first, was not enough to fill needs at home and increasing demands for exports to the food-short satellites.

Khrushchev decreed the trek of the young "pioneers" to the unfarmed lands of Kazakhstan. "The Soviet people," said Nikita Khrushchev, "will undoubtedly provide the necessary number of workers for the reclamation of waste and virgin land. Everybody realizes that this is an all-peoples' cause . . ."

Staggering Goal. As facts about the venture in Kazakhstan seeped out of Russia, outside experts were struck by two things in particular: 1) the declared goal was staggering--to make over 32 million acres of land, and to plow, sow and harvest 18 to 20 million tons of grain there within only two years; 2) the Kremlin was willing to rob its established farmlands of machinery and its factories of manpower to exploit the virgin lands. Taking from other sectors of the economy to build the new enterprise brought to mind Russian Satirist Krylov's fable of Trishka, the poor simpleton who patched a hole in the elbow of his coat by cutting a piece of cloth from the cuff, patched the new hole by cutting away the coattails, finally went about in a coat cut shorter than his vest.

"Nothing like That." The first fever of enthusiasm wore off in the inhospitable climate, makeshift poverty and poor housing of Kazakhstan. "We have tea, as much sugar as we want, but no place to buy a teapot," a pioneer told an Izvestia reporter. "Kerosene lamps are also a problem . . . and then, washing basins . . . pots to cook in . . ."

Most pioneers had only tents to live in; poor food was dished out in communal kitchens, and the canteens had little to sell ("Five Komsomols went to Magnitogorsk, which is more than 500 miles away, [to buy] toothbrushes, toothpaste, thread, shoelaces, indelible pencils, envelopes . . . Nothing like that exists here").

Government radio programs began to belabor party and government officials for not working hard enough.

The mixture of discontent, of listless workers, of idle and broken machinery, of incoherent direction, demanded action in Moscow. One day last month Pravda's lead article criticized the slowness of the Kazakhstan sowing and warned that the authorities on the scene would not be allowed to hide behind poor weather as an alibi. Nikita Khrushchev himself found it necessary to rush east to meet with the Kazakh Communist Party and discuss "at length" the problems of the virgin lands.

Khrushchev's emergency trip was the sharpest evidence yet of trouble in the program and of the importance the Kremlin places on it. He had personal reason to worry. A year ago, when Stalin died, he was in the second tier: the big names were Beria, Molotov and Malenkov. Now Khrushchev is one of the big two: he heads the party, and Malenkov the government. When the Supreme Soviet met last April, Malenkov addressed the upper house, Khrushchev the more important lower house. In Red Square on May Day, Khrushchev alone of all the dignitaries had the honor of waving his hat to the crowd. The last seven major state pronouncements from the Kremlin have been in Khrushchev's name, not Malenkov's. At the top of a dictatorship, two's a crowd.

The massive farm program, particularly the daring virgin-lands project, is strictly Khrushchev's responsibility. Georgy Malenkov has notably had nothing to do with it publicly. If bread does not materialize in the empty breadbasket of Kazakhstan, Nikita Khrushchev might be used to provide a circus for the public instead.

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