Cold Comfort Farming

"What is a married man?" Communist Party Boss Nikita Khrushchev asked an audience in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, and answered himself: "It is a man who wants to raise a family and to settle firmly in a new place." The emphasis was on the words "firmly" and "new place," for the audience was a group of young city men who are being sent east to help turn Siberian wasteland into golden harvest.

Earlier groups of settlers are writing "tearful" letters home, pudgy Boss Khrushchev said, "reproaching" the government with the fact that, in addition to enduring the rigors of the frontier, they are expected to pay heavier defense taxes as bachelors. Revealing himself as the originator of the bachelor tax, he added: "If 100 million were added to our 200 million population, even that would not be enough. There must be in a family at least three children!"

In the Ukraine, traditional Soviet "breadbasket," severe drought has raised the specter of famine, and increased peasant resistance to government collection of grain. Previous failures to control the peasants in this area (e.g., in the Dearly '30s, when farmers slaughtered millions of head of cattle when forced to collectivize, and in 1950, when they burned haystacks as a protest against new regimentation) led Khrushchev last year to undertake a vast switch in Soviet agricultural effort: to grow wheat on some 100 million acres of marginal and semidesert land in Siberia. Tens of thousands of young party workers and more than half the country's agricultural-machinery production are being shipped out to Kazakhstan and Altai. But the life is not easy.

Said Khrushchev last week: "It is said that there is little rain there. Many will have to go to completely open country where no amenities are available. In many regions there is no timber [but] Kazakhstan is very rich in reed plants. This is very good material for the construction of houses." For the fainthearted, Khrushchev had a word of warning: "We will see you off with honor, but we won't welcome you back with joy. You must settle there firmly, once and forever. For this purpose it is desirable that you should marry there."

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