Bread & Iron

Russia's 125 most powerful Communists met in Moscow last week in a secret session lasting five days.

Though meetings of the Central Committee of the U.S.S.R. are almost never mentioned publicly, on this occasion all the resources of Soviet propaganda were thrown into publicizing the address of the party's publicity-minded first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. To Russians, the news could not have been very cheering: the accent was on failures ori the farm and the inadequacy of Soviet industry.

Moscow newspapers were enlarged to print the full text of Khrushchev's analysis of Soviet weaknesses and particularly his remedy for correcting them. For days afterwards, newspaper editorials spelled out his message in even greater detail.

Buried in the verbiage were some vital facts :

P: The U.S.S.R. is facing a food shortage. A disastrous winter in the Ukraine and dry winds in the Volga area seriously affected the 1953-54 harvest. A quarter of the grain was lost "through delays in harvesting, which sometimes took 45 days, as a result of the shortage of harvesting machinery" (much of it had been moved to Siberia to take care of Khrushchev's ambitious scheme for developing that dry and virgin area). In the same winter the meat and dairy industry suffered severe setbacks, and the U.S.S.R. lost 2% of its sheep flock.

P: According to Khrushchev's figures, the total number of cattle in the U.S.S.R. is still less than in 1928, when the first Five-Year Plan began (though Russia's population has increased 60 million). There are fewer cows than in 1916, the year before the Reds seized power.

P: Soviet industry is lagging. Pig-iron prouction for 1954 was less than the planned figure, and rolled steel is in short supply. Production is below quota in all other metals, in oil, coal and timber.

P: The machine-tool industry was criticized for using obsolete methods and being behind production in electric motors, steam engines, metal-cutting lathes, chemical, textile and rolling mill equipment, and most particularly in freight cars, self-propelled grain combines, tractor cultivators and threshing machines.

Praise the U.S. Party Secretary Khrushchev's cure for Soviet economic ills fell into two parts: 1) increasing wheat production in Siberia and the development of U.S.-type animal husbandry in western Russia and the Ukraine, 2) a crackdown on consumer industry and consumer spending in favor of a buildup of heavy industry. He even found himself praising the U.S. to make a point. Khrushchev is impressed by the way "Americans have succeeded in achieving a high level of animal husbandry." The answer for Soviet Russia, he said, is the widespread U.S. planting of hybrid corn for fodder. Khrushchev urged that collectives in European Russia should plant U.S. hybrid corn, and demanded an eightfold increase in Soviet corn production by 1960. That will take some doing.

Khrushchev moved on to a more controversial subject, not seeming to mind whose toes his heavy boots trod upon. "Lenin taught that the building of heavy machines, capable of reorganizing agriculture, can be the only material basis of socialism," he said. "This Lenin line was followed under Stalin's leadership, is being followed at present, and will be followed in future." He branded the more-consumer-goods faction as saboteurs. "This is a grave mistake, alien to the spirit of Marxist-Leninist reasoning ... It is a belching of rightist deviation, a belching of views hostile to Leninism which were once propagated by Rykov and Bukharin."* Though Khrushchev did not identify just who could have belched such dreadful views, all his hearers knew that among those who had was Khrushchev himself. And another had been Premier Georgy Malenkov, who in August 1953 proclaimed that Russia was in a position "to expand light industry at the same rate as heavy industry," and promised the public more candies, TV sets and "elegant footwear."

Postponing Better Days. Actually, consumer-goods gains in 1954 were relatively small. According to the report of the Central Statistical Bureau, there was a 27% increase in the production of artificial silk underwear and a 6% increase in cotton fabrics, but in surveying the whole field, the bureau found that "much of this production was still of unsatisfactory quality." Makers of pianos, cameras, champagne, cigarettes, sausages, tea, matches and soap had exceeded their production quotas.

Under the new Khrushchev plan, Soviet consumers will not only get fewer of these luxuries, but will have less money to spend on them. The Soviet budget, while promising no increase in taxation, announced a new government bond issue, expected to bring in twice the amount of money as that launched in 1954. Khrushchev postponed the promised good times: "A better life in five to six years instead of consumer goods in a year or two." The new budget increases Soviet military appropriation 12%, enough to give internal weakness an outward show of strength, but it is below the 1952 appropriation, and still no match for U.S. preparedness.

Two days after the Central Committee meeting, the Supreme Soviet, most unanimous of the world's governments, met in Moscow. After. dutifully applauding the Khrushchev plan, the members flew back to their home territories to tell hungry Soviet masses about their new diet of iron.

*Both executed in 1938.

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