Dismantling the Fortresses

One of the human upheavals vast enough to change the physical look of a large part of the earth's surface was the collectivizing of Soviet agriculture. One hundred and eight million Russian peasants were forcibly torn from the traditional checkerboard of their individual farms and resettled in a new pattern of huddled hamlets dotting the forest-wall-to-forest-wall carpeting of huge collectively tilled fields. This battle for collectivization, Stalin told Churchill, was harder to win than the war against Hitler, and he killed or starved to death an estimated 6,000,000 Russians in winning it. In that battle, the dictator's fortresses and control posts in the Russian countryside were the state tractor stations that he set up to supply machinery to the collective farms.

Across the snowdrifted steppes of Soviet Russia last week slogged hundreds of thousands of peasants to attend party-organized "discussion" meetings about Nikita Khrushchev's latest decision: to abolish the tractor stations. Speaking last month to farm officials in Minsk, the First Party Secretary announced that the Machine Tractor Stations had outlived their usefulness as originally constituted, and that henceforth the collectives may buy and operate their own machinery. "Where there are two masters on the land, there can be no good order," he thundered. "The tractor station sows no flax but is supplied with flax machines. It plants no cabbage but is supplied with machines to plant seedlings."

The change does not mean a retreat from state control. In enlarging the collectives and assigning them their own machinery, Khrushchev is actually making them more like the big state farms, the "factories on the land," which he favors as cheaper producers of foodstuffs. Thus he brings nearer the day when all Russia's crops can be tilled and harvested by workers paid by the hour like any other factory hands.

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