The Big Dream

The only kind of war against the West that Nikita Khrushchev is interested in waging--or so he likes to say with that bear-hugging grin--is economic. Last week Khrushchev formally laid down his battle plan for economic war, and claimed victory in advance.

The audacious new seven-year plan (1959-65) that he unrolled in Moscow set targets so high that it pledges Russia to top U.S. production by "about" 1970. By that time, boasted Nikita in "theses" outlining the plan that his Central Committee will present to the 21st Communist Party Congress next January, the Soviet people "will be assured the world's highest standard of living." By 1965, cried Khrushchev, the Communist bloc countries will bt producing more than half the world's output.

Never before had a Soviet economic plan--advertised as only the first installment of an even grander "15-year-perspective development plan"--been proclaimed that sounded so much like a political manifesto. It pledges Russia's 121 million workers "the world's shortest working week"--but at some unspecified future time. It promises that there will be butter for every Russian table, while "flights to celestial and cosmic bodies" will also be carried out. It targets an overall rise of 80% in industrial output by 1965, and a 62%-63% boost in national income. Thus the emphasis will again be on heavy industry--an old story to Russian workers living in overcrowded squalor. They have to be inspired somehow to renewed effort. Khrushchev's recipe is pride, optimism, promises.

Sky Pie. Khrushchev's planners promise 22 million more housing units (a mere beginning to Russia's housing problems, even if successful), 5.6 times more refrigerators, 4.6 times more TV sets by 1962. But Khrushchev expects to build only 25% more automobiles than the paltry 100,000 his factories produced last year.

What then about Khrushchev's talk of outproducing the U.S.? "Nonsense," says one U.S. expert whose specialty is Russian economics. By a totalitarian concentration, the Soviet Union might top U.S. output in a few items, but Russia's economy is "like a younger brother who always seems to be catching up to his older brother, but never really does because the older brother also keeps growing, too."

Another expert, University of Virginia Economist G. Warren Nutter, compared Russian economic growth to U.S. experience at about the same phase of development--between 1880 and 1920--and concludes that in these 40 years the U.S. surpassed Soviet growth in its first four decades. Soviet Russia has scored its most impressive gains in a few key fields such as steel, oil and heavy construction, whereas U.S. productive energies have ranged over a far wider spectrum, and established a much wider base. Assuming a continuous growth in the U.S. economy, Soviet output will still be badly lagging by either 1965 or 1970. In fact, the Soviet rate of growth has slowed considerably since 1952.

Khrushchev faces further difficulties. Because the short crop of war babies now coming of age will not add enough entrants to Russia's labor force to meet Khrushchev's goals in the next few years, Khrushchev plans to revamp the Soviet educational system. The Russians will abandon their much-publicized ten-year schools and compel all but the gifted few to take factory jobs after the eighth grade. Furthermore, on past showings, agricultural output seems least likely to rise by the rate (70%) that Khrushchev has proclaimed, and U.S. experts doubt that the inefficient concentration of Soviet citizens engaged in agriculture (40%, as compared to 10% in the U.S.) is apt to be much reduced in the next seven years.

Goodbye, Bulganin. Of course, by the time of final accounting, Russia's fast-talking boss, now 64, may not be around. The men who introduced Russia's previous five-year plans have all now disappeared from the scene. Among them: former Premier Nikolai Bulganin, who sponsored the 1955-60 plan, which had to be scrapped last year as overambitious.

Khrushchev made a passing--but electrifying--reference to his old traveling partner in his report, making clear that more than ill-health was involved in Bul-ganin's steady demotion from Premier of all Russia to an obscure post in the north of the Caucasus. The Central Committee, said Khrushchev, had "exposed and smashed the anti-party group of Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Bulganin and their adherent Shepilov ..."--adding Bulgy for the first time to the list of renegades who had dared to cross Khrushchev.

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