Russia's Big Lag

For the first time since the days when Trotsky led the opposition to Stalin in the '20s, Pravda last week suddenly published the proceedings of the Soviet Communist Party's 253-man Central Committee Plenum while it was going on. By this precedent-smashing maneuver, Nikita Khrushchev sought to broadcast as swiftly and dramatically as possible his speech signaling a shift in Soviet agricultural policy. Acting so abruptly, in such untimely fashion just six weeks before the 21st Party Congress is due to meet, Boss Nikita gave many the idea that he was in something of a sweat.

Humbug Harvest. In his usual high-binding style, Nikita tried to turn a defensive outburst into a strident success story, covering 6 1/2 pages of Pravda. When he took over five years ago, he said, Soviet agriculture was in "a very bad state," its grain output so low that cities suffered from bread shortages, its livestock population dying by the millions for lack of fodder. Only the year before, Malenkov, "to conceal the failures under his direction," had "dishonestly" put out "humbug" figures purporting to show that the country had produced 145 million tons of grain, when in cold fact it had harvested no more than 100 million. Taking over, Nikita Khrushchev saw that the only way to expand production to feed an industrialized nation was to open vast new acreage in Siberia and offer Russia's collective farmers gaudy price incentives to boost their output. Having messed up Soviet agriculture earlier, said Khrushchev, the "reactionaries" of the anti-party group fought his every reform. "It hurts my tongue to call them comrades.'' he growled.

But this year his virgin-lands program paid off in a big harvest, and Nikita, ending an official Soviet statistic silence as to farm production that has lasted throughout his five-year reign, bragged that in 1958 the Soviet Union had harvested a 137 million-ton grain crop. He also asserted that this year Soviet milk production would top that of the U.S. for 1957, that Soviet butter production now surpassed the U.S.'s, that Soviet wool output was now 2.3 times that of the U.S. and second only to Australia's in the world. Only in meat production did he admit that the Soviet Union, producing less than half the U.S. output, was failing to catch up. But though declaring Malenkov's figure a lie (since it made his own seem less impressive), Khrushchev was almost certainly fudging his own figures. Western specialists, piecing together other evidence, suspect that Khrushchev has inflated current grain production so that party critics could not protest that his 153-million-ton goal for 1965 is "unrealistic."

"The Control of the Ruble." But the real burden of Khrushchev's 38,000-word message is that Soviet collective farmers must improve their efficiency if the new plan is to be fulfilled. Khrushchev's touring experts had been shocked during their 1955 visit to Iowa to see what huge crop yields a relatively small number of U.S. farmers could obtain. In farm productivity, said Khrushchev, "our country is still seriously lagging behind the U.S." He cited some revealing figures of the number of man-hours required in the two countries to grow 220 lbs. of produce:

U.S. U.S.S.R. State Farms Collective Farms

Grain 1.0 1.8 7.1

Cotton 18.8 29.8 42.8

Milk 4.7 9.9 14.7

Hogs 6.3 43.0 103.0

For five years, said Khrushchev, collective farmers had had it good because the state offered them fancy prices. But, he added, "the control of the ruble" works both ways, and now that the virgin lands are turning out bumper crops and the state can store some grain, the state will be able to buy "wherever it is cheaper." This year's decision to break up the state Motor Tractor Stations and sell their equipment to collectives, he said, "marks the beginning of a new stage in economic relations between the state and collective farms. Henceforth, the principle of free sale of produce will be extended," and prices are due for a fall.

One reason that collectives do so badly is that peasants prefer to concentrate on their own cows and individual plots, which they are allowed as a sideline. Khrushchev wants to abolish this privilege. The people of his native village of Kalinovka, he said, last year "at my suggestion sold their cows to the collective farm . . . and, far from making out worse, have actually improved their material position." Their women were also freed, he pointed out, for more work on the collective. And in a significant echo of China's commotion, the Soviet Premier urged: "The time has come to organize, not only in towns but also in collective farms, communal dining halls, laundries, bakeries and nurseries."

"If the party bodies will grip the task with all their energy," concluded Khrushchev, "the goals set by the seven-year plan will not only be fulfilled but overfulfilled." In other words, the party must get tougher with the peasants--or Khrushchev is not going to hit his ambitious target of raising farm production another 70% by 1965.

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