A Revolution for What?

For the Soviet Union, 1962 has been a year of economic ferment unmatched since the early days of industrialization and the forced collectivization of the '30s. In this atmosphere, Nikita Khrushchev this week opens the plenum of the party's Central Committee, an assortment of some 2,000 committee members and other party workers summoned from factories and fields across Russia. The meeting is two months overdue; Khrushchev delayed calling it because he had hoped that things would settle down--domestically, that is.

Evidently they have not. The plenum will have to deal with inefficient industrial production, the long-debated need for capitalist-style incentives, and the continuing failure of Soviet agriculture, including Khrushchev's pet virgin lands project in Kazakhstan. Certain to come under scrutiny will be the most violent outburst of discontent reported from Russia in years, last summer's riots in the southern city of Novocherkassk, which ended with the killing of hundreds of workers and housewives who protested against high prices and poor working conditions (TIME, Oct. 19). Moscow denied the whole thing, but according to new details trickling to the West, party officials were stunned by the outbreak, not only because of the sudden violence, but because the rioters revealed sophisticated political attitudes that made Moscow suspect the existence of an organized underground. Scores of youths tore up their party cards in public, others shouted such slogans as "Back to Lenin" and "Down with the Deceiver." Even the local army garrison of Russians sympathized with the rioters and refused to fire into the protesting crowd. The soldiers who did were central Asian Uzbeks and Kirghizes, who had less objection to shooting Russians.

Another wave of turbulence in the Siberian industrial center of Kemerovo was reported last week by the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya. More than 47,000 construction workers walked off the job during the first six months of the year because of low wages, poor housing and food shortages. Economic planning in the region was a joke. Equipment for a steel mill delivered in 1954 was still waiting to be installed. A fruit cannery was finished before it dawned on its builders that there was no local fruit to can. All in all, $660 million went down the drain.

Labor unrest also took place in Grozny, an oil center in the north Caucasus; Donetsk, center of the Donbas coal fields; Yaroslavl, in the Upper Volga, where workers in a tire factory staged a sitdown strike; and even Moscow, where there were mass protest meetings at the Moskvich compact-car plant. Khrushchev himself seems to have drawn the lesson of these events. Said he last July in his native village of Kalinovka: "We have carried out a great revolution to give the people the good things of life. If these things are not available, people will say: 'What do we need such a revolution for?' "

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