"Get Down to Production"

With the idea men out of the way, Khrushchev turned to the painful problem of Russia's factories and farms.

Casting about for a way to boost industrial output, the Premier called a special joint session of the Communist Party Presidium and the government's Council of Ministers, which announced creation of a new, all-powerful Supreme Economic Council, discarding at last the discredited scheme for regional industrial autonomy that was installed in 1957. At the same meeting, Khrushchev scrapped the last two years of his much-touted Seven-Year Plan (1964-65) and ordered the new economic czars to get busy and draft a new set of quotas.

The bouncy Premier also turned up at a Moscow meeting of agricultural experts and explained why he fired the Soviet Agriculture Minister fortnight ago (TIME, March 15). He spent too much time writing directives from Moscow and too little time on the road, inspecting the farms he was ordering about. "The cows can't read directives," scolded Nikita. "All they want is a just exchange: 'You give me fodder, I give you milk.' " And of milk and meat, he admitted, there is "still very, very little. We have already criticized the writers for bad works. You obviously won't do as writers. Better get down to production."

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