Plowing Up

For three days last week Russia's all-powerful Central Committee met be hind closed doors, giving the Kremlinologists in every Western chancellery another round in their perennial guessing game. When Izvestia delayed publication for some hours, an event that had not happened since the committee ousted Nikita Khrushchev last October, the mounting speculation even shook stock prices in Wall Street.

But when official Moscow finally reported the committee's decisions at week's end, they seemed to boil down to another effort to deal with Russia's chronic economic problem: agriculture. Kicked upstairs to a party secretaryship was Supreme Economic Council Chairman (since 1963) Dmitry F. Ustinov. Replacing him was onetime State Planner Vladimir Novikov, 58. Ustinov's other post as First Deputy Premier went to a Byelorussian apparatchik, Kirill T. Mazurov, 50. Though Khrushchev's old ideological czar, Leonid Ilyichev, was also bumped aside, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev laid most emphasis on the agricultural mess.

Though farm output had been planned to rise 70% within seven years, said Brezhnev, it had in fact actually risen only 10% in the past six. The solution he proposed, spread across Pravda and the delayed edition of Izvestia, was "to do away resolutely with subjectivism in the practical management of socialist agriculture"--Red gibberish which Brezhnev suggested meant a more rational use of "economic incentives" and "greater independence" along the lines the Soviets are already applying in industry (TIME cover, Feb. 12). Also planned: a massive infusion of new capital into the farm sector to the tune of some $80 billion over the next five years--double the present rate.

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