Russia: Trouble by the Ton

At harvest time, the Soviet press is usually full of propaganda hoopla about the bumper grain crops brought in by happy teams of Communist pioneers.

Not this year. Facing the prospect of a 10% to 20% drop in grain production, Moscow has clamped a news blackout on the subject. And apart from a routine one-line announcement of a new trade agreement, there was not one word about the huge $500 million pur chase of Canadian wheat and flour that the Kremlin hopes will make up much of the deficit.

Sleigh Ride. But the Russian people had good reason to guess that a shortage lay ahead. Recently bread stores have rationed customers to two loaves per purchase, and Pravda last week launched a massive campaign against grain wastage and theft. The foreman of a mill in the Kaluga region south west of Moscow was ignominiously photographed with flour he had smuggled out in his pants. In the North Caucasus, peasants raising their own livestock on private plots were denounced for buying or stealing almost 100,000 lbs. of feed grain. Restaurant managers and waiters were threatened with stiff penalties for serving over-ample portions of bread — “the holy of holies” as a newspaper called it — which they scoop up when the meal is over and sell to private animal-raisers.

Communist officialdom blamed disastrous droughts and freezes for the poor harvest. But Nikita Khrushchev angrily blamed sloppy management for chronic agricultural crises. U.S. farmers, said Nikita, protect their fertilizer in plastic bags, but in Russia the piles of mineral fertilizer shipped out from factories are allowed to lie around in heaps, exposed to the weather. In winter, snorted Nikita, kids slide down the piles on their sleds. Making another of his Utopian promises to catch up with U.S. production, Khrushchev also said that by 1965 Russia hoped to turn out 35 million tons of fertilizer. Though this would equal U.S. output last year, U.S. fertilizer is far richer in essential plant nutrients.

No Objections. The Kremlin’s spending spree on wheat, which promised to give an exhilarating boost to the lagging Canadian economy, would have its impact elsewhere as well. Word came from Australia that it would sell Russia another $100 million worth. Moscow was dickering with West Germany for 250,000 tons of flour. Even U.S. wheat growers, stuck with a huge surplus, hoped to get in on the bonanza; the State Department in Washington apparently had no objections.

Pravda, meanwhile, prepared the Soviet populace for possible shortages next year. The newspaper complained that farmers were “lagging intolerably” in their autumn plowing for the 1964 spring harvest. “They are carrying it out much worse than last year.”