Communists: Marxism Fails on the Farm

The Western farm expert had never seen anything like it. On a tour last summer of Soviet collective farms, he was shown fields full of weeds, cabbages crawling with caterpillars, diseased corn. At a dairy farm in Byelorussia, 120 cows were jammed into a shed so filthy that the milkmaids took off their shoes rather than risk losing them in the mud. “What I saw was appallingly bad, rundown in every respect,” said the expert last week. “But my tour was planned by the Russians themselves, so what I saw must have been far from the worst.”

Another agronomist touring the Eastern European satellite countries was equally amazed. In Hungary, enough machinery parts “to supply six collectives” lay rusting in the open air. In Czechoslovakia on a Sunday, there was no one in the fields to turn the cut grain, drenched by a recent rain, so that it would be dry on Monday. A collective farm boss in Rumania confessed that the peasants “just don’t care any more.” This year’s total harvest in Eastern Europe will be scarcely better than prewar production in the same area. Significantly, perhaps, the best yield will be in Poland, where some 86% of the land is still privately owned and worked.

But if agriculture is bad in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is catastrophic in Red China. Two Chinese pilots, whose job it was to spray farms in Shantung province with insecticides from a light plane, fled to South Korea. Last week in Seoul, they told reporters that life for the average Chinese peasant is “indescribably miserable” and that, even in once-fertile Shantung, so many are dying of starvation that they are being buried in mass graves.

This catalogue of calamities expresses a major Communist crisis: the Reds’ evident inability to bring the same competence to agriculture that, on the whole, they show in industry and technology. After 40 years of collectivization and relentless agricultural planning, the Marxists are making it plain once again that they lack a green thumb. This is all the more remarkable because, since the war, much of the non-Communist world has experienced a startling agricultural revolution. Machines are replacing men in the fields; with countless innovations, science has vastly increased the yield of the earth. But at a time when the U.S. is glutted with food, Western Europe produces more than it can eat, and per capita farm production rises steadily even in such “underdeveloped” countries as Burma, Thailand and Formosa, the Communist bloc is beset by agricultural troubles that result in belt tightening and hunger.

Trouble in Russia. Charges of Communist inefficiency by Western observers and political refugees are open to the suspicion of bias. But the Communists themselves make similar complaints.

In midsummer, the Soviet press was trumpeting claims that this year’s harvest would be the greatest in Russian history. Then last month the breast beating began in earnest. In Soviet Kazakhstan, home of Nikita Khrushchev’s ambitious virgin-lands project, Party Secretary Dinmukhamed Kunaev glumly confessed that grain production was down for the third successive year and would fall 36% short of plan. Kunaev—whose two predecessors were fired for farm failures—blamed the collective farmers for clumsy plowing, which permitted “a tremendous incursion of weeds,” and for inept practices, which caused “heavy losses of grain in the course of harvesting.” The party secretary of the Kirgiz Republic admitted that lazy farmers had allowed 20% of the arable land to revert to wilderness. Tadzhikistan’s party secretary expressed fear that there would be serious failures in cotton deliveries unless collective farmers responded to his pleas that they revive “the former glory of our master cotton pickers.”

Citizens of the Soviet farm belt apparently either ignore orders or embarrass everyone by following them to the letter. In a speech last June in Central Asia, Khrushchev cried: “Comrades, you should do everything to develop herds of horses for meat. I don’t need to tell you that horse meat is tasty and nourishing.” A Tashkent newspaper last week complained that some Uzbek farmers had taken Khrushchev at his word and had rushed 18 thoroughbreds and three pedigreed stallions straight from the local race track to the slaughterhouse.

Failure of Theory. Part of the Reds’ difficulty lies in the historic background of Communism, which was invented by urban intellectuals and aimed at the industrial proletariat. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx scarcely mentioned the farm problem except to say that “large-scale industry in agriculture will destroy the bulwark of the social order, the peasant.” Marx’s successors have persisted in thinking that a farm is just a factory without walls, and that farmers are identical with workers on an assembly line.

Hostile to the peasant and devoted to centralized authority, the Communist bureaucracy under Stalin sent out imperious orders telling the farmers when and what to plant, when and where to reap. Farm machinery, trucks, tractors, fertilizers and even seed were controlled by bureaus in Moscow that drove farmers to frenzy with missed deadlines and frustrating delays. When Khrushchev took over, he broke up the tractor stations and scattered the mechanized farm implements among individual collective farms. A massive effort was made to streamline the system by packing the bureaucrats off to the countryside. As a result, collective farms now get their orders from the nearest provincial capital instead of from Moscow. But 40 years of fumbling have taken their toll: ambitious young men and women desert the farms for the cities; the old ones who stay on have become expert at working fitfully for the government and industriously for themselves.

The years of mismanagement have resulted in the contrast between the sorry state of most collective farms and the flourishing state of the small, one-acre plots that the peasants still retain. Though these individual patches of ground total less than 3% of cultivated Russian land, they produced in 1959 13% of the milk, 20% of the meat, 49% of the potatoes, 56% of the eggs, and almost half of all the vegetables grown in the Soviet Union.

Disaster in China. Marxist rigidity is not the sole reason for Communism’s agricultural woes. The Russian winter is long and the growing season short and bedeviled by early rain, snow and frost. Nature and man have dealt even more harshly with China. Though much of China is in warmer latitudes than Russia, centuries of deforestation and uncontrolled flooding have reduced arable land to scarcely 11% of the total area.

The Chinese Reds gambled recklessly even with this narrow margin. During the first five-year plan in 1953, 75% of China’s investment went into industry and only 8% to agriculture, forestry and water conservation. Industrial growth leaped forward at a remarkable 6% to 7% a year, but even with bumper harvests the annual agricultural increase was 3%—dangerously close to the normal population rise. The 1958 introduction of rural communes brutally upset this balance and prepared the way for disaster.

Even the best-intentioned efforts of the Chinese Reds backfired. The campaign to kill sparrows as a nuisance bird was so successful that there has been a tremendous increase in insect pests. Peking ordered that crops be doubled by close planting, but instead, the practice sucked fertility from the soil and spread plant disease. In 1957 the Chinese Reds boasted that they had won the “final victory” over drought and flood. But the swollen Yangtze River has repeatedly swept away the newly planted fields of Hunan province. In southern China, the 2,700-mile Yellow River dried up so completely that a car could be driven up its parched bed. China’s total grain harvest this year will scarcely reach 180 million tons—less than in 1957. And since then, there are some 60 million more Chinese mouths to feed.

At the same time that Peking called on the “heroic and industrious” Chinese nation “to overcome all difficulties,” the food ration was recently cut again, dropping to 1,500 calories a day (in the West, 2,000 calories daily are considered the minimum needed to sustain life for sedentary workers).

Drift to Capitalism. In its desperate effort to survive, Red China last week put up more of its dwindling gold reserves to buy grain on the world market for 1962. This follows a purchase of 6,000,000 tons this year, from Canada and other countries, at a price of $340 million, much of it still unpaid. Such purchases seem to be driving China close to bankruptcy, and the country’s international credit rating is poor. While buying grain abroad, Peking is also taking the pressure off its long-suffering peasants. The hated communes are dead in everything but name; small, individual plots of land are being handed back to the farmers, who are being encouraged to raise poultry and cattle for private profit. Moscow is being importuned for new loans and agricultural imports.

But Nikita Khrushchev is having difficulties of his own. To achieve theoretically perfect socialism, Khrushchev knows that he must somehow persuade the peasant that it is more profitable to produce for the collective farm than for himself on private land. But Moscow dare not move just yet against the private system, which is clearly more efficient than the state farms.

Some economists think the Soviet Union may succeed in making the shift within the next ten years. A member of the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization says: “Russia is now entering the ranks of those nations wealthy enough to be able to raise the prices paid to farmers and thus make collective work more profitable than private.” In other words, Moscow may finally achieve its Communist goal when it has enough ready money to afford the capitalist technique of subsidizing the farmers.