Communism: The Breadline Society

In the great marble hall where he once bragged of beating U.S. meat and milk output, Nikita Khrushchev last week told Soviet leaders what every Moscow housewife knows. With 12,000,000 more citizens to feed than three years ago, Russian agriculture actually produced less food last year than in 1958 and is lagging so far behind Khrushchev’s ambitious targets that it “seriously threatens” the entire seven-year plan. Russians are in no danger of starvation and in fact are better fed than in Stalin’s day. But production of grain, sugar beets, vegetables and butter has remained level, and the cities are plagued by recurrent shortages of meat and milk. The explanation is simple. Said Khrushchev: “The fact is that we just don’t have enough.”

Milk with an Awl. In a somber, six-hour speech at the Central Committee’s annual conference on farm policy, the Soviet Premier castigated “irresponsibility” and “backwardness” in almost every segment of agriculture, even to the high price of harrows in Novosibirsk and the lagging fight against weeds in Kazakhstan. Unless the party makes “tremendous efforts,” he warned, “our country will face great difficulties, and serious harm will be inflicted on the cause of building Communism.” To get Red farms in the black, he demanded sweeping, immediate reforms that include doubling the output of farm machines, a tenfold boost in fertilizer production by 1980, and increased “Leninist incentives” (i.e., pay for peasants). Burying his seven-year-old decentralization program, Khrushchev put responsibility for agriculture on a vast central administration. With all the fervor of his old crusade for corn, he even plugged a brand-new party-line panacea: abandonment of Stalin’s system of sowing grain fields to grass every few years.* Instead of allowing almost half the valuable land to lie fallow, Khrushchev decreed that farmers henceforth will rotate grain with peas, beans, sugar beets and other crops.

His new goal: a 250% productivity increase by 1971.

Some Western diplomats deduced hopefully that Khrushchev would now press seriously for disarmament, argued that the vast investment needed for his farm program could come only from the Soviet defense budget. However, most Soviet experts agree that Khrushchev cannot afford to gamble with national security or alienate the army, which reportedly is already suspicious of his faith in peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev is inextricably committed to butter as well as guns, sirloin as well as sputniks. He has long since staked his political survival on raising Russian living standards, and last week even declared approvingly that Marxism-Leninism, like U.S. capitalism, will eventually lead to the “affluent” society.* Diehard Stalinists, notably China’s leaders, deplore Khrushchev’s emphasis on material comforts—in his own words, “presenting Communism as a table groaning with tasty dishes.” But, reasoned Nikita Khrushchev, “the preaching of equality in the spirit of the early Christian communes, with their low standard of living, with their asceticism, is alien to scientific Communism. To invite people to such Communism is tantamount to slurping milk with an awl. Communism must not be regarded as a table set with empty plates around which sit high-minded and fully equal peoples.” The Greatest Failure. To hasten affluence in Russia, Khrushchev in the past eight years has doubled the number of tractors (to 1,168,000) and ruthlessly cannibalized collective farms (250,000 into 40.000). His greatest gamble—and, say some Western critics, his most catastrophic—was to plow $40 billion into marginal virgin lands when the investment could have been profitably used to intensify farming in more fertile areas.

Whatever his new targets, in Khrushchev’s own phrase, “statistics don’t fry pancakes.” Few experts expect Russia to have any farm surplus problem for years to come. It is perhaps Communism’s greatest failure that nowhere has it satisfied man’s most fundamental demand in life, to be properly fed. Throughout the Communist empire, from Castro’s Cuba to Mao’s China, breadline societies are an inevitable result of Marxism’s ingrained distrust of the peasantry and its insistence on headlong industrialization.

Communist farm workers have no stake in the land, little incentive to work hard.

Peasants invariably steal a few daylight hours to till their private plots for profit.

The vast irony of collective agriculture is that if peasants were not allowed to raise and sell cash crops, Russia’s food shortage would be catastrophic. Though their holdings amount to less than 4% of all arable land, individual peasants own 50% of all cows, 25% of the hogs, produce 65% of the potatoes and cabbage that are Russia’s basic foods. European economists speculated last week that Nikita Khrushchev could still solve the farm problem in a single stroke. The solution: a threefold increase in the peasants’ private plots.

Developed Underdeveloped. Though Russia’s northerly location and harsh climate make for low crop yields, a more important cause of food shortages is its long failure to adopt the scientific methods that have revolutionized Western agriculture. Example: with 15 million more cows, Russia produced one-third as much milk as the U.S.; in huge areas of crop land, weed killers are virtually unknown.

It is plagued as well by an inefficient bureaucracy that tends to be more skillful at padding its returns than increasing crop yields. Moscow’s Ministry of Agriculture, said Khrushchev last week, remains exactly as it was in 1894, except that instead of three Deputy Ministers it now has 14. Russia has 48 million farm workers—nearly half its total labor force —and is still desperately short of hands.

The U.S., by contrast, has one-seventh as many farm workers, only 65% as much crop land, and 37 million fewer mouths to feed than Russia, but has a 60% greater output. Says a top British economist: “In agriculture, Russia is at best only the most developed of the underdeveloped countries.”

* Its chief prophet was Vasily Robertovich Williams, a Moscow-born scientist of Welsh descent, who sold the scheme to Stalin as a way to skimp on fertilizer. Stalin rejected Williams’ more radical theory: that Russian farm machinery should be horse-drawn or hung from cranes, since heavy tractors would ruin the soil’s substructure. Snorted Khrushchev as he recalled the scheme: “How should the cranes be suspended? From airships?”

* Although the book of that name, by U.S. Economist Kenneth Galbraith, is a highly critical study of U.S. values, it has not been published in Russia. Said Galbraith, now U.S. Ambassador to India, of Khrushchev’s allusion: “It shows that he is coming into touch with some of the best literature.”