"Communism," said Lenin, "is Soviet Authority plus electrification." Since then, five Five-Year Plans have come and gone. Soviet Authority is still supreme, but the electrification of Russia hardly extends beyond the big cities. Last week Lenin's successors announced a sixth Five-Year Plan, the main feature of which was a bracket of atomic power stations with a total capacity of some 2.5 million kilowatts.
Actually each successive Five-Year Plan (piatiletka) is a set of production targets which the state planners then exhort the Russian people to attain by superhuman effort. The sixth piatiletka...