"Things are bad, very bad!" shouted Nikita Khrushchev last January, summarily firing Nikolai Belyaev, his viceroy for the virgin-lands region of Soviet Kazakhstan. But just how bad things were on the Soviet's wild rontier is only now evident. The fact is that last October 3,000 young Communist pioneers staged a strike that turned into a small rebellion.
The "disruption," as Belyaev's successor euphemistically called it in an otherwise frank speech last month, took place in the city of Temir-Tau (pop. 54,000), where some 3,000 Komsomol pioneers had been assigned to build a huge steel plait. They...
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