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Bark on the Wind. The December Plenum had conservatively cut back Khrushchev's expansive plans for agriculture and industry. Nikita's reply was to organize some 514,000 "discussion" meetings across the country, in which his loyal party workers exhorted the comrades to back Nikita's dreams of Russia's future. Nikita himself launched an attack on Moscow's desk-bound administrators. "Bureaucrats sprout like mushrooms after a rainfall," cried Nikita. In May the Supreme Soviet voted to hand over industrial control to Khrushchev by scattering Moscow's managerial elite among 105 new economic regional councils—all tightly supervised by his regional party henchmen.
As the new class of government managers and engineers was blown from desks and dachas to the four corners of the Siberian steppes, Khrushchev roared off for his old corn-belt stamping grounds to deal with Soviet Russia's biggest worry: the farm problem.
"You must plant potatoes in square clusters. You must grow cabbage as my grandmother did," he lectured cloth-capped peasants. He admitted that his plans for planting corn ("sausage on the stalk") had not panned out so well everywhere. "If you cannot catch the bird of paradise," he advised, "better take a wet hen." Bidding for the farm vote, he promised the collectivists lower taxes and an end to compulsory delivery to the state from their private plots, then crowed: "Within the next few years, we shall catch up with the U.S. in per-capita production of meat, milk and butter."
The West would call him crazy, said Nikita. His answer was to quote a Russian proverb: "The dog barks and the wind carries the sound away." Barked Nikita: "This program is stronger than the H-bomb. If we catch up with the U.S., we will have hit the pillars of capitalism with the most powerful torpedo yet."
The Old Cell Game. Khrushchev's Presidium rivals thought Khrushchev was overdoing it. They had thought so ever since he rose in the Kremlin's Great Hall at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 to deliver his weeping, three-hour indictment of Stalin as a "murderer" and "maniac." They sprang their showdown last June, and it was a close thing. The majority present voted to deny Khrushchev the chair, and Bulganin took over. Did the Old Guard think that because they had destroyed Stalin's police power, they could vote Khrushchev freely out of his job as they had voted Malenkov out before him? Khrushchev fought back, and the old commissars learned that the new party boss swung a new kind of political power. According to an East German radio report, Marshal Zhukov sent out his aircraft to fetch Khrushchev's Central Committee henchmen to Moscow. In the final vote all joined to censure the "antiparty group" except Molotov, who stubbornly abstained. Molotov, the last living collaborator of Lenin; Kaganovich, the first sponsor of Nikita's career; Malenkov, Stalin's designated successor—all were shipped off to obscure posts in remote areas. The dictator jounced off to visit the Czechs. In Slovakia, he airily dismissed the anti-party group: "As they say, a scabby sheep got into a good flock. We took the sheep by the tail and chucked it out."