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Devices of Discontent. Those who openly opposed his plans. Khrushchev trod underfoot. But many are the covert devices of discontent. The peasant did not have to resist; he need only not cooperate. From party secretaries in the outlying republics came bitter complaints that the agrogorods were unworkable. A year ago, while Stalin was still alive, Malenkov disowned the agrogorods. But somehow their creator was not disowned. Khrushchev stayed put, and when it came time, three months ago, to replace the hard policy with a softer one, it was Khrushchev who criticized the past and outlined the future. His criticisms:
¶Too much red tape: "Each collective farm submits 10,000 statistical indices each year, eight times as many as before the war."
¶ Too little technical know-how: "Less than one in five of the chairmen of collective farms has attended secondary school"—a startling admission of how much education has been concentrated on the worker and denied the peasant. ¶ Too few incentives: "It is pernicious . . . to interfere too much with private ownership of cattle." (Of the 24.3 million cows in the Soviet Union, the majority—14.8 million—are "private cows," tended by the peasant in his spare time away from the collective.)
Khrushchev's remedy for his difficulties was even more startling than his diagnosis. He announced a new slogan, "Increase the Material Interest of the Peasant," and in doing so, resurrected that old capitalist notion of a Fair Profit. He wanted to shift the emphasis from grain to livestock, and to make the shift attractive to the peasant, he offered to pay him five times more than previously upon "compulsory delivery" of his cattle. To get the peasant to work harder, he offered immediate rewards, not distant promises: "Grain must be issued to workers when they thresh; boots should be sold to the peasants in return for the cattle they deliver."
The silent revolt of the peasant had the government to retreat. Stalin, last years, had been too stubborn back; his successors have the shrewdness see the necessity. But it was only a retreat: after 23 years' trial, the Soviet farm policy (so glowingly advertised throughout the rest of the world as "land reform") is bankrupt—but it has not been abandoned. Khrushchev himself made this plain by acknowledging: "We want gradually to liquidate the system of individual farms . . . but it would be a mistake to show haste.''
Upon the cooperation of the muzhik, often deceived and deeply suspicious, the sucess of the New Course depends. By dangling Adam Smith's carrot while wielding Karl Marx's stick, Khrushchev and the Kremlin expect to provide not only more meat and potatoes, but enough agricultural raw material (cotton, wool, etc.) to enable industry to meet its new promises to the consumer. In Russian terms, the new promises, with their dazzling percentage figures, are ambitious. But compared with the accepted norms of Western production, the targets are by no means high.
In the United Kingdom, for instance, the density of livestock is seven times as great, the output of milk per unit of land eight times, and the application of fertilizers almost 20 times as large as in the Soviet Union