RUSSIA
(See Cover)
The snail has started his trip, hut when will he get to the end of it?
—Russian proverb
In May 1960, Nikita Khrushchev peered across the Great Kremlin Hall and spied the millennium. "In the immediate future," he declared to the Supreme Soviet, "we shall reach the production and consumption level of the United States, the wealthiest country of the capitalist world. Then we shall enter the open sea in which no comparisons with capitalism will anchor us."
Less than four years later, Khrushchev's age of abundance seems as remote as mythology's Isles of the Blest. For all his glowing promises to the consumer, living standards in Russia today are little higher than they were in 1958. Though some food prices have increased sharply since 1962, there has been only a token increase in wages. Housing, consumer goods, and several key sectors of heavy industry have fallen far short of even the reduced levels set for them last year.
Dismal Catalogue. Above all other obstacles on the road to abundance looms agriculture, the perennial problem child of Soviet society. Though Russia regularly exported big farm surpluses in Czarist times, in 46 years of Communism it has never yet managed to grow enough food or raw materials for its needs. In 1963, after four straight years of disappointing harvests, the farm problem came to a head with a disastrous crop failure that forced Russia's leaders to buy $935 million worth of wheat from the capitalists they vowed to bury.
Last week 6,000 experts and officials from all over Russia gathered in the Kremlin for a week-long Communist Party Central Committee meeting on farm problems. As speaker after speaker reviewed the results of Khrushchev's pet panaceas, Nikita listened somberly to a dismal catalogue of failures.
In the forbidding Virgin Lands of Central Asia, where Khrushchev set out in 1954 to create a vast new granary, erosion now threatens to turn millions of acres into a dust bowl; most of the new croplands last year failed even to return their seed grain. His hasty campaign to plow under fallow grasslands has impaired huge areas of once-fertile soil since 1958. Khrushchev's evangelical efforts in 1961 to promote mass sowing of corn did more harm than good, as he himself admitted at the meeting.
Grey Eminence. Agriculture Minister Ivan Volovchenko—the sixth official to hold that thankless post since Khrushchev became boss of the party in 1953—last week outlined the costliest, most ambitious program to boost farm output that has ever been undertaken by a Soviet government. After decades of starveling treatment at the hands of leaders hell-bent on industrialization, Soviet agriculture is finally to get the machinery, fertilizer and technology that have revolutionized U.S. and Western European farming over the past 50 years. But for city dwellers, Volov-chenko's promised bounty came too late. After a winter of scarcities, they learned only two weeks before the meeting that fodder shortages last fall had forced farmers to slaughter 29 million hogs—more than 40% of Russia's entire swine herd—as well as record numbers of cattle and sheep, thus assuring that scarce meat will be scarcer than ever for the next few years.
Together with lagging consumer-goods production, agricultural failures—which