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The case for the consumer is even stronger today. While military needs helped undergird development of heavy industry in Stalin's era, advanced defense and space technology nowadays siphons off ill-spared capital and technical brains, with little or no return to the economy as a whole. In a discussion of his farm shortages with surplus-burdened U.S. Agriculture Secretary Orville L. Freeman last August, Khrushchev drew his hand across his throat and remarked: "I've got rockets up to here." What the West does not always suspect is that when the Soviet line veers abruptly from cordial coexistence to shoe-pounding enmity, or back, the change may not necessarily reflect Communist diplomatic wiles so much as a new turn in the factional war among the Kremlin bureaucrats.
Matter of Decades. Since late 1958, the metal eaters have succeeded in boosting Soviet defense spending by one-third, to nearly 20% of Russia's G.N.P., v. 9% in the U.S. As always, consumer production was the first to feel the pinch. Though East-West tensions have eased markedly in the past year, the Soviet government has made only token cuts in the military budget. The arms burden is the heaviest of many demands on Soviet resources that have seriously overtaxed the economy at a time when the government's income was shrinking. The annual rate of increase in investment in the economy has dropped 50% since 1959, while Russia's economic rate of growth has dwindled from better than 6% in the '50s to a level recently estimated by the Central Intelligence Agency at less than 2.5% in 1962 and 1963.
While some economists argue that the Red decline is not that serious, other independent studies of Communist statistics confirm the CIA estimates. No one seriously believes that Russia faces economic collapse. But if Soviet society is to provide its 226 million people with living standards comparable to those of the West, that day is still decades away.
Be Patient. While creature comfort currently has a low political priority, the Russian's lot has already improved enormously in the decade since Stalin's death. In 1953, Russians earned less in real wages than they had before the first Five-Year Plan in 1928; since then, the population has increased nearly 50%, but per-capita farm production has remained static. By the time Russia's belated economic recovery reached its peak, in 1958-59, the country had not only rebuilt its war-ravaged industry but under Khrushchev's prodding had also increased per-capita consumption 50% and boosted farm output 55%. It was a glum Nikita Khrushchev who had to caution Russians last year: "You must be patient, wait a while and you will have everything. We can't make everything at once."
Russia is no longer the "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" that Winston Churchill described 25 years ago. Despite myriad restrictions, nowadays tourists and journalists can travel fairly widely, and Sovietologists, economists and scholars from many other