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Russia is already beginning to feel unmistakable stirrings of consumer resistance. Shoppers are increasingly leary of high-priced, low-quality goods; evidence of this is the fact that each year since 1959, more than $1 billion in disposable income has flowed into savings banks. In 1963, the accumulation of unwanted goods on retail shelves amounted to some $3 billion above normal inventory levels. The Communist press carries reams of complaints about shoddy products and inefficient service, faithfully reports punishments meted out to the venal or incompetent. When an architect confessed that he had failed to provide elevators for a 13-story apartment building, he was assigned a room on the top floor.
Over-Response. Planners and managers are under stern orders to meet consumers' needs, but only the discipline of a competitive economy could ever make them do anything about it. As Nikita Khrushchev himself said in Kalinin last month, "We would like to lower prices, but we cannot. We would have to build shops of reinforced concrete; otherwise the customers would demolish the walls with their elbows."
Soviet economists over the past year have been engaged in a heated debate over the need to organize the entire labyrinthine price and profit system on a rational, scientific basis. The basic problem, of course, is one of incentives, the issue that has hobbled Soviet agriculture for decades. With 50% more cropland than the U.S. and a labor force that is almost seven times as large, Russia produces only two-thirds as much food as the U.S.
To squeeze more meat and dairy products from the land, Khrushchev has labored long and hard—too hard. For his crusading zeal saddled Soviet agriculture with an additional problem, one that Russian-born Economist Alec Nove calls "over-response." In their rush to plant corn, farm officials plowed under valuable pasture in many areas unsuited to grain crops.
In all his pet projects, Khrushchev, who has probably lavished more time on farm problems in the past decade than any other statesman in the world (a recently published seven-volume collection of Nikita's agricultural sermons represents only a sampling of his Georgics), attempted to wring out more food for the lowest possible cost. The Virgin Lands campaign was a shotgun attempt to grow wheat on the cheap, by tapping the stored-up fertility under 19 million acres of marginal land, rather than resort to the costly safe alternative of intensifying yields in existing croplands by increased use of fertilizer.
The prospects are little better for 1964. A cruel sheet of ice, reaching from the Ukraine to the shores of the Caspian, threatens serious damage to the winter wheat crop that normally provides nearly half of Russia's needs.
O.K. With Lenin. Undaunted, party officials at last week's farm conference were already gloating over the bumper harvests that would roll in as soon as the tide of fertilizer washed over the land. If this was