Russia: Tomorrow Is Three Suits

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over-response, it came none too soon: Khrushchev had been crying in vain for fertilizer since 1958. Now, armed with a seven-year, $47 billion "chemicalization" program that will pour out more than 80 million tons a year of mineral fertilizer as well as other synthetics, Khrushchev said that, with help, Russia by 1971 would have a chemical industry comparable to any that Western countries have taken decades to build. Said he: "It would be stupid to ignore the achievements of foreign science only because they were made in a capitalist country. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin did not consider it a shame to learn from the capitalists."

Skeptical peasants first have to be taught to use fertilizer. In the past, the Soviet variety has been so poor in nutrient that many countrymen agree with the farmer who confided to a friend last week: "Chemistry is all right, but what really counts is dung." Then it has to get to the fields, mostly in areas served by crude dirt roads that turn to quagmires in winter. More than 25% of Khrushchev's precious fertilizer is usually wasted in transit. Shipped in boxcars, the coarse Russian mixture sometimes cakes so hard that it has to be broken loose with picks. Piled outside the station, it often lies forgotten through the winter, serving small boys as a toboggan slope. When a traveler once congratulated a rural stationmaster on the bumper wheat crop pressing in on the tracks, the embarrassed official explained: "First, there was this shipment of fertilizer that never got picked up. Then there was that shipment of seed grain that didn't get delivered. They just got together."

Everybody Planning. All the fertilizer in the world will not solve the fundamental dilemma of Soviet agriculture: the nature of the peasant. No incentives yet devised have ever persuaded him to devote to impersonal toil a scintilla of the love and labor he lavishes on the minute patch of land he can still call his own. From privately owned plots, amounting to a bare 3% of all cultivated land in Russia, comes half of all the nation's meat, milk, green vegetables. But the bureaucracy adamantly refuses to expand the private plots.

Every enterprise in Russia is watched and judged by the party. Its presence radiates from Moscow to the remotest district in the land, no longer holding its subjects with terror but with the stern and pious stare of orthodoxy.

In today's Russia, with its 200,000 industrial plants producing more than 200 million commodities, a Soviet economist estimates that the planners' task has become 1,600 times more difficult than it was in 1928. Unless it is dramatically reformed, warns another Soviet expert, by 1980 the bureaucracy will increase thirty-six fold—and employ every adult Russian.

The Paper Ocean. As it is, Moscow's congeries of commissars is incapable even of absorbing the facts needed to analyze the economy's current performance, let alone planning intelligently for the future. From a study of the

Urals Machine-Building Factory, Herbert Levine, a visiting economics professor at Harvard, found that this one plant's list of its requirements in labor, materials and equipment for the annual plan fills 17,000 close-packed pages.

Bureaucrats are hopeful that computers will ultimately enable the planning organization to breast "the paper ocean,"