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But a year later, Khrushchev, as party chief, with the power in his control, was able to show that the "new life" was a flop. In a series of speeches he showed that: 1) housing had not materialized; 2) the consumer-goods program had failed; 3) there was a nationwide food shortage. There were some other failures he did not have to point up: the first suggestion of relaxed control had been followed by the East German riots and by a ten-day strike of slave laborers in the Vorkuta prison camps. Attempts at "honest art," e.g., Novelist Ehrenburg's The Thaw, merely confused Soviet writers accustomed to writing propaganda, including Ehrenburg himself, and honesty in art was incomprehensible to painters of the approved anecdote.
A bad season in the Ukraine had ruined the harvest, and vast quantities of grain had rotted on the railroad sidings; in the Volga region, dry winds cut crops. It did not matter to Khrushchev that these failures were aggravated by his own plan to switch wheat production to Siberia, and that the harvest in the Ukraine had been delayed (and a fourth of it lost) because he had ordered much of the machinery for its collection removed to Siberia. All he wanted was something to pin on Malenkov, head of the negligent government ministries.
It did not matter to Khrushchev (or any other Soviet leader) that the condition he had revealed was in fact the sharpest proof that the Soviet system of state socialism, with its hierarchy of officials and police, is unworkable, both in industry and agriculture. The idea of the "new life" had sprung from Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., published just before the old dictator's death, in which the idea of satisfying consumer demand on the basis of "primacy in the production of means of production" could be found in a fog of ideological jargon. Khrushchev made a savage comment about "ill-starred theoreticians" in his last speech on the subject, but it was Malenkov he was aiming at, not Stalin.
The Blaze. The gathering of all this ideological tinder had been made plain to all the world for weeks, but who would start the blaze, and when, and who would be burned, was something no man outside the Kremlin could foresee.