Out in the district of Kustanay in remote northern Kazakhstan, a Russian wrote a despondent note to Moscow's Pravda, and for its own reasons, Pravda decided to publish it:
". . . Machinery lies all around the railroad stations. One can see everywhere mounds of broken parts lying in the mud . . . Many things get spoiled. Gasoline, lubricants, hay, spares, combines are being kept together in one backyard; hay mowers rot in the compost . . . Some spare parts are just thrown into the middle of the street, and the tractors which go by crush them to pieces . . ."
In Komsomolskaya Pravda, another complained: "The soil begins to dry . . . The cause is lack of manpower. Things are managed the wrong way. Seventeen-year-old girls from the city who have never held a pitchfork in their hands work in the hayfields, while two husky kolkhoz fellows just sit by the stove, drink vodka and tell funny jokes . . .''
And in Ivestia, another: "The Tarangul Motor Tractor Station began its work in the fields about half a month later than last year . . . Not a single furrow has been made in our kolkhoz. The director of our MTS, Comrade Petrov, forgot to give even one single plow to our brigade . . ."
One of Two. These small-fry complaints (and the big treatment they got) were the visible signs of a great internal problem which was besetting Russia's topmost leaders last week. Russia's vast new emergency farm program was going badly. The outcome may well determine the future of Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party secretary who in one year has risen so high that he now stands side by side with Premier Georgy Malenkov in a diumvirate ruling Soviet Russia.
On the burly shoulders of Khrushchev rests responsibility for a great gamble of men and machines that the Kremlin calls "development of virgin soil and wasteland." Since February, tens of thousands, mostly young Russians and Ukrainians—many of them never before close to a farm—plus hundreds of the best Soviet agricultural engineers and scientists, have been dragooned into a great eastward migration to convert 32 million acres of untilled land into a new Communist breadbasket as great as the Ukraine. Big percentages of Russia's farm-machinery output (e.g., 120,000 tractors this year, just about all that Russia can produce), spare parts, and the fuel to run them have been consigned to the virgin lands. Some of the toughest commissars in the party were chosen to oversee the gamble, which is taking place in 16 regions across the Volga, in the Urals, in western Siberia. It is concentrated on the sometimes arid, sometimes frozen steppes of Kazakhstan (see-map).
Past Failure. In his 25 years of brutal collectivization and regimentation of the peasantry, Stalin failed to wrest enough food out of the Russian soil to feed his people; the output of some agricultural products (e.g., meat, milk, butter) fell below the 1916 levels of czarist days. Last September Nikita Khrushchev admitted the shortcomings of the Stalin program and announced a program of incentives to persuade the peasants to grow more. The Kremlin said consolingly that there was enough bread grain, but Khrushchev complained of severe shortages of livestock, vegetables (particularly potatoes), coarse grain and other fodder.