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In February, Farm Boss Khrushchev had to confess to the Central Committee of the party that the output of bread grain was also insufficient. "The quantity of grain that remains on collective farms" after the state has collected its quotas, said he, was not enough to pay off the workers on the collective farms. And what the state got, grabbing first, was not enough to fill needs at home and increasing demands for exports to the food-short satellites.
Khrushchev decreed the trek of the young "pioneers" to the unfarmed lands of Kazakhstan. "The Soviet people," said Nikita Khrushchev, "will undoubtedly provide the necessary number of workers for the reclamation of waste and virgin land. Everybody realizes that this is an all-peoples' cause . . ."
Staggering Goal. As facts about the venture in Kazakhstan seeped out of Russia, outside experts were struck by two things in particular: 1) the declared goal was staggering—to make over 32 million acres of land, and to plow, sow and harvest 18 to 20 million tons of grain there within only two years; 2) the Kremlin was willing to rob its established farmlands of machinery and its factories of manpower to exploit the virgin lands. Taking from other sectors of the economy to build the new enterprise brought to mind Russian Satirist Krylov's fable of Trishka, the poor simpleton who patched a hole in the elbow of his coat by cutting a piece of cloth from the cuff, patched the new hole by cutting away the coattails, finally went about in a coat cut shorter than his vest.
"Nothing like That." The first fever of enthusiasm wore off in the inhospitable climate, makeshift poverty and poor housing of Kazakhstan. "We have tea, as much sugar as we want, but no place to buy a teapot," a pioneer told an Izvestia reporter. "Kerosene lamps are also a problem . . . and then, washing basins . . . pots to cook in . . ."
Most pioneers had only tents to live in; poor food was dished out in communal kitchens, and the canteens had little to sell ("Five Komsomols went to Magnitogorsk, which is more than 500 miles away, [to buy] toothbrushes, toothpaste, thread, shoelaces, indelible pencils, envelopes . . . Nothing like that exists here").
Government radio programs began to belabor party and government officials for not working hard enough.
The mixture of discontent, of listless workers, of idle and broken machinery, of incoherent direction, demanded action in Moscow. One day last month Pravda's lead article criticized the slowness of the Kazakhstan sowing and warned that the authorities on the scene would not be allowed to hide behind poor weather as an alibi. Nikita Khrushchev himself found it necessary to rush east to meet with the Kazakh Communist Party and discuss "at length" the problems of the virgin lands.