In the great marble hall where he once bragged of beating U.S. meat and milk output, Nikita Khrushchev last week told Soviet leaders what every Moscow housewife knows. With 12,000,000 more citizens to feed than three years ago, Russian agriculture actually produced less food last year than in 1958 and is lagging so far behind Khrushchev's ambitious targets that it "seriously threatens" the entire seven-year plan. Russians are in no danger of starvation and in fact are better fed than in Stalin's day. But production of grain, sugar beets, vegetables and butter has remained level, and the cities are plagued by recurrent shortages of meat and milk. The explanation is simple. Said Khrushchev: "The fact is that we just don't have enough."
Milk with an Awl. In a somber, six-hour speech at the Central Committee's annual conference on farm policy, the Soviet Premier castigated "irresponsibility" and "backwardness" in almost every segment of agriculture, even to the high price of harrows in Novosibirsk and the lagging fight against weeds in Kazakhstan. Unless the party makes "tremendous efforts," he warned, "our country will face great difficulties, and serious harm will be inflicted on the cause of building Communism." To get Red farms in the black, he demanded sweeping, immediate reforms that include doubling the output of farm machines, a tenfold boost in fertilizer production by 1980, and increased "Leninist incentives" (i.e., pay for peasants). Burying his seven-year-old decentralization program, Khrushchev put responsibility for agriculture on a vast central administration. With all the fervor of his old crusade for corn, he even plugged a brand-new party-line panacea: abandonment of Stalin's system of sowing grain fields to grass every few years.* Instead of allowing almost half the valuable land to lie fallow, Khrushchev decreed that farmers henceforth will rotate grain with peas, beans, sugar beets and other crops.
His new goal: a 250% productivity increase by 1971.