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Some Western diplomats deduced hopefully that Khrushchev would now press seriously for disarmament, argued that the vast investment needed for his farm program could come only from the Soviet defense budget. However, most Soviet experts agree that Khrushchev cannot afford to gamble with national security or alienate the army, which reportedly is already suspicious of his faith in peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev is inextricably committed to butter as well as guns, sirloin as well as sputniks. He has long since staked his political survival on raising Russian living standards, and last week even declared approvingly that Marxism-Leninism, like U.S. capitalism, will eventually lead to the "affluent" society.* Diehard Stalinists, notably China's leaders, deplore Khrushchev's emphasis on material comforts—in his own words, "presenting Communism as a table groaning with tasty dishes." But, reasoned Nikita Khrushchev, "the preaching of equality in the spirit of the early Christian communes, with their low standard of living, with their asceticism, is alien to scientific Communism. To invite people to such Communism is tantamount to slurping milk with an awl. Communism must not be regarded as a table set with empty plates around which sit high-minded and fully equal peoples." The Greatest Failure. To hasten affluence in Russia, Khrushchev in the past eight years has doubled the number of tractors (to 1,168,000) and ruthlessly cannibalized collective farms (250,000 into 40.000). His greatest gamble—and, say some Western critics, his most catastrophic—was to plow $40 billion into marginal virgin lands when the investment could have been profitably used to intensify farming in more fertile areas.
Whatever his new targets, in Khrushchev's own phrase, "statistics don't fry pancakes." Few experts expect Russia to have any farm surplus problem for years to come. It is perhaps Communism's greatest failure that nowhere has it satisfied man's most fundamental demand in life, to be properly fed. Throughout the Communist empire, from Castro's Cuba to Mao's China, breadline societies are an inevitable result of Marxism's ingrained distrust of the peasantry and its insistence on headlong industrialization.
Communist farm workers have no stake in the land, little incentive to work hard.
Peasants invariably steal a few daylight hours to till their private plots for profit.
The vast irony of collective agriculture is that if peasants were not allowed to raise and sell cash crops, Russia's food shortage would be catastrophic. Though their holdings amount to less than 4% of all arable land, individual peasants own 50% of all cows, 25% of the hogs, produce 65% of the potatoes and cabbage that are Russia's basic foods. European economists speculated last week that Nikita Khrushchev could still solve the farm problem in a single stroke. The solution: a threefold increase in the peasants' private plots.
Developed Underdeveloped. Though Russia's northerly location and harsh climate make for low crop yields, a more important cause of food shortages is its long failure to adopt the scientific methods that have revolutionized Western agriculture. Example: with 15 million more cows, Russia produced one-third as much milk as the U.S.; in huge areas of crop land, weed killers are virtually unknown.