Depression at Home

Russia's amazing diplomatic performance these days may be intended to seize any external opportunities offered, but from all the accumulating evidence, a big reason for wanting an easement abroad comes from troubles at home. While the U.S. and Western Europe prosper, Russia is in the throes of a widespread economic depression.

Khrushchev's blundering attempts to meet the agricultural crisis (for which Georgy Malenkov took the rap last February) have not helped significantly. In some areas of Siberia farmers are reported deserting the collectives to set up independent farms, or to join roving work gangs, where they probably eat better. To curb this kind of deviation, Minister of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov last month took a swing through Kazakhstan, one of the principal collective farm areas, with a posse of MVD police.

Slow & Fast. Rising food prices and a flourishing black market have brought about a high measure of inflation. There have been nine price cuts in clothing and food since the war, but none this spring. The reduced purchasing power of the ruble, not compensated by an increase in wages, has caused dissatisfaction among the workers who have not responded to the usual methods of coercion and Stakhanovite exhortation to work harder on "the march towards Communism." Result: many state enterprises are not fulfilling their "plans."

A few weeks ago the Kremlin called a conference of its top industrial managers to read off a formidable list of wastages and failures. Commented Pravda: "Many enterprises that systematically fail to reach their targets ... are concealed behind the attained overall targets in [other] branches of industry." The solution was characteristically bureaucratic: two new economic commissions were formed, one to deal with present planning, the other to deal with the future. Management of a number of key industries was broken up to decentralize.

But the critical emphasis was on labor. Chemical Industry Boss Sergei Tikhomirov complained of "the stagnation and routine attitude prevalent among some workers." Others complained of the "complacency and smugness of ... workers" and the "great shortcomings in the standardization of labor." Workers were condemned for what apparently is the common practice of lying down on the job in the first half of the month and then working like crazy (and at overtime) in the second half to make up the month's prescribed production quota. A new word was added to the Soviet work vocabulary to describe this phenomenon: shturmovshchina, i.e., storm attack. "Shturmovshchina," said Premier Bulganin, "leads to low-grade production."

The Troubleshooter. Last week control of labor and wages was put in the hands of a troubleshooter who shoots only Big Trouble. One of the few original Bolsheviks to survive the purges, First Deputy Premier Lazar Kaganovich, chairman of the new output committee, worked nis passage across the Stalinist years by performing a score of grisly jobs for the old dictator. During the early collectivizations he forcibly put down peasant risings against the regime and punished whole areas by seizing foodstuffs and creating artificial famines.

When unrest spread to Moscow, Stalin gave him extraordinary powers. Comrade Kaganovich built the famed Moscow subway; he also cast thousands of Moscovites into jail and changed Moscow into a bastion of the party line. Twice he undertook "pacification" measures in the restless Ukraine, and during World War II he reorganized the Soviet Union's dislocated railroad system, introduced the death penalty for failure to make schedules. Kaganovich was the first man to make servile speeches about Stalin's "genius." His sister Roza was Stalin's mistress, possibly his second wife.

Now a mustachioed 61, Kaganovich is the senior member of the Communist Party's Central Committee and, by virtue of his long membership in its organizational and political bureaus, possibly its most influential member. Men who have worked close to Kaganovich adjudge him its "thinking" member. Identified in the past with the rise to power of both Khrushchev and Malenkov, and held in some trust by both factions, old Bolshevik Kaganovich is regarded as the chief advocate of the current "collective leadership," under which all the wary Kremlin gang can hang on to their lives and jobs if no one of them gets too strong.

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