Great Expectations

At a Moscow embassy party last week, First Deputy Premier Maxim Saburov boasted, "The Soviet Union will draw even with the U.S. in the foreseeable future."

The Bolsheviks are talking big these days. Western specialists do not expect to live to see Russian production overtake the U.S., but after analyzing the figures that Saburov gave out for the first time in Russia's new, sixth Five Year Plan (TIME, Jan. 23), they are becoming increasingly respectful of Soviet economic progress.

Russian Steel. Judged by Saburov's claims of last year's performance in 50 basic industrial commodities, Russia's planned economy is now second only to the U.S.'s booming free economy, and growing twice as fast (having so much farther to go). For the first time, Russia used hard figures, not meaningless percentages. Russian steel production (a mere 4,300,000 tons in 1928) was 45.2 million tons last year, and the 1960 target is 68.3 million tons. Though this falls far short of U.S. 1955 output of 106 million tons, it appears to surpass that of France and Germany combined. The Soviet Union plans to top U.S. coal output next year. If the Russians fulfill their goal of raising national income 60% by 1960, they will have to be at two-thirds of the present U.S. economic strength, and will have achieved the broad base of heavy industry their world ambitions require.

Only in agriculture does the Soviet Union confess great weakness. The new plan that so confidently ticks off industrial goals discloses no figures for past food production, and Pravda admits that the agricultural goals were not fulfilled. But the new plan demands 100% greater productivity on collective farms by 1960, which Western specialists think is an impossible target. "This new and dangerous stage in the attempt to assimilate Soviet agriculture," says the London Observer's Edward Crankshaw, "can mean nothing less than an unspoken declaration of war on the mass of the peasants."

Chinese Earth. Red China's bosses are also making tremendous claims. Writing on "The Surging Tide of Socialism in the Chinese Countryside," Mao Tse-tung last week asserted that some 70 million farm families--more than two-thirds of all peasant households--have now been collectivized. He told a party meeting in Peking that Red China's Socialist revolution "has rolled ahead so fast" since he ordered a speedup last summer that he now thinks it can be basically achieved for China's 585 million in about three more years. Apparently Mao believes his great purge of 1950-51, in which perhaps as many as 15 million died, so effectively destroyed the Chinese will to resist that he can now press on with complete collectivization of the land without having to kill more millions in a new blood bath.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.