Down With the Piatiletki

To change horses--the peasant plow horse for the horse of heavy industry--that is the goal. . . of the Five-Year Plan.

--Stalin (1933)

At the beginning of Soviet Russia's climb from a plow-horse to a horsepower economy, the Five-Year Plan, or Piatiletka, was a dramatic slogan as well as an effective method of primitive state planning. But when the sixth Piatiletka arrived last year, the word had lost its power for millions of Russian workers, case-hardened by 30 years of ceaseless urging to achieve ever higher production norms. Last week the Soviet leaders indicated that they were ready to drop the old Piatiletki for a more relaxed method of planning and executing the progress of their national economy.

At a joint session of the Supreme Soviet (Russia's rubber-stamp legislature), Economic Boss Mikhail Pervukhin admitted that scores of economic targets set for 1956 had not been achieved. Then Pervukhin made, for a Soviet leader, a surprising statement: instead of scolding the workers, he blamed the Piatiletka planners. They had placed too much emphasis on oversized industrial complexes, particularly in the coal, steel and chemical industries. Pervukhin promised that industrial targets for 1957 would be lowered by nearly 4% on previous planning, with continued emphasis on heavy industry. More important than the substance of Pervukhin's announcement was the principle involved: the Soviet leaders were scrapping the rigid Five-Year-Plan system for a realistic ad hoc economy more in line with the West.

One reason for the sought-after economic flexibility is the crisis in the satellites. Pervukhin ordered new efforts to be made in coal, fuel and cement production in western Russia, to compensate for deliveries no longer coming from Poland and Hungary. Another reason is the need for a new approach to the problem of defense. The declaration that the 1957 defense appropriation is $24 billion (down 5.6% from 1956) was an obvious attempt to invite comparison with the U.S. defense budget (estimated for 1957 at $41 billion). Actually, there has been no reduction in the Soviet's armed forces, and the trend, as in the U.S., has been toward more highly specialized equipment, e.g., guided missiles and submarines--suggesting increased rather than decreased defense spending.

Only one hint of the Soviet Union's vastly stepped-up nuclear program (five bombs exploded since August 1956) was given by Pervukhin: an order to rush work on big electric-power projects--essential to atomic development--at Kuybyshev, Saratov and Stalingrad (on the Volga) and Kairak-Kum, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk (in Siberia). Something speedier and more pliable than the old Piatiletki was needed to harness these horses.

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