Pie in the Sty

When a Russian says someone has "passed him a pig" he means that he has been done a dirty trick. Last week Nikita Khrushchev, who farrows folksy epigrams wherever his pudgy frame goes, told a gathering of farm bosses and workers that if only they would concentrate on producing more pigs, say two per citizen, the expression "passing a pig" would mean doing a good deed, instead of a bad one. In the next breath Khrushchev passed Soviet citizenry its biggest pig in many a year: he declared a moratorium on 260 billion rubles ($65billion) lent to the state by workers.

Almost every year for 35 years, Soviet workers have had from two weeks' to a month's pay deducted from their wages in exchange for state loan certificates. Since World War II the state has tried to popularize these forced loans by holding quarterly lotteries in which the owners of lucky-numbered loan certificates collect prizes of from 200 to 50,000 rubles. But the cost of redeeming earlier loans, plus prize money, now absorbs 35% of the amount collected. Complained Khrushchev: "This year we shall have to pay out about 16 billion rubles; next year, 18 billion; and in 1967 we would have to pay about 25 billion, or almost as much as the subscriptions to the loan envisaged for the current year. This is a vicious circle." Khrushchev's solution was as Marxist as the circle itself: wipe out the loan and postpone paying back previous loans for 25 years, during which loan holders would get no interest.

Khrushchev did not expect the West to believe that Soviet workers would gladly accept the loss of a theoretical 260 billion rubles on outstanding loans. Grunted Nikita: "Comrades, the capitalist--that shopkeeper who would slaughter his own father for a half-percent interest--will never believe that you consent to this of your own free will. He will read about it in the papers and say they have intimidated the workers and peasants." And in fact there were two reasons why the Soviet worker might not be wholly displeased with the state pig passed to him by Khrushchev: 1) at least from now on, Khrushchev promised, the loan deductions would cease; 2) few Soviet workers and peasants have believed that the loan scrip was worth more than the paper it was printed on. Almost the only people who stood to lose by the decision were the speculators who had bought up loan certificates at fractional values on the gamble that some day they might be redeemed. "Stormy applause" was said to have greeted Nikita's announcement. He added: "Just as a pig can never look at the sky, so the capitalist can never understand our psychology."

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