Bark on the Wind

Before a gathering of Soviet agricultural workers and farm experts in Leningrad last week, Nikita Khrushchev, the busy boss of all the Russias, admitted that he could not do everything at once. "Even Chekhov's hero," said Nikita, "unscrewed only one nut before he started on another." But having only just started the huge job of decentralizing the whole of Soviet industry, Khrushchev was ready and willing to take on the biggest and balkiest of all Soviet troubles: the farm problem.

"Comrades," cried Khrushchev, "successes achieved in agriculture and good prospects for its development permit us to set and solve a task of great nationwide importance: within the next few years to catch up with the U.S. in per capita production of meat, milk and butter."

As Khrushchev told it, the farm troubles about which he had had to "speak quite sharply" three or four years ago, were as good as over. And the predictions his experts had given him, of overtaking the U.S. by 1975, were too pessimistic. Their arithmetic was O.K., but to wait that long would be to "let the ideologists of the capitalist world go on prattling for too long a time. Let the comrade economists blush. Sometimes man must exceed his own strength by making a sudden spurt."

Last year, said Khrushchev, the Soviet Union produced 71 Ibs. of meat per capita as against 226 Ibs. in the U.S., 259 quarts of milk as against 362 1/2 in the U.S., and 6 Ibs. of butter as against 8 1/2 Ibs. in the U.S. "This year we will get as much butter and perhaps even more than the U.S. produced last year. We cannot only catch up with but even surpass the U.S. in milk as early as 1957. By 1961 we must be putting on the finishing touches to producing more meat than the U.S.

"Colonial countries, agog at the amount of U.S. food production, do not even imagine that they can compete with the U.S. We have dared challenge the U.S., before whose moneybags all capitalist powers dither and toady. Our program will again clear the way in consciousness of those people who vacillate and have not yet taken up our ideology. I am not speaking of capitalists--it is impossible to re-educate them. The grave is the only cure for hunchbacks. This program is stronger than the H-bomb. If we catch up with the U.S. in per capita production of meat, butter and milk we will have hit the pillars of capitalism with the most powerful torpedo yet seen."

Judging from the past showing of livestock and dairy production in Khrushchev's Russia, which in some categories is still below Czarist levels, Soviet specialists in the West doubt that Khrushchev can meet his exuberant boasts. Elsewhere in his speech Comrade Khrushchev quoted an old Russian proverb: "A dog barks and the wind carries the sound away."

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