Time to Retreat

The leaders of Communism's two big lands are in trouble.

To hear them tell it last week, Mao Tse-tung was stepping serenely down from the most tedious of his five jobs, and Nikita Khrushchev was proclaiming some of the greatest victories in Soviet agricultural history.

Actually, both Moscow and Peking were in major retreats at home. In both cases the battle was over agriculture--that individualistic and capricious pursuit that has defied Communist planners from the beginning. Moscow proposed to toughen up on the peasantry. Peking confessed to moving too fast in thrusting thousands of peasants into barrack communes.

Russia's Nikita Khrushchev found it necessary to reveal some great weaknesses in his drive for a farm output that would soon equal that of the U.S.--and to serve notice in guarded but unmistakable fashion that he is going to put pressure on the peasantry of his collective farms to give up their private plots and cows.

Incentives of Cost. Having made many concessions to a sullen peasantry to get work out of them, the Soviet boss now finds them living too high on the hog--a trend that is even more marked in Communist Poland, where, one economist says, "the cities are working for the peasants."

Khrushchev last week cited vast differences between the man-hours required for comparable farm output in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that were really much more eye-opening than his flashy predictions of increased farm production. These comparisons (see below) gave a truer picture of how far Khrushchev really is from equaling the U.S., and how harshly he must clamp down if he would close the gap. He found it necessary to increase his menaces against the "antiparty" group, and to blame them for the defects in Soviet planning. Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, by opposing his virgin lands development, gave him a beautiful issue on which he can and does skewer them now.

Incentives of Fear. In China too, the boss blamed those below. Mao was also suffering from a desperate agricultural imbalance. He set out audaciously to do two tasks at once--to create an industrial structure from scratch while at the same time boosting farm output to feed an increasing population. To achieve a radical increase in farm products, he did not propose to introduce Khrushchev's costly peasant incentives. Instead, Mao has substituted Communism's cheapest incentives--fear and control.

The pell-mell herding of millions into communes was threatening to produce a resistance that might cause an even less ambitious program to founder. So Mao and his colleagues were compelled to slow up. But they have yet found no other way to achieve their headlong ambitions.

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