Bigger & Better

Ever since Nikita Khrushchev got back from his U.S. visit, Moscow's press and radio have been careful to emphasize that their leader was in no way overawed by what he saw in the showcase of Western capitalism. "I did not find a better land than our Russia," said Nikita himself.

"Indeed I was not looking for one." Last week, as if to drive Nikita's point home, Moscow published the fattest statistical yearbook in Soviet history, a 958-page tome filled with figures carefully chosen to indicate that Russia is far closer to outstripping the West than many an Uzbek peasant might think. For one thing, assert Russia's statisticians, Russia is producing more people than the U.S. Russia's birth rate, according to the yearbook, was 25.3 per thousand in 1958 v. a mere 24.3 per thousand for the U.S., and only 7.2 Russians per thousand died last year while the U.S. mortality rate was 9.5 per thou sand. Furthermore, by the statistics, Rus sia had more marriages (12.5 per thou sand v. 8.3 per thousand for the U.S.) and fewer divorces (.9 per thousand v. 2.3 per thousand in the U.S.).

Back in Czarist days, Russia was fifth in world industrial production and fourth in Europe. Today, the Kremlin declares, it is far ahead of the rest of Europe and second only to the U.S. in world rankings.

Picking years chosen to fit their point, Moscow's statistical wizards even "prove" that between 1952 and 1958 (a U.S. recession year), Russia registered steady increases in production of pig iron, steel, coal and cotton textiles, while the U.S. lost ground; absolute production figures, which show the U.S. far ahead in every important industrial and mining product except coal and iron ore, are discreetly left in the background or totally ignored.* But in the last fortnight, as he meandered through Siberia on his way home to Moscow from Peking, Khrushchev could not avoid seeing for himself that his country was still far from the wonderland of the yearbooks. At Vladivostok, citizens flooded him with letters of complaint about inadequate housing and consumer goods shortages. To his open anger, Khrushchev also discovered that the local commissars had dressed up their normally bare shopwindows especially for his visit. Last week, hard on the heels of Nikita's arrival in Moscow, a decree went out for a 42% increase in the value of consumer goods output by 1961. Among the items to be stepped up: television sets, sewing machines, refrigerators, bicycles, electric irons--and lampshades "to match the best foreign samples."

* Even in 1958, when U.S. output had slumped, the U.S. produced 77.2 million metric tons of steel to Russia's 55.2 million; 4,258,000 autos to Russia's 122,400; 724 million kw-h of electricity to Russia's 233 million kwh; 331 million metric tons of crude oil to Russia's 113 million tons.

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