Economic Failure

It was Benny Goodman's toughest audience. As he led his red-coated band into the opening strains of Let's Dance, the 4,600 people crammed into Moscow's Soviet Army Sports Palace divided their attention between him and the figure seated in the government box: Nikita Khrushchev. By his presence, Nikita gave official approval to a brand of music that the Communists have often reviled as decadent. Russian cats were hip enough to know that Benny was really otstaly (out-of-date), but Khrushchev declared himself bewildered. "I enjoyed it," he said as he left, but added: "I don't dance myself, so I don't understand these things too well."

Jazz was not the only field in which Khrushchev proved himself a square. He was equally perplexed and bothered by the swingingest development in recent Western history--the fabulous growth of the Common Market. The same day as the Goodman session, in a 40-minute tirade that was really an involuntary tribute to the market's success, Khrushchev denounced the Six as an imperialist octopus. The Common Market, he declared piously, could not, of course, threaten the mighty Communist bloc, but it was designed to keep the emerging states in Africa and Asia in subservience as Europe's "agrarian appendages."

Like any other world politician who is fresh out of ideas, Nikita then turned to the U.N. To counter the market's "aggressive policy," he called for an international, U.N.-sponsored trade organization in which "economically underdeveloped countries can uphold their interests and resist the international union of capitalist monopolies."

Both Common Market headquarters and Washington dismissed Khrushchev's demand as a "diversion" that betrayed Russia's concern over the West's economic vitality as compared with its own weakness. One of Russia's great economic defeats was dramatized last week when Moscow boosted meat prices 30% and butter prices 25%--the sharpest cost-of-living increase in Russia since World War II. Said Nikita:."I wouldn't say that this was pleasant for the people." But he argued that the move was necessary. Reason: collective farmers "have not been materially interested in increasing their output" because prices were so low. But the government claimed it could not divert funds from defense for farm incentive payments or purchase needed equipment, because the U.S. is "harboring plans for a surprise nuclear rocket attack on the Soviet Union"--hence the cost must be passed on to the housewife.

Given the new prices, a minimum-wage earner in Russia must work five hours for a pound of butter, as against 42 minutes in the U.S. The Russian must work four hours for a pound of meat, as against 46 minutes in the U.S. The political consequences of these figures, at home and abroad, might be vast. They suggest that Russia cannot afford to produce both guns and butter. They also show that the revolutionary regime, whose basic appeal was to the "masses" and their hunger for a better life, today still cannot fully satisfy that hunger in its own land.

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