The Bricklayers
Like the third little pig of legend, Russia's new leadership recognizes the wisdom of building in brick. Nikita Khrushchev for years had huffed and puffed in favor of prefabricated concrete slabs, relegating the lowly brick to minor status in the nation's crash housing program. But last week, when the new economic plans of Premier Aleksei Kosygin and Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev were disclosed, the brick was back in the planners' priorities. That alone would not keep the wolf from the door, but some of the other decisions announced would certainly help.
Out of the Dump Truck. In a step aimed at boosting farm production, the government granted incentives to collective farms by canceling their $2 billion debt to the State Bank and promised premium prices for any deliveries above quotas. Also announced was a $77 billion investment in agriculture by 1970 --most of it to be paid by the government. On the industrial front, Kosygin called for more consumer goods, announced that the next Five Year Plan would provide higher wages for factory workers, who currently earn an average $120 a month. It was the first indication of a break in the long wage freeze imposed by Khrushchev.
Kosygin had a special sneer for that pet Khrushchevian policy, the de-emphasis of automobile production. Said he: "You know with what obstinacy the idea was foisted on us that our country needed no large-scale production of passenger cars. Everyone was expected to ride buses." What really irritated Kosygin was that government officials in many cases had been forced to ride in dump trucks. Russia currently has fewer than 1,500,000 passenger cars, ranging from the tiny Moskuich (comparable to the old-model German Opel Rekord but priced at about $4,000) to balloon-tired Chaikas that sell for $12,000. But even if a Soviet worker could afford a car, he would have to wait five years or more for delivery under current production rates. Though Kosygin would like to change that, it is obvious that it will be 15 or 20 years before Russia can develop a mass-production automobile industry and the necessary complex of gas stations, repair shops and spare-part systems to go along with it. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, for one, was not willing to wait that long: last week he bought a $17,000 Lincoln Continental executive limousine, complete with built-in bar and TV console.
The New Men. Kosygin's freewheeling optimism seemed at least partially warranted. A government report on industrial production during the first quarter of 1965 showed that, for the first time in two years, the decline in Russia's industrial growth rate had been checked. Whereas the 1964 growth rate had been a miserable 7.1%, this year's first quarter showed a 9% expansion in industrial output. More heartening to Kosygin & Co. was the record production of meat and butter, showing that the catastrophic crop failure of 1963 had been surmounted. Another sign of agricultural recovery was the issuing of flour--rationed since the end of 1963--to Moscow housewives for the Russian Orthodox Easter holidays.
Much of the improved economic picture has been painted by "the new economists"--men like Professor Evsei Liberman (TIME cover, Feb. 12) who talk of loosening the rigid Marxist bonds that have tied their predecessors to outmoded planning and production schemes. Kosygin has long backed the new men, and last week three of the best known--Leonid Kantorovich, Viktor Novozhilov and the late Vasily Nemchinov--were awarded Lenin Prizes for their contributions to streamlining the bulky Soviet economy.
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