Crocodile Laughter

Russians tried hard to laugh about the shortcomings of their new Five-Year Plan and the purges that came in its wake. The humorous weekly, Crocodile, ran a cover cartoon of a man filling milk cans at a water pump. Each can bore the legend "100% fulfilled." The caption: "Chief milkmaid, or how Tovarish Figure-Chaser fulfills the plan." To make the picture still funnier, P. V. Smirnov, the head of Russia's meat and milk production, was promptly fired. But the comedy was still strictly official. For in Russia last week a full-fledged purge, affecting all departments of Soviet life, from the official manufacture of farm machines to the official manufacture of sonnets, was under way. Some developments:

P: Politburo Member Nikita Khruschev announced a "mass replacement of the [Communist] Party's leading personnel" in the Ukraine, the Soviet republic with the strongest separatist tendencies, and the area that suffered most from the war. Gone were "about half" of the Ukraine's executives, including 64% of the heads of regional Soviets and 67% of the directors of tractor stations. To replace their "bourgeois-nationalistic conceptions," Khruschev said that special party schools would be set up to give the new leaders (29 years after the founding of the Soviet Union) proper "ideological-political training."

P: Maxim Litvinov, longtime Soviet Foreign Commissar and Ambassador to the U.S., was "released from his duties" as Deputy Foreign Minister. Into his shoes stepped the former Soviet Ambassadors to Britain and Japan, Fedor Gusev and Yakov Malik.

P: The two top Communist officials in the Crimea (whose "autonomous" republic was abolished by Moscow last June because the local population had sided with the Germans) were fired for failure to "strengthen the collective farms."

P: The newspaper Cinema warned Russian moviemakers that they "must be faithful to the principles of Bolshevik partisanship in art," while Izvestia turned its attention to dance bands (see Music).

P: Leningrad, ruled by Politburo Member Andrei Zhdanov, was waging an esthetic purge. Two outstanding literary figures, Poetess Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko (whom many Russians consider their best short story writer since Chekhov), were barred from all Soviet publications for "decadence" and "rotten lack of ideology." The literary magazine Leningrad was suspended and Zvezda condemned for ignoring "the vital foundation of the Soviet system, its political policy" and "spreading a spirit of obsequiousness to the contemporary bourgeois culture of the West." With obsequious haste, the Leningrad writers' union voted to abandon "the theory of pure art" and, instead, "train Soviet youth in a high feeling of patriotism."

The industrial purge (TIME, July 8) which started this wave of self-criticism was also going strong. Among its recent targets: "medical racketeers," housing officials who "systematically extorted bribes from working people in need of rooms," and managers caught red-handed in the "antiState practice of falsifying reports" in order to collect bonuses for nonexistent production.

But Crocodile's editors, unquestionably under orders from on high, still found food, for fun. They reported the case of a 25-year-old food shop directress who had embezzled 333,000 rubles ($63,270). The sale of all her personal property realized only 5,000 rubles. She was ordered to repay the remaining 328,000 at the rate of 25% of her monthly salary of 225 rubles. Laughed Crocodile: "There. You have your orders. You are directed to live to the age of 511 years."

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