Six Times Five

"Communism," said Lenin, "is Soviet Authority plus electrification." Since then, five Five-Year Plans have come and gone. Soviet Authority is still supreme, but the electrification of Russia hardly extends beyond the big cities. Last week Lenin's successors announced a sixth Five-Year Plan, the main feature of which was a bracket of atomic power stations with a total capacity of some 2.5 million kilowatts.

Actually each successive Five-Year Plan (piatiletka) is a set of production targets which the state planners then exhort the Russian people to attain by superhuman effort. The sixth piatiletka (1956-60) is more than usually superhuman: in the next five years heavy industry must be up 70%, pig iron up 70%, steel up 51%, coal up 49%, oil up 100%, building up 52%, consumer goods up 60%; in agriculture grain production must increase 80%, while labor efficiency on state farms must rise 70%, on collectives 100%. Incentives are a calculated feature of piatiletki: 55 million workers will be in regular employment, the planners say, with wages up 30%; there will be 50% more technicians and specialists and more than twice as many hospital beds. Airports are to be reconstructed, air freight is to be doubled, and new fast passenger planes are to ply feeder routes. But, faithful to the Leninist dream (in Russia, electric light bulbs are ironically called Ilyich after Lenin's patronymic), the big story was electric power: an overall increase from 160 to 320 billion kilowatts. No mention was made of the larger atomic-energy target for 1960, but an atomic-powered transarctic liner with special hydraulic ice-melting monitors was promised.

The sixth Five-Year Plan will be the subject of endless stakhanovite speech-making in coming months, but Russian workers may well recall an exhortation made by Stalin of an earlier piatiletka: "We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We have to run this distance in ten years. Either we do this or we disintegrate." That was a quarter of a century ago. Even in the unlikely event of the targets being attained, the gross national product of the U.S.S.R. in 1960, experts calculate, will be only two-thirds that of the U.S. at the present moment.

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