Ferment & Failure

Ten months that shook the soviet empire have passed since the last announced Moscow meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Yet to hear the Committee tell it last week as it wound up five solid days of deliberations, all they had really talked about was the current state of the Russian economy.

The economic balance sheet drawn up by the Committee began with the cheery news that in 1956 Russia had increased production of capital goods 11% and that of consumer goods 9%. "An idea of the scope of Soviet industrial production," crowed Pravda, "can be gained from the fact that by the end of 1956 the Soviet Union will have smelted 49 million tons of steel, mined about 430 million tons of coal, produced 84 million tons of oil, and generated 192 billion kw-h of electricity."*

Then the Committee got to the red ink. Despite increases over 1955, production of steel, coal, cement and timber in 1956 did not reach the goals set by the Sixth Five Year Plan adopted a year ago. In addition, scowled the Committee, "the plans for housing have been only partly fulfilled," which was a soft way of saying that Russia's desperate housing situation is in terrible shape.

Out of Bounds. The trouble, huffed the Committee, was the failure of Soviet planners to stay within the bounds of "the real possibilities of securing enough material and financial resources for fulfillment of the plans." Out of the chief planning job went chill-eyed First Deputy Premier Maxim Saburov, apparently only shunted aside, unlike his predecessor Voznesensky, who was executed in 1949. The new planner is scholarly looking First Deputy Premier Mikhail Pervukhin, 52, who has risen high as an industrial manager (the approved biographies, which always make top Reds humble sons of the proletariat, list him as a blacksmith's son, which he may or may not be).

The Central Committee took the unprecedented step of sending the Sixth Five Year Plan back to the planners with demands for revision of unrealistic targets, "a decrease in the volume of capital investment, and curtailment of the number of construction projects." Carefully unmentioned was the fact that the Polish and Hungarian revolts had created unexpected new drains on Russia's resources, especially coal.

New Voices. It was hard to believe that in five days the 133 members of the Central Committee failed to take up such a pertinent topic as the spreading ferment of discontent in the universities. In Kiev and Azerbaijan, reported the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, students were in an "unhealthy state of mind," and at the Leningrad Technological Institute they indulged in "brash and demagogic remarks" that showed "an effort to ignore completely the undoubted gains of Soviet culture." In Moscow, where university students openly admitted listening to Western radio broadcasts, the youthful audience at a Lenin Library lecture walked out in disgust at the speaker's lame explanations of events in Hungary. Simultaneously, there appeared in the capital anonymous mimeographed "newspapers," which were obviously written by intellectuals, and which charged that the Soviet government was not telling the people the truth about Hungary.

One situation that had to be remedied, agreed the Communist magazines Kommunist and Party Life, was the tendency of many professors to duck the searching political questions thrown at them by their students. No one, however, dared to point out that professors could scarcely be expected to commit themselves at a time when even the Central Committee of the Communist Party flagrantly evaded public comment on anything more controversial than steel quotas.

* Unwilling to make odious comparisons, Pravda failed to note that the U.S. in 1956 produced 115 million tons of steel, more than 500 million tons of coal, some 350 million tons of oil and 730 billion kw-h of electricity.

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