Sounding the Retreat

If there is one rhythm Russia's 200 millions are well used to, it is the succession of five-year plans. Last week Radio Moscow broke the rhythm by announcing the abrupt scrapping of the current five-year plan (1956-60) before it had even reached the halfway mark. In its stead there is to be a seven-year plan running from 1959-65. Radio Moscow tried its best to make this sound like progress: "Large new deposits of various raw materials and sources of power have been discovered in recent years," and thus "there are possibilities for creating new enterprises and industrial centers not envisaged in the sixth five-year plan."

What this seemed to argue was that because Russia has greater resources it would take longer to achieve its economic goals. What it actually meant was that the economic snafu shown when the sixth five-year plan was sent back to the planners for downscaling (TIME, Jan. 7) has now grown so severe that the Russians no longer have any hope of meeting even their reduced targets for 1960.

Part of the Soviet economy's increased strain stems from the confusion caused by Nikita Khrushchev's decision to decentralize the management of Soviet industry (TIME, April 15). In addition, the troubles in Poland and Hungary not only deprived Russia of valuable imports, e.g., Polish coal, but also obliged Russia to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the satellites to quiet their unrest.

But the basic difficulty is that Nikita Khrushchev, a man reaching the top at 63 (Stalin was 47 when he got there), is trying to do too much all at once. With an industrial production roughly one-third that of the U.S., Russia is 1) maintaining the world's largest armed forces, 2) trying to overtake the U.S. in production of meat, milk and butter, 3) sending aid not only to the satellites and Red China but also to susceptible Middle East nations, 4) facing an increasingly vociferous domestic demand for better housing and more consumer goods.

The question which now fascinates the U.S. State Department: What will happen to Khrushchev himself when he is no longer able to disguise the fact that Russia cannot meet all these commitments?

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