"Things Are Bad, Very Bad"

Agriculture continues to be the Soviet Union's No.1 headache. At the time when farm productivity is rising everywhere else in the world, per-acre yields are actually falling in the Soviet Union.

In the season of Sputnik and missile triumphs, the Soviet Union has about five times as many people working on the land as the U.S. does, and producing less. Presiding at a year-end Communist Central Committee meeting on the Soviet farm problem, Premier Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged that the 1959 grain harvest had been disappointing, allowed himself to be angry and sarcastic about it.

Who Is to Blame? The 46 million tons of bread grains delivered to the state in 1959, he acknowledged, was down 2,000,000 tons from the average achieved in the first four years after the opening up of his widely touted eastern virgin lands. It was down a full 20% from the 1958 crop. Drought, explained Khrushchev, had cut deliveries in many areas of European Russia. But more than drought was to blame for the performance in the Asian virgin-lands Republic of Kazakhstan, which only the year before had filled Khrushchev's heart with gratitude by producing more than a third of all grain received by the Soviet state.

By last week, all gratitude had drained from Nikita's heart. Growling that in their reports to the meeting the republic's Party Chief Nikolai Belyaev and Premier Dinmukhamed Kunaev had "lacked the courage to admit their shortcomings," Khrushchev announced bluntly that he would do it for them.

"A good crop was raised this year in Kazakhstan," said Nikita, "but poor organization lost it. On Nov. 1, 4,000,000 acres planted to grain had not been harvested. The Kazakhstanis say that some of the grain was flattened by the first snow, and they harvested it afterward. But what sort of harvesting is that? You know how geese pluck grass, especially goslings. A gosling grabs a blade of grass, yanks it out and falls on his backside. That," said Khrushchev amid laughter and applause, "is about how they harvested the grain left under the snow in Kazakhstan."

The Worst Timing. Everyone knew that Party Boss Belyaev was not only a member of the Soviet Union's ruling Presidium but an old Khrushchev favorite who was sent to Kazakhstan two years ago to jack things up. Khrushchev mentioned that too. "Friendship is one thing," he said, "but work is another. People say, you are my brother--but truth is my mother.

If we do not speak the truth to you here, Comrades Kunaev and Belyaev, they .will applaud you in Kazakhstan, and you will tell them there was a meeting of the Central Committee and everything went off fine. Actually, things are bad, very bad.

"Why didn't the grain ripen, dear Comrade Belyaev? I'll tell you. Eighteen thousand of your tractors did not take part in the spring sowing because they had not been repaired in time. And what does that mean, comrades? It means that the sowing was dragged out. When it came time to harvest in Kazakhstan they had barely finished sowing. Why blame the Lord God and say that the grain didn't ripen? Sow in time, and then the Lord will say, you did your part and now I'll do mine." Khrushchev had figures to show that 32,000 combines were out of whack at harvest time in Kazakhstan. He pointed straight at his protege and shouted: "I asked you, Comrade Belyaev, what you still needed to assure a timely harvesting. You answered, 'We don't need a thing. The job will be done.' " Said Khrushchev: "If you feel you can't cope, come straight out and say so. We have excellent people for replacements."

Apparently Khrushchev had been angered by the smugness of Belyaev's report, which had elaborated on "achievements," barely mentioned the poor harvest, and concluded with a lavish tribute to "that outstanding fighter for peace, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev." Since Khrushchev's virgin-lands scheme was based on opening lands considered climatically unsuited to agriculture, Khrushchev could hardly blame the weather too much, had to take it out on his aides.

The Best Butter. Apart from the outburst at the virgin-lands leadership, Khrushchev's speech was uncharacteristically subdued, as if he felt overwhelmed by it all and had little now to offer. He spent an unusual amount of time singling out and praising a sizable group of milkmaids, swineherds and tractor drivers who had won a trip to the Moscow meeting as "Heroes of Socialist Labor." Khrushchev reminisced: "In childhood, before I went to the factory, I worked for the landlords as an understudy to a swineherd."

Nowadays, he said disapprovingly, farmers' income "in some areas" tops factory workers' pay, though, "as everyone knows," it is Communist doctrine that "the working class is the leading force in our society." He brushed aside other speakers' schemes for curbing collective farm "millionaires" because such reforms at this time might "cause trouble" for attainment of his cherished seven-year-plan production. Pointing at these goals, Khrushchev was able to quote Soviet and U.S. figures in support of his claim that the Soviet Union now produces more butter per capita than the U.S. (8.8 Ibs. to 7.8), and that last year for the first time "the Soviet Union outstripped the U.S. in gross milk production." Western specialists are more inclined to accept Khrushchev's butter figures than his milk figures, which include milk sucked by calves and apparently even milk produced by mares, ewes and she-yaks.

Khrushchev also proclaimed that the Soviet Union would catch up to the U.S. in per-capita meat production by 1963. But this was less a boast than a retreat. This goal was originally supposed to have been achieved last year. The amount of meat the Soviets say they produced in 1959 was about half U.S. output. Furthermore, Kazakhstan's grain failure in 1959 cuts Soviet cattle breeding in 1960, and all but eliminates the chance that the Soviet Union can top last year's claimed gain in meat production.

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