Russian Agriculture and the Peasant
Measures to stop the rot in -Soviet agriculture which have already led to promotion for N. S. Khrushchev and a notable Ministerial reorganisation are a belated but realistic attempt to remedy, within the confines of Party dogma, a situation which all the exhortations of the Russian Communist Party have not saved from serious deterioration in the past few years. The • gravity of the situation is not minimised in the official announce- ment, which speaks of " mismanagement, unproductive expendi- ture, waste of money and materials and high cost of production." It is typical of the more realistic trends of the post-Stalin era that the remedies should be prescribed (in the collective name of the Central Committee) by N. S. Khrushchev, who was Stalin's viceroy for so many years in the granary of Soviet Russia—the Ukraine. It is clear that Khrushchev has finally displaced A. A. Andreev as agricultural adviser to the Kremlin. The main fault requiring correction is stated quite honestly and simply to be " the violation of the people's material interest in the development of production and in increasing its profit," but the implications of this statement are not borne out by the means proposed to put matters right, which are much less precisely enumerated. However, the planned figures for a considerable increase in livestock in 1954-55 are accompanied by the cancellation of arrears of deliveries to the State by collective farmers. The grain situation is dealt with rather briefly, but there is an ominous ring in the reported decline of both acreage and yield in the Ukraine, which may presage a revision of the ambitious increase in the Russian grain-harvest planned for 1955. An end is to be made of the pernicious practice of stepping-up the delivery quotas of the more efficient collective farms—a plain concession to the human element—but apart from this there is little to show that the Soviet leaders are yet prepared to treat the Russian muzhik as the individualist he is.
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