Black Dust Storms Bring Trouble For Khrushchev

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30269, 23 October 1963, Page 7

Black Dust Storms Bring Trouble For Khrushchev

(By

ISAAC DEUTSCHER]

LONDON, October 7. Recent news has brought to the world’s attention a grave economic crisis in the Soviet Union. This year’s harvest has been poor. Bread has been virtually rationed; the Soviet Government is sternly urging the population to save food; and queues have appeared at bakeries.

Soviet envoys have been feverishly rummaging the grain markets of the West. They have bought nearly 10,000,000 tons of wheat and flour in Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

They want to buy more from the United States; but Washington has not yet authorised the sale and Moscow is anxiously waiting for a decision. To meet an expected gap in their balance of payments the Russians have drawn on their gold reserve; in September alone they sold gold for nearly 300 million dollars in London, Paris and Zurich. The Soviet Union is clearly faced with an economic emergency which must affect every aspect of policy and is already reflected in diplomacy What is the nature of the emergency and what is its magnitude. Just how severe is the setback to Soviet agriculture? To what extent is the crisis temporary and to what extent is it chronic? How and when can it be overcome? And what are thg prospects before the Soviet economy at large? No Statistics Yet Moscow has not yet published the statistics about the harvest; but I think it quite certain that the crop has amounted to not more than 120 million tons of grain, of which approximately one half is wheat. This is a very sharp drop from last year’s harvest of nearly 150 million tons: it is well below even the two bad harvests of 1959 and 1960, which yielded 125 and 134 million tons. The total grain deficit amounts to 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 tons and the wheat deficit is of the order of 15 million tons. This determines the size of the purchase the Soviet Government is making abroad. Insofar as the crisis has been due to exceptionally bad weather, it might be regarded as temporary. But a glance at the record of recent years shows a striking frequency of poor harvests of the last five years three years were very bad; one was mediocre: and only one was fairly good. The fact is that Soviet farming is abnormally vulnerable to the vagaries of climate and this points to weakness of structure. The present calamity has at a stroke obliterated a good half of the progress achieved since the end of the Stalin era. Population Growth As the population has grown, in the last 10 years, by nearly 20 per cent (i.e. by nearly 40 million and as the urban population has been growing at almost double this rate, the supply of food is not going to be much more abundant than it was in Stalin's last years. Indeed, the per capita production of grain (about 500 kg. head) is this year even lower than it was half a century ago. in 1913

This throws into sharp relief the long-term stagnation of Soviet farming. For a time it looked as if Mr Khrushchev had managed to lift agriculture out of the rut. In the first period of his ascendancy, between 1953 and 1958, he showered reforms on the country; he denounced Stalin's maltreatment of the peasantry: put an end to requisitioning and rigid official control; sold the State-o—ned machine and tractor stations to the collective farms; raised the prices of all farm produce and enabled the farmers to double their earnings. In a word, he put away die st.ck with which Stalin drove the peasants and he held out the carrot of material incentives. His most startling move, however, was to initiate the ploughing up of the virgin lands in Soviet Central Asia (and elsewhere) so that within a few years about 100 million acres of those lands were brought under cultivation.

He embarked upon his breathtaking improvisation in

the teeth of opposition from Malenkov, who advocated intensive farming on the old lands and warned that Khrushchev's experiment would end in disastrous soil erosion. Yet, during the first half of the post-Stalin decade the success in agriculture was so sensational that Khrushchev was able to wipe the floor with the critics of his policy. Grain output rose by nearly 50 per cent, and the food situation improved so radically that Khrushchev confidently predicted that within a few years the Soviet Union would catch up with the United States in farming and standards of nutrition. But in 1960-61 it was becoming clear, as I pointed out in these columns in the spring of 1961, that “the stimulus which Khrushchev's reforms and improvisation had imparted to Soviet farming was exhausted," and that a new period of stagnation had set in. New Proposals Soviet economists then proposed new measures. Some advocated a more “liberal” policy, with new incentives to farmers and greater autonomy for kolkhozes; while others urged the Government to bring agriculture under closer control and even to transform the kolkhozes into sovkhozes, that is State-owned farms. The party leaders could not make up their minds, because no matter which course of action was adopted, new reforms required massive capital investment in agriculture and diversion of resources from armament and heavy industry. A heated controversy over this went on in the Presidium in 1960, after the breakdown of the Paris summit meeting, and at the beginning of 1961. In spite of Mr Khrushchev’s misgivings, the Presidium decided to raise defence expenditure and to cut allocation tor farming. In the next three years, which brought the Berlin crisis and multi-megaton nuclear tests, this order of priorities was maintained.

Advice To Farmers | Khrushchev and his officialdom hoped that agriculture would somehow muddle through. Instead of further reforms, Khrushchev offered the farmers voluble but dubious agronomic advice in many speeches, which he has now collected and published in seven bulky volumes. Thus the fortunes of Soviet farming and the people’s standard of living have depended on the state of the arms race between East and West and on diplomacy. Now, conversely, the tempo of the arms race and the course of Soviet diplomacy are to some extent dictated by the condition of Soviet farming. In the middle of last summer. when Mr Khrushchev resolved somewhat suddenly to come to terms with the United States over the test ban, and to seek a detente even at the price of a break with China, he must have taken this decision with an eye on the gloomy reports I on the harvest that were pili i ng up on his desk. Evidently these reports at last moved also the Presidium to endorse Khrushchev's initiative. Farmers Apathetic What has been brought to a head year is the chronic crisis of agriculture; and the effects must, even in the best of circumstances, be felt over many years. It is a fact that, in spite of all the initial successes and the boastful propaganda. Khrushchev’s Government has, like the Stalinist regime, failed to come to terms with the food producers. No longer afraid ot the stick and disappointed at the meagreness of Khrushchev's carrot, the farmers concentrate on tilling the small plots of land which they own privately. and they are treating the needs of the collective farms with utter apathy or cynicism. The morale at rural Russia has sunk to a very deep low. (The descriptions of

■ rural life which one finds in i recent Russian novels and periodicals suggest indeed an image of the Soviet peasantry amazingly similar to the image of the wretched French peasantry, so elemental in its individualistic greed, which Balzac drew 120 or 130 years ago.) The Soviet Government needs years of detente, of reduced defence budgets, reforms, and high investment in farming to cope with this issue and to raise the farmers’ morale and productivity. Disastrous Erosion The most alarming feature of the present emergency is the disaster that has befallen the farms in the virgin lands in Soviet Asia. Khrushchev’s gigantic and costly experiment there has ended in catastrophic soil erosion. Prolonged droughts and hot gales have turned vast areas of Kazakhstan and of the Altai Province into “dust bowls.” Reports speak about black dust storms that have for months turned day into night, and compelled travellers to drive with headlamps on all the time. Even the terrible soil erosion that various parts of the United States, especially Texas, experienced before 1933, seems small and mild by comparison.

The extensive farms on the virgin lands, if they survive, will hardly be able to produce substantial crops in the next few years. They must first restore the top soil on their fields. This requires time and can be done only by the careful use of a great mass of fertilisers. The government has now ordered the managers of chemical plants to double the output of fertiliser, or at least to raise it from 20,000,000 to 35,000,000 tons by 1965. But the chemical industry is one of the bottlenecks of the Soviet economy, and it remains to be seen whether the target can be attained. Effects On Economy To gauge the economic I effects of all this, one has to consider that nearly one-half (45 per cent) of the grain quota collected by the State was already coming from the State-owned farms, and that most of these were established on the virgin lands. Khrushchev may well have to repeat his large-scale grain purchases abroad in 1964, 1965 and perhaps even later. The growth of Soviet industry may be slowed down for a time, because the industrial centres of Soviet Asia, whence about half of the total Soviet industrial output comes, were already relying on the virgin land farms as their main food base. Relatively mild shortages of consumer goods had led to strikes and food riots there in 1961. Much greater turbulence may develop when the full impact of this year’s calamity makes itself felt.

Politically Khrushchev is suffering a signal defeat. Even quite recently he was still imprudent enough to poke fun at the Cassandras who forecast the soil erosion in Kazakhstan; and he has all these years walked in the glory of his spurious success on the agricultural front. His prestige, just when it has risen in the West, is shattered at home.

The perennial tension between town and country is mounting dangerously, after he has proclaimed that it has vanished forever and that the Soviet Union is making its passage from socialism to communism. He is in no position to help with food the Governments of Eastern Europe and tells them to buy what they can in the West.

Conflict With Mao

In his conflict with Mao, he has just boasted of the contrast between his Communist welfare state and poverty-striken China, and he has said that Mao’s wrongheaded agricultural policy has “reduced the Chinese to their meagre rice rations, which they eat from the common bowl.” Peking is now going to have a resounding comeback; and Khrushchev

is not going to have the best! of the argument. To restore somehow his i position, Khrushchev needs j not only the semblance of an; international detente, he! needs a real detente. He needs to cut drastically hisi defence expenditure in the j next budget, and in the budgets of the next few, years and to throw immense) resources into agriculture and into the chemical Indus-1 try and the consumer industries.

He has to try and recover all the years since Stalin's death that he has wasted (as far as fanning is concerned) on speechifying, bureaucratic fireworks and improvisations. But can he recover those years? Will he have enough time for that? Or is he going to bequeath the predicament to his successor? In any case, it will take a long, long time before the black dust storms of 1963 hav t really blown over.—(World Copyright Reserved by Isaac Deutscher.)