gained momentum. The years witnessed a great stress on increasing the 'indivisible fund' of a collective - that is, that part of its revenue which belongs to the entire kolkhoz and is not parceled out among individual members - and on using this fund for such 'socially valuable' undertakings as building schools and roads in the locality. The purchase of M.T.S. machinery by the collectives in itself necessitated heavy expenditure. Also, Khrushchev and other leaders returned to the theme that the private plots of the members of a kolkhoz are meant merely to augment a family's food supply rather than to produce for the market and that they should become entirely unnecessary with further successes of socialist agriculture.
Moreover, the Seven-Year Plan goals of increasing agricultural produc-
tion by 70 per cent and raising labor productivity in the kolkhozes by 100 per cent and in the sovkhozes by 60 to 65 per cent proved to be impossible to attain. Perhaps they had been predicated on a further drastic socialization of Soviet agriculture, and in particular the elimination or near elimination of the twenty million small private plots of the members of the collectives, which the leadership did not dare carry out.
Again, in the opinion of Bergson and other Western observers, the agricultural goals adopted by the Twenty- second Party Congress as part of the program of creating a 'material basis' for communism by 1980 seemed fantastically optimistic and quite unreal - an estimate that did not apply to nearly the same extent to the industrial goals. Khrushchev's frantic efforts after the Congress to bolster farm production - this time demanding the abolition of the grass rotation system in favor of planting feed crops such as sugar beets, corn, peas, and beans - served to emphasize further the crisis of Soviet agriculture. It is also probably in connection with the economic, especially the agricultural, crisis that Khrushchev enacted, in 1962, his strangest reorganizational measure: the across-the-board division of the hitherto monolithic Communist party into two party hierarchies, one to deal with industry and the other with agriculture.
Khrushchev's enthusiasm and ambition in the economic and other fields found characteristic expression in his insistence on the early building of communism, which was to replace socialism as the culminating phase in the evolution of Soviet society. The Twenty-second Party Congress, in October 1961, paid much attention to this issue, proclaiming that the preconditions for communism should be established in the U.S.S.R. by 1980. Although the concept of communism remained fundamentally vague and lacked substantiating detail, Feldmesser and other Western scholars have been able to draw a generally convincing picture of the projected Soviet Utopia.
Communism would be based on an economy of abundance which would satisfy all the needs of the population. These needs, however, were to be defined by the authorities. In the words of Khrushchev, 'Of course, when we speak of satisfying people's needs, we have in mind not whims or claims to luxuries, but the healthy needs of a culturally developed person.' Presumably, the authorities could also determine that some people had more needs than others. Nevertheless, the main thrust of communism would be toward equality. Income differentials would be drastically reduced. More than that, communism would finally eliminate the distinction between town and country, industrial and agricultural work, mental and manual labor, and thus the differences in the styles of life. Members of the new society would be 'broad-profile workers,' that is, persons trained in two or three related skills who would, in addition, engage without pay in one or more other socially useful occupations in their leisure hours.
The collective would obviously dominate. Even some of the abundant
consumer goods would be available in the form of 'appliance pools' of refrigerators, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners. Apparently, Khrushchev objected to the last to private automobile ownership and projected instead public car pools. On a still broader scale, life would become increasingly socialized. Free public health services and transportation would be followed, for example, by free public meals which would virtually eliminate kitchen drudgery for women. The Academician Stanislav Strumilin and others constructed models of communal cities of the future, with parents allowed a daily visit to their children, who would live separately under the care of a professional staff. Indeed communism would seem to imply a great diminution in the role of the family, if not its abolition, although most Soviet commentators have refused to face this conclusion. By contrast, the role of the school would expand, and so would the roles of labor brigades, comrades' courts, and other public organizations. Lenin's, or Khrushchev's, authoritarian Marxist system would in no sense be diluted, or even diversified, in communism, but only strengthened and more effectively 'socialized,' so to speak, and internalized. In the end, only mentally deranged persons would seriously object to it.
According to a bitter Chinese remark, largely applicable in the economic as in other fields, the fall of Khrushchev resulted simply in Khrushchevism without Khrushchev. Yet, as already indicated, it brought at least a striking change in the manner of execution and in tone, if not in fundamental policy. The new leaders abolished Khrushchev's reorganizational reforms, such as the division of the Party in two and the creation of the sovnarkhozy, and discontinued some of his pet projects. They stopped the discussion of the imminent building of communism and the propaganda concerning the early surpassing of the United States in the production of consumer goods. Instead they revealed grave economic shortcomings and failures of the past administration and took a more realistic view of the potentialities of the Soviet economy.
It was in the middle and late 1960's especially that fundamental measures were enacted to bolster Soviet agriculture. Collective farmers finally received a guaranteed wage, which made their position comparable to that of the sovkhoz workers, whereas earlier they had the last claim in the distribution of gain, frequently rendering their very existence marginal, a point emphasized by Lewin and other scholars. Also, pensions and social services were extended to the kolkhoz members. Over a period of years the state greatly increased the amount of resources devoted to agriculture so that investment in agriculture came to constitute over a third in the allocation of the total national investment. Another
to keep these prices down in spite of heavy production costs. Still other large sums went into agricultural research. If one adds to these huge expenses some five billion dollars spent by the Soviet Union in 1975-76 alone to buy grain abroad, more money to buy meat and butter, as well as similar huge purchases later, one can get an idea of the enormous effort mounted by the Soviet leadership to develop the agricultural sector and to supply the Soviet public with increasing amounts of food at more or less stable prices. Indeed it has been said that instead of being the most depressed social group in their country the Soviet peasants became the most pampered. But that only made the generally miserable condition of Soviet agriculture all the more striking.
The new Five-Year Plan, 1966-70 - eventually designated as the Eighth - presented by Kosygin to the Twenty-third Party Congress in the spring of 1966, reset a number of Khrushchev's economic goals from 1965 to 1970. The economy was to strive for a 49-52 per cent increase in the output of heavy industry and a 43-46 per cent increase in consumer goods, with the annual growth rate of 8.5 per cent and 7.7 per cent respectively - a very high figure for consumer goods in relation to heavy industry, although in line with Khrushchev's thought on the matter on the eve of his fall. Subsequently the Soviet government signed contracts with Italian and French companies to help develop the automobile industry in the Soviet Union.
The Eighth Five-Year Plan was followed by the Ninth, 1971-75, then the Tenth was promoted as the 'Five- Year Plan of Quality,' the 'Basic Directions' for which came out in mid-December 1975, some two months before the Twenty-fifth Party Congress. Yet rather than recapturing the earlier drive the new Plans seemed to testify to a slowdown of the Soviet economy, accentuated by the disastrous crop failures of 1972 and especially of 1975, which necessitated massive purchase of grain abroad - supplied, particularly by the United States in 1972, on terms remarkably advantageous, to be sure, to the Soviet Union. To quote an expert evaluation of the economic position of the U.S.S.R. at the time of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress:
Soviet economic growth slowed down significantly during the Ninth FYP period (1971-75), and the Plan's ambitious targets were generally - sometimes widely - missed, affected as the USSR has been by declining reserves of labor and other retardational forces and under the blows of two major crop failures. Particularly hard hit was agricultural production, and consumer goods output and consumption levels rose much less than planned. Civilian equipment production and capital formation also fell short of expectations. Nonetheless, Soviet heavy industries expanded
at high rates, and (presumably) military production did well too. The recession in the West made Soviet industrial performance look particularly good.
