The Muzhik & the Commissar

(See Cover)

Opposite the Kremlin, on the northeast side of Red Square, there stands a strange old building, sometimes plastered with the likenesses of Lenin and Stalin. The outside of the building is like a wedding cake, but within, there are so many modern corridors and pillared halls that the casual visitor might wonder whether to say a prayer or catch a train.

On one facade of the building are the bold initials G.U.M.--for Glavny Universalny Magazin (Principal Department Store). G.U.M. is Moscow's answer to Macy's, Gimbels, Sears Roebuck, Woolworth and A. & P., all rolled into one. Scheduled to open next week, but already three weeks behind schedule, it is being hailed in advance by the Soviet press as "the biggest and the best in the U.S.S.R."

Last week in G.U.M.'s polished interiors (which can hold 20,000 people), workmen were putting the finishing touches to nearly two miles of counters, to snack bars, post offices and a special "nursing room." Soon the shabby housewives of Moscow will pour in, carrying the brown shopping nets which are standard through all Russia. They will be attracted by G.U.M.'s huge ads: "Whatever the Stomach, Body, or Mind demand, G.U.M. will supply," by the government's elaborate promises of a new "Abundance," and by an elemental canniness that has taught them to get in early, because there is never enough to go around.

In G.U.M. the women will find no January sale. Prices in the Soviet Union have dipped substantially, but eggs still cost the equivalent of $3 a dozen, a good pair of shoes is $75. a radio $200, oranges 55-c- each. Yet the mere fact that G.U.M. is opening fills many with wary hope. The site that the giant store occupies was once Upper Row, the biggest shopping center in Czarist Moscow. For 25 years it had served as a labyrinthine Soviet government office: now, by restoring it as a people's shopping center, the Kremlin appears to be giving substance to its impressive promises:

P: "A sharp rise in the production of consumer goods."--Premier Malenkov. P: "A widespread development of Soviet trade."--Trade Minister Mikoyan. P: "An abundance of popular goods and agricultural produce."-- Party Boss Nikita Khrushchev.

All this will be achieved, the Kremlin insists, by 1955 or 1956. By then, if all goes well, the Soviet people will have twice as much clothing (including underwear "trimmed with lace and embroidery"). three times as many shiny new pots and pans to cook twice as much meat and fish, twice as much candy and ice cream. In 1956, clothes will fit, machines will work; there will be lipstick and perfume for Masha, cigars for Ivan.

New Course. At a time when the Soviet Union spurns negotiation, strains to make superbombs, rejects disarmament, and presents to the outside world a face more brutally intransigent than at any time since the Berlin airlift, the Kremlin's domestic accent on sweets and serviceable footwear may be hard to credit. Yet for all their skepticism, many Western diplomats think that Russia's "New Course" is on the level. They point out that the Soviet Union is now offering to buy butter, meat and TV sets from anyone who will sell them, and that the payment Moscow proposes to the world is gold or strategic minerals.

Equally impressive is the detail and preciseness of the Kremlin's decrees, indicating that the New Course is not a hurried phony to give a propaganda boost to an uncertain new regime, but a well-laid-out scheme that might only have needed Stalin's death to get the go-ahead. The proof is in the preparation: 100,000 words prescribing how many acres must be planted to each crop on every collective farm; sheaves of instructions saying exactly how much steel has been allotted to each factory to fill written orders for bicycles and refrigerators. Such detailed specifications. Western analysts argue, involve millions of people; they cannot be easily countermanded, orally and overnight.

There is no evidence in the decrees--or anywhere else--that the Kremlin wants a letup in the arms race, or that Russia shrinks from permanent cold war. Yet one top U.S. official says that the New Course is "as significant as America's New Deal." The Soviet plans, he says, are "serious and sincere"; their immediate objective ("to raise living standards") is genuine, even though the ultimate goal (to strengthen Russia for war) is predictably cynical. Looking on, Sir Winston Churchi11 concluded optimistically that "internal prosperity, rather than external conquest, is not only the deep desire of the Russian peoples, but also the long-term interest of their rulers." In fact, there is mounting evidence that the Kremlin is subject to economic pressures that it cannot forever ignore.

Unbalanced Economy. Since Stalin's death, more (and more conclusive) statistical information has come out of Russia than in any period of Stalinist rule. It has been sifted and evaluated by the growing body of Soviet specialists at work in Western Europe and in the U.S.--in Government departments and in special study centers such as those at Harvard and Columbia. The information suggests that the Russian economy is becoming increasingly powerful, but also dangerously lopsided, almost to the point of overbalancing. Since 1940, Russia's heavy industry has made what the U.S. State Department calls "remarkable and dismaying progress.'' The evidence (in millions of metric tons): *

1940 1952

Coal 166 301

Steel 18.3 34.4

Oil 31 47.5

Electricity 48.3 116.4 billion kw-h

Such progress was made possible only by a relentless moratorium on consumer goods. While arms plants boomed, farms and light industry slumped. This economic unbalance leaves Russia well geared for a short war, but liable to great strains, particularly in food production, in a long-drawn-out war of atomic attrition. It is a fact that has been noted by Malenkov himself (TIME, Aug. 17). "Things are bad," said Malenkov. "The volume of production of consumer goods cannot satisfy us . . . We are not meeting the demands of the population for meat, milk and eggs. All this is damaging to the national security."

Malenkov left his lieutenants to spell out the damage in detail. In an orgy of breast beating, they reported: P: Stockings, underwear, hats and footwear--"completely inadequate." P: Textiles of all sorts--"insufficient . . . badly dyed, with flaws." P:Furniture--"unsatisfactory." P: Women's dresses--"poor." P:Bed linen--"production is lower than in 1940."

Far more serious is the "near crisis" in agriculture revealed by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, who doubles as party secretary and overlord of Soviet farming. Khrushchev succeeded Malenkov in Stalin's old job as boss of the party; the fact that he confessed a "serious lag" in food production attests to the growing alarm of the Soviet leaders. The facts, as Khrushchev gave them: P: A shortage of cattle in 1952 equal to 22 million head. P: A decline in pork, from 5,000,000 tons in 1940 to 1,600,000 in 1952. P: A drop in butter production, in Siberia alone, from 75,000 tons in 1913 to 65,000 tons in 1952. P: A supply of potatoes and vegetables that is "quite unsatisfactory."

Khrushchev showed that since 1940 the Soviet population has increased more than twice as fast as agricultural production. After 36 years in power, during which they had total power to make over the land in their own image, and by their own theories, the Communists officially acknowledge that the Russian people, in 1953, are eating less high-protein food per head than they did under the Czar. And the people work harder for it than they did 30 years ago, as the following U.S. Government tables show:

To buy 1 Hours of Work

kilo of 1923 1953

Bread 2 hrs. 42 min. 4 hrs. 30 min

Beef 11 hrs. 2 min. 15 hrs. 48 min.

Butter 3 hrs. 41 min. 4 hrs

Milk 1hr. 5 min. 3 hrs. 42 min.

Sugar 3 hrs. 51 min. 5 hrs. 35 min.

As the one-man boss of Soviet agriculture, Khrushchev is the man most to blame for the human misery and potential strategic weakness that his figures indicate. But though Communism has killed tens of thousands for failings one-tenth as great, this tough, blue-eyed bureaucrat has not only survived but has got himself appointed boss of the Kremlin's recovery plan. He has undertaken to revolutionize Soviet agriculture (for the umpteenth time) by 1956, to more than double its gross output. He promises to raise the supply of meat (230%), butter (190%), cheese (220%), sugar (230%). His record makes it plain that he will stick at nothing to get what he wants.

A Man with Bounce. Khrushchev is a man with machine gunner's eyes and thin, whitening hair that still shows streaks of blond. A Great Russian by race, he has the shoulders of a Stakhanovite (he was once a coal miner), the broad buttocks and high cheekbones of a Slav peasant. Bureaucratic life has covered Khrushchev's frame with an overlay of fat, but one of the few Western diplomats who have met him recently reported last week that he is "rosy and energetic: a man with a lot of bounce."

At 59, he is eight years older than his boss and ally, Georgy Malenkov, but both men regard themselves as "second-generation Communists" -- too young to have been bomb-throwers in Czarist days, but old enough to have been hardened on Stalin's anvil. Said a German Foreign Office man who met Khrushchev in Moscow: "He is one of the best examples of the young Bolshevik -- like Malenkov a fat, brutal, intelligent fonctionnaire, a new type created by Stalin: undogmatic, unintellectual, but effective rulers."

Until 1945 Khrushchev lurked in the shadows, a mere name to Western diplomats. Then, year by year, in pictures of the Soviet leaders seated at their desks before the Supreme Soviet, his bullet head loomed larger--from a white blur on the packed backbenches to a big, pale face, edging close to Stalin, and now to Malenkov. Khrushchev's advance was silent, but it had the momentum of a T-34.

Khrushchev has tackled some of the toughest jobs in Communism, but the one he had last week was the biggest and might be the bloodiest. Agricultural weakness sets a ceiling on Communist power; it is his job to remove it. To do so, he had taken absolute power over Communism's greatest assets: the Russian land and the 100 million peasants who till it.

One-Sixth of the Earth. The Russian land is vast: 8,500,000 square miles. If the city of Los Angeles were tossed into the Pripet Marshes (it would fit quite easily), the Mississippi River would trace the line of the Urals, Boston would be lost somewhere in the Siberian plains, and there would still be plenty of room to fit the North Atlantic Ocean, as far as the Azores, into the emptiness of Soviet Asia. Within this huge expanse (one-sixth of the world's inhabited land surface), there is vast diversity, and some of the natural wonders of the world. There are millions of acres of tundra, stretching across the north in frozen silence; mountains that run amuck from the Himalayas and belch volcanic ash into Bering Strait. There are 100,000 rivers, one-third of the world's forests, the greatest inland sea--the Caspian, five times the size of Lake Superior.

Two-thirds of Russia is either barren or too cold for cultivation under present methods, but underground, say Soviet geologists, there is half the world's iron and almost as much of its coal, half its known petroleum, one-third of its manganese.

More precious than all these is the "black wealth" of the steppe: the deep, black earth that covers most of the Ukraine and stretches across the Volga into the plain of Siberia. Shorn of its black earth, the Soviet Union would die. It feeds two-thirds of Russia's 210 million people.

Pyramid of the People. Half the people of the Soviet Union are Great Russians; the rest, a score of races, speak 200 different tongues and dialects. There are Tartar horsemen unchanged since Genghis Khan, primitive Yakhuts, Samoyed reindeer herders, Mongol tractor drivers and Cossack commissars. There are 20 million Moslems in the U.S.S.R. All of these diverse and frequently antagonistic peoples are ruled by the Soviet elite: some 50,000 ministers, managers, army officers and intellectuals, who are more removed from the people than were the Czar's nobility.

The Soviet rulers live in luxury, atop a social pyramid that is surprisingly stratified. Below them Vladimir Yurasov, a member of the Soviet Reparations Mission to East Germany who escaped, and reached the U.S. in 1951, has distinguished these main groups :

P: Between 8 and 20 million "forced laborers," most of them at work on the massive "Stalin Projects" (Volga-Don Canal, Kuibyshev power station), and in atom plants in central Siberia. Supervised by GULAG, the industrial arm of the MVD (secret police), a minority of the slaves are political prisoners; many are Crimean Tartars and other minorities, shipped to Siberia en masse.

P:100 million peasants--about half the Soviet population. Tied to kolkhozes (collective farms), which they work as sharecroppers. Russia's muzhiks live in wooden and sod huts, eat the black bread of the poor, provide the Red army with its masses of infantrymen.

P:About 28 million "proletarians"--miners, factory workers, clerks and mechanics. A typical worker's home: one small bedsitting room (for a man, his wife and two children), with kitchen and toilet facilities shared with the next-door neighbor. The average worker's wage buys him an austerity diet of bread, fish and potatoes (fresh meat is a luxury), and such occasional relaxations as a ticket to a soccer match or a jugful of cheap vodka.

P:The new Soviet bourgeoisie--about 6,000,000 people (with their families, 20 million). Administrators, middle-drawer bureaucrats, technicians and army officers, these men are the backbone of Russian Communism. Many drive motorcycles, rarely automobiles, own radios but seldom TV sets. They are tough, ambitious, fiercely dedicated to the service of the state.

Within this social pyramid, the new middle class is most subject to change. Their expectations are rising: they want to get ahead. An experienced Western diplomat reports that he has seldom seen "so much drive for keeping up with the Joneses, so much materialistic thinking, so much Babbittry and seeking after 'culture' as there is in Moscow at present."

If the Kremlin's New Course succeeds even partially, it is this new bourgeois group that will benefit. Most of them are looking to Khrushchev, for he is one of them himself.

Vydvizhenets. Born the son of a miner in a poor Russian village on the edge of the Ukraine, Khrushchev is what the Communists call a Vydvizhenets--one who has been "pushed forward." Instead of going to school, he was put to work first as a shepherd boy, then as a child laborer in the Czar's coal mines. When the Red revolution came in 1917, he jumped eagerly into party harness. The Reds sent him to school in a Leninist Rab-Fak, one of the schools intended to prepare illiterate adults for service to Communism. Khrushchev emerged the very prototype of Soviet Man--brainwashed of the old, riveted to the new, a creature who, in Lenin's words, was divorced from history.

In the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), Khrushchev was sent to Moscow, and attached for two years to Communism's M.I.T.: the Stalin Industrial Academy. His foot was on the ladder, for in Communist jargon, Moscow is "the forge of cadres," "the city of foremost culture." Merely to glow in Moscow is to blaze like a shooting star across the length and breadth of Russia.

Khrushchev soon became first secretary of the Moscow Oblast (region) Committee. then a member, rubbing shoulders with Malenkov and Beria, of the omnipotent Central Committee, whose secretary was Stalin himself. He bossed the excavation of Moscow's subway system. He showed an unexpected Grover Whalen-style talent in making the giant Red Square parades a permanent feature of Soviet ceremonial. Khrushchev's reward was the Order of Lenin and one of the party's toughest assignments: to stamp out the lingering embers of Ukrainian nationalism.

Embroidered Shirt. The Ukrainians. 40 million strong and proud of their own mother tongue, have a national pride that centuries of conflict--with Poles, Turks, Swedes, Germans and Russians--have not dimmed, but glorified. It was to root out just such bourgeois nonconformity that Khrushchev returned to Kiev in the fall of 1938.

Khrushchev wore an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and pretended an affection for Ukrainian art. One day he visited the Kharkov Art Center to view a local painter's panel called End of Harvesting. It showed a group of farmers with an elderly man in the center and a girl in Ukrainian dress sitting at table.

"Khorosho [fine]," said Khrushchev.

"Well," said Comrade Aksiutin, Politruk of Art Factories, "why does the girl wear Ukrainian dress? It brings up shades of nationalism . . ."

Khrushchev corrected himself. "The politruk is right; the pictures must be purged of error."

Khrushchev found greater errors in the Ukrainian Communist Party. He ordered a purge of "the enemies of the people" (local patriots), and of "all Communists who have lost their vigilance." Of 15,000 local party secretaries, 3,000 were removed--presumably shot or shipped off to Siberia. Khrushchev's reward from Joseph Stalin was the Order of the Red Banner of Labor--and a small gift package from the Ukrainian patriots. Tossed into his railway carriage one wintry day in 1939, the package exploded, killing two of Khrushchev's companions and peppering him with steel shards.

The Purger. The measure of Khrushchev's failure came in World War II when millions of Ukrainians went over to the Germans without a fight. Stupidly rejecting this free offering, the Nazis launched a mass slaughter which so aroused the survivors as to provide the Red army with a vast guerrilla underground that slashed at the Wehrmacht's rear. Khrushchev, a lieutenant general, commanded a Ukrainian guerrilla army, and won a medal for the defense of Stalingrad. Political commissar for all Russian armies on the southern front, he ruthlessly purged collaborators in city after city recaptured from the Germans. By 1947 Khrushchev was able to report: "Half the Ukraine's leading party workers have been done away with--65% of the presidents of regional soviet, two-thirds of the directors of tractor stations."

Recalled to Moscow in 1949, Khrushchev warned his bosses that "Ukrainian enemies of Communism have entered the service of Anglo-American imperialists." It was his way of saying that trouble was brewing in the land.

No Place for Peasants. Khrushchev's work had brought him face to face with one immutable fact that plagues Communism the world over: that Marxism is and was the creed of a city dweller, with little place in it for the land-loving peasantry. In their writings, Communist thinkers (e.g., Engels) sneer at the muzhiks as "a class of barbarians" with an "anti-collective skull," condemned by history to inexorable extinction. Communist bosses (e.g., Stalin) have consistently endeavored to make the prophecy come true, and the result is a never-ending war between the muzhik and the commissar.

Lenin declared the war in 1920: "The peasant lives in a separate homestead, and he has bread; by that fact alone he can enslave the workers." Five million peasants starved to death when Lenin's grain collectors took the bread force.

In the '30s Stalin's men took the land as well as the bread. The peasants rebelled; millions of them were killed. The muzhiks still resisted in the only way they could, slaughtering or abandoning half of Russia's cattle (30 out of 70 million), half its hogs (12 out of 26 million), one-third of its sheep. In the famine that followed (1931-33), millions more peasants died of hunger; and millions of those who remained were driven into kolkhozes (collective farms), subjected to the law of Aug. 7, 1932: "Death by shooting for any theft from the sacred and inviolable property of the kolkhoz."*

World War II destroyed Russia's livestock for a second time. It also loosened the Kremlin's iron grip on the Russian countryside. Peasant families nibbled at the state farms, decollectivized an estimated six million acres. They hoarded the grain and refused to give it up to the commissars. At first they got away with it. Fearful of massive famine in the wake of war, the Kremlin temporized with the muzhik's lust for land that he could call his own. The Council of Ministers agreed to let the state farms be worked by family groups or by ex-soldiers, banded together in "links" of eight to ten men apiece. Many of the "linkers," explained one of them who escaped, "were peasant soldiers who had fought together at the front, and who tried to stay together afterwards . . . Every former officer or colonel of a battalion tried to have his men with him . . . During the first postwar years, the Kremlin didn't bother to put obstacles in the way, and even backed [the links] . . . but afterwards, it became clear that the situation was becoming politically dangerous. The links were getting too independent of the center."

Agrogorods. First to realize this was Nikita Khrushchev. With Stalin's approval, he denounced the links as 1) "incapable of using heavy machinery"; 2) "standoffish"; 3) "a heresy." So Khrushchev himself took over.

First, he smashed the links by merging them into huge (80 to 150 men) agricultural brigades, bossed by the commissars. Pravda described one brigade at work on the Lenin's Memory kolkhoz: "The brigade women pick the potatoes dug up by machines driven by the men . . . They are followed by supervisors from the party cells who mark down the efficiency of each worker . . ."

"Transform the farms," was Khrushchev's next decree. His method reflected his own and the party's gigantomania. In 1950 alone, Khrushchev amalgamated 40,000 small kolkhozes into vast agrogorods, literally "farm cities." Workers in the agrogorods were promised "running water, large movie houses . . . apartment houses so planned as to have bathrooms and porches."

By dragooning the peasants into agrogorods, equipped with tractor fleets, Khrushchev was confident that he could mechanize Soviet farming. He also expected to mechanize the farmers. Soviet geneticists (e.g., Trofim Lysenko) have erected into Communist dogma the notion that man is mere animal, condemned by nature to acquire the characteristics of his environment. Khrushchev tested the theory in his agrogorods. Just as the Soviet factories had produced a "new Soviet man" (e.g., Khrushchev), so he believed that the agrogorod environment would develop a new agrarian robot divorced from the muzhik's "old village backwardness."

Devices of Discontent. Those who openly opposed his plans. Khrushchev trod underfoot. But many are the covert devices of discontent. The peasant did not have to resist; he need only not cooperate. From party secretaries in the outlying republics came bitter complaints that the agrogorods were unworkable. A year ago, while Stalin was still alive, Malenkov disowned the agrogorods. But somehow their creator was not disowned. Khrushchev stayed put, and when it came time, three months ago, to replace the hard policy with a softer one, it was Khrushchev who criticized the past and outlined the future. His criticisms:

P:Too much red tape: "Each collective farm submits 10,000 statistical indices each year, eight times as many as before the war."

P: Too little technical know-how: "Less than one in five of the chairmen of collective farms has attended secondary school"--a startling admission of how much education has been concentrated on the worker and denied the peasant. P: Too few incentives: "It is pernicious . . . to interfere too much with private ownership of cattle." (Of the 24.3 million cows in the Soviet Union, the majority--14.8 million--are "private cows," tended by the peasant in his spare time away from the collective.)

Khrushchev's remedy for his difficulties was even more startling than his diagnosis. He announced a new slogan, "Increase the Material Interest of the Peasant," and in doing so, resurrected that old capitalist notion of a Fair Profit. He wanted to shift the emphasis from grain to livestock, and to make the shift attractive to the peasant, he offered to pay him five times more than previously upon "compulsory delivery" of his cattle. To get the peasant to work harder, he offered immediate rewards, not distant promises: "Grain must be issued to workers when they thresh; boots should be sold to the peasants in return for the cattle they deliver."

The silent revolt of the peasant had the government to retreat. Stalin, last years, had been too stubborn back; his successors have the shrewdness see the necessity. But it was only a retreat: after 23 years' trial, the Soviet farm policy (so glowingly advertised throughout the rest of the world as "land reform") is bankrupt--but it has not been abandoned. Khrushchev himself made this plain by acknowledging: "We want gradually to liquidate the system of individual farms . . . but it would be a mistake to show haste.''

Upon the cooperation of the muzhik, often deceived and deeply suspicious, the sucess of the New Course depends. By dangling Adam Smith's carrot while wielding Karl Marx's stick, Khrushchev and the Kremlin expect to provide not only more meat and potatoes, but enough agricultural raw material (cotton, wool, etc.) to enable industry to meet its new promises to the consumer. In Russian terms, the new promises, with their dazzling percentage figures, are ambitious. But compared with the accepted norms of Western production, the targets are by no means high.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, the density of livestock is seven times as great, the output of milk per unit of land eight times, and the application of fertilizers almost 20 times as large as in the Soviet Union

The Blueprints. It is the judgment of most Western analysts that the armed Soviet Union should soon be able to afford both superbombs and more consumer goods. Its economy is growing, says the Harvard Russian Research Center, at the rate of 5% to 6% a year--theoretically enough to double its gross national product once every twelve years. Short of war, Russia's gross output may pass Western Europe's by 1965 or 1970. According to these figures, its output per capita equaled Italy's in 1950; it will catch up to the 1951 output of France by 1955, and to that of Britain by 1962. This does not mean that Soviet living standards, in one decade, could possibly catch up with Western Europe's, for European kitchens and wardrobes are crammed with "capital goods" -- cutlery, linen, clothing -- that have taken years to accumulate.

The ugly necessities of the 20th century have driven most observers in the rest of the world to measure these possibilities solely by what they promise in terms of war or peace. In these terms, a State Department expert concludes that the Soviet New Course "ultimately creates power that will add to their war potential . . . They would be knuckleheads to start a war now, but in the late '50s, who can tell?" This vast upheaval over one-sixth the earth's surface might also be measured by the small easements--a pair of shoes, a full plate of food--that it may bring to that most forgotten of forgotten men, the Russian serf. The tragedy is that these benefits will add little to his joy, and nothing to his freedom, but will work only--for this is the intent--to fasten tighter the control of his masters.

-*1952 U.S. outputs in millions of tons: coal, 458; steel, 85; crude oil, 313-Electricity: 399 billion kwh.

*Winston Churchill once asked Stalin how many had been "blotted out or displaced forever." The Russian's reply as recorded in Churchill's memoirs: " 'Ten million,' he said, holding up his hands. 'It was fearful. Four years it lasted . . . It was all very bad and difficult--but necessary.' "

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