Nikita in the Fir Tree
JUDY, RICHARD W.
THE PROSPECTS FOR SOVIET AGRICULTURE Nikita in the Fir Tree By Richard W Judy WEIRD AND EXOTIC rituals to insure bounteous harvests are no novelty in Russia. Sir James G. Frazer reports that...
...while others poured water on it through a sieve...
...Intensification — i.e., boosting acreage yields and emphasizing animal husbandry—is the most rational path for Soviet agriculture to follow...
...Admittedly, the nutrients were supplied in inadequate quantities...
...In 1961, agricultural output plans went unfulfilled: grain by 10.6 per cent, milk by 20 per cent, and meat by 34 per cent...
...A myriad of decisions must be made and much hard work done if high crop and livestock yields are to be attained...
...Generations of young agronomists took instruction in the Williams gospel...
...In effect, the Party has taken over agriculture...
...After Stalin's demise in 1953, steps were taken to boost food output by raising procurement prices, relaxing restrictions on the peasants' private plots, incrementing the consumer goods available to the peasantry, decentralizing agricultural planning, increasing agricultural investment, and greatly expanding the cultivated acreage...
...Elsewhere, the villagers were wont to disinter the body of a raskolnik, or dissenter, who had expired the preceding December...
...With ample grain and forage for feed, livestock production set a record in 1959...
...No great gift for ratiocination is required to perceive the absurdity of this measure...
...In addition to lack of proper machinery, there exists an acute shortage of spare parts...
...It is a historical fact that, in the past, agricultural plans have never been fulfilled...
...Agricultural investment has slumped...
...In the past, Soviet agricultural machinery production has been mainly of the outsized, general purpose variety best suited to extensive grain cultivation...
...To no one is this more apparent than Nikita Khrushchev himself...
...And each night, when those housewives serve up their suppers, they must endure the snarls of surly husbands tired of bread-filled cutlets and meatless weeks...
...Clearly, matters are in parlous estate...
...Never before has the Party or State had such a broad charter to meddle in agricultural affairs...
...These are colossal figures...
...These measures plus abundant rainfall paid off in the bumper crop of 1958...
...In place of the grass rotation system, he proposes to substitute an intensive type of agriculture...
...It would be difficult to exaggerate the import of this new organization...
...It is all a matter of the proper organization, and we Communists are masters of organization...
...In the past, leguminous grasses standing for two or more years have supplied needed nitrogen and organic matter to Russian soil...
...the second knocked fire brands together to simulate lightning...
...This scheme promised to maintain fertility without heavy investments in the chemical fertilizer industry, and thus found great favor with Stalin who was ever eager to skimp on agricultural investment...
...Foremost among the current scapegoats was the grass crop rotation system fanatically propounded by academician V R. Williams, who died in 1939...
...In 1961, the planned output for chemical equipment was fulfilled by only 87 per cent...
...By 1980, when the Communist millennium is scheduled to arrive, grain output must more than double, milk output about triple, and meat output nearly quadruple...
...What are the prospects for fertilizer production...
...But if the grasses are liquidated and replaced by high yielding crops such as corn and sugar beets, something will have to replace the plant nutrients taken away by these soil-exhausting crops...
...History offers little encouragement...
...The output of livestock products has declined, and there is not so much as a whisper about Khrushchev's defunct campaign to overtake the United States by 1961 in the per capita production of meat, milk and butter...
...One wonders whether it was undertaken for economic reasons or in order to strengthen the Party apparatus and secure someone political support...
...With anti-Marxist alarm, he recited the startling statistics: Population growth since 1953 was 29 million...
...Since there is general recognition of this fact among Soviet economists, it was thought that the March Plenum might provide an important innovation on the matter of incentives...
...Whether the Party Program's ambitious goals for food output will be met depends on how willing the Party is to pay the requisite price...
...Its job, according to Khrushchev, will be "planning, calculation and accounting, and exercising influence on the organization of production of every kolkhoz and sovkhoz...
...Cotton, which occupies only 1.1 per cent of the cropland, uses nearly a quarter of the fertilizer...
...Today, under Socialism, we have the mid-winter Central Committee plenums devoted to problems of agriculture...
...Indeed, it is probably the only path...
...The Party seizure of agriculture is a ludicrous and retrogressive step, and fails completely to come to grips with the problem of management and motivation...
...and adopted it was in all regions, irrespective of how ill-suited local conditions might be...
...it remained so even last year when good weather prevailed over most of the country...
...This worthy's function will be to "organize daily verification of the fulfillment of Party and State decisions on agricultural questions...
...To escape this burden, he feels annually constrained to mount the fir tree, denounce scapegoats for the past year's failures and prescribe nostrums guaranteed to bring abundance the following year...
...Furthermore, most of the mineral fertilizer is at present being lavished on technical, non-food crops...
...of that number, 28 million were urban...
...It is this entrenched doctrine that Khrushchev has challenged...
...If they are achieved, the first requisite of a highly productive agricultural economy will have been met...
...Soon there will be 250280 million stomachs to fill...
...During the first three years of the Plan, however, output increased to only 15.3 million tons...
...Sir James G. Frazer reports that in certain parts of Old Russia rain was induced by sending three peasants up the fir trees of an old sacred grove...
...Instead, Khrushchev chose to give no more than lip service to the principle of material incentives...
...and the third sprinkled water about with a bunch of twigs...
...Its adoption was decreed...
...According to the Seven Year Plan, the output of mineral fertilizer is to increase from 12 million tons in 1958 to 35 million tons in 1965...
...There will be a Committee for Agricultural Leadership in Moscow, chaired by a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers...
...This year Khrushchev warned the attendant faithful that continued stagnation could undermine the Seven Year Plan and cause "the building of Communism to suffer serious damage...
...Ambitious targets have been set in the past, but the Party has never been willing to allocate capital on the scale necessary to meet them...
...Some of the brethren beat the corpse about the head shouting, "Give us rain...
...Comrades gather by the score to be harangued by their tub-thumping, teeth-gnashing leaders...
...In that year, over 80 per cent of all eggs and about half of all milk and meat came from the private plots...
...There will be a corresponding republican governmental organ to be called the Ministry of Production and Procurement of Agricultural Products...
...If climatic conditions are reasonably favorable, the 1962 output could exceed the 1958 high water mark...
...Such a committee will exist in every union republic, and it will be headed by the republican first secretary of the Party...
...For want of repair and proper care, more Soviet grain combines stand idle than work during the harvest time...
...Some 55 million acres are due to be diverted from grasses to grain and forage crops in 1962...
...Behind Khrushchev's statistics stand long lines of impatient Soviet housewives waiting to buy scarce meat at outrageous prices...
...In no other area have past Soviet failures been so abject as in those of management and motivation...
...Badly frightened by the marauding shade of Deacon Malthus, Nikita Khrushchev climbed the fir tree on March 5 and begat a six-hour oration...
...But for the promise to be realized, certain requisites must be met, and failure will spell fiasco...
...The acreage sown to grasses increased rapidly in the 1930s and '40s...
...One pounded a kettle to imitate thunder...
...Yet in 1961, the Soviet output of all kinds of mineral fertilizers was only 15.3 million tons, as compared to about 23 million tons produced in the United States in 1959...
...Population growth is now at the rate of nearly 4 million annually...
...To compound his woe, Khrushchev's planners tell him that in order to provide a satisfactory diet Soviet agriculture must expand enormously in the immediate future...
...But such was not to be...
...This is a remedy that should either cure or kill the patient...
...The immediate outlook for agricultural production, all things considered, is mildly favorable...
...Can these targets be achieved...
...The Bolsheviks are rightly terming it a revolution in agriculture...
...In 1959, the average application of mineral fertilizer per acre of sown cropland in the Soviet Union was only 51 pounds, compared with 145 pounds in the United States, 360 in France, 580 in England, and 890 in East Germany...
...Progress will depend on timely and massive deliveries of mineral fertilizer, more and better farm machinery and, most important, a system of incentives that will stimulate the peasantry to greater efforts...
...Reports filtered out from Warsaw that the Russians were leering approvingly at the Polish system, which allows great latitude for private enterprise in agriculture...
...Bourgeois rubbish...
...A new Party bureaucracy has arisen...
...In the longer run, the Party Program and Twenty Year Plan call for fertilizer output to rise to 77 million tons by 1970 and 125-135 million tons by 1980...
...How characteristic and ironic that when the Bolsheviks set out to emulate the intensive, highly productive livestock economy of Denmark, they replace the smallholding Danish farmer with a sprawling Party bureaucracy...
...And, though the masses have existed for a generation on bread alone, they now have more money to spend and demand better fare...
...Essentially, it would be a highly developed livestock economy based on high yielding grain and forage crops such as com and sugar beets...
...With increased application of fertilizers, there is good reason to expect sharp increases in acreage yields...
...These are the agricultural targets specified by the much ballyhooed Party Program that was announced at the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist party last November...
...This, at any rate, was approximately the reasoning behind Khrushchev's latest grotesquerie...
...In the light of this precedent, the pessimists are prepared to give generous odds that they will continue to be unfulfilled for years to come...
...There is adequate feed remaining from last year's crop to permit livestock output to increase substantially over 1961's dismal level...
...This means that mineral fertilizer must become available in vastly increased amounts...
...From 1928 to 1953, Soviet agriculture was synonymous with stagnation...
...At the regional (krai or oblast) level, the Party's local first secretary will head directorates with subdivisions responsible for the operation of 30-100 farms...
...Grain, which covers two-thirds of the cropland, gets a miserly one-fifth of the fertilizer...
...And yields have dropped in the semi-arid "virgin lands" because of soil exhaustion and moisture depletion resulting from continuous grain cropping...
...The main Party man down on the farm will be the "inspector-organizer," who will supervise the operation of from four to six farms...
...This area, too, will require very sizeable capital investments...
...Thus, given proper conditions, intensive agriculture holds great promise...
...Of all the requisites for successful intensive agriculture, the most essential is good management and high motivation...
...What he proposed was a nostrum of classical Bolshevik proportions: Does intensive agriculture require maximum personal incentive...
...The promised boons and benefactions of Khrushchevian husbandry remain ethereal...
...Incentives have slackened following campaigns to reduce the private plots and transfer most of the privately owned livestock to the Socialized sector...
...Little care has been given to the design of lighter specialized equipment and tractor attachments to relieve back-breaking work...
...In that same period, the plan for bringing new fertilizer plants into operation was fulfilled by only 44 per cent...
...The doctrine was of dubious logic, but to doubt its universal efficacy became tantamount to treason...
...The use of fertilizer is to increase by 12 per cent...
...But the fertilizer must be there...
...The system was designed to improve soil fertility and texture by the widespread cultivation, in rotation, of annual and perennial grasses...
...And this year, as an added assurance of good crops, the faithful disentombed the reputation of the late soil scientist, V R. Williams, flailed it valiantly, and doused it with anhydrous ammonia...
...The possibilities for expanding cultivated acreage have already been exhausted by plowing the virgin lands in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan, and Soviet yields are now very low...
...grass rotation was the only Marxist way to promote soil fertility...
...It remains to be seen what priority Khrushchev and his successor will give to mineral fertilizers...
...The first requisite for a program of agricultural intensification is increased soil fertility...
...About two thirds of this is now to be replanted to high-yielding crops...
...Some pundits speculated that Khrushchev would propose a sweeping reform of agricultural incentives designed to encourage peasant initiative...
...Having posed before the multitude as the nation's foremost agricultural savant, he bears full responsibility before the Soviet people for the post-1958 failures...
...The Socialized system of agriculture abysmally fails to provide the incentive for hard work and sound decisions...
...Fertilizer production requires substantial investment in plant and equipment...
...Richard W. Judy, formerly a Fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard, currently views the Soviet scene from Yellow Springs, Ohio...
...The average Soviet consumer eats well under half as much meat and eggs as his American counterpart, and considerably less than his Polish, Hungarian or Czechoslovak brothers...
...To Williams, the staunchest of Bolsheviks, mineral and natural fertilizers were taboo...
...In 1961, nearly one third of Soviet cropland was planted to low-yielding grass or oats, or under clean fallow...
...Since 1958, however, progress has been dismal...
...As a second requisite, intensive agriculture demands much labor and specialized machinery...
...It is a complete reversal of Khrushchev's 1955 decision to decentralize the planning of agricultural production...
...The outlook for the remaining four years of the Seven Year Plan is not sanguine, though it is too early to predict total failure...
...The long run perspective, however, is much more dubious...
...The 1958 grain crop is still unequaled...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 8
