RUSSIA: Things Are Bad, Very Bad

Agriculture continues to be the Soviet Union's No.1 headache. At the time when farm productivity is rising everywhere else in the world, per-acre yields are actually falling in the Soviet Union.

In the season of Sputnik and missile triumphs, the Soviet Union has about five times as many people working on the land as the U.S. does, and producing less. Presiding at a year-end Communist Central Committee meeting on the Soviet farm problem, Premier Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged that the 1959 grain harvest had been disappointing, allowed himself to be angry and...