COMMUNISTS: Subversion on the Farm

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In their slide-rule approach to life, the Communists have always had their worst troubles with agriculture. Nothing in Marx or Engels tells how to make a peasant milk the state's cow as zealously as his own or to treat the state's tractor as carefully as if he owned it. And nature itself has a way of defying the drafters of five-year plans. Both Moscow and Peking were complaining last week.

¶ Radio Moscow admitted "alarming" delays in harvesting grain in Kazakhstan, Khrushchev's favorite Central Asian "virgin lands" region, which was counted on to boost this year's grain harvest 6% above 1958's 141 million-ton harvest. Many of the tractors needed to cut the crops before the first snow were out of order for lack of spare parts, grumbled Radio Moscow. Millions of bushels of cut grain were still lying out in the open because thousands of "volunteer" workers had quit in disgust with low wages and Kazakhstan's primitive living conditions. In a similar situation Nikita Khrushchev in January fired Kazakhstan's party secretary; the new fellow may soon be out of a job, too.

¶ Peking's People's Dally dolefully informed readers that in 1960 half of China's cropland had been visited by drought, floods, hordes of insects or other natural disaster. While Russia, with bumper crops in the Ukraine and northern Caucasus to compensate for Kazakhstan's losses, may yet do a little better than 1959's thoroughly mediocre harvest, the Chinese Communists seemed to be preparing their hungry people for the worst harvest since they took over in 1949. Already cut to a daily ration of 1,750 calories, Chinese commune workers were being admonished by mess-hall signs: "It is glorious to eat less than one's food ration."

In another Orwellian display of converting failures into successes, the Chinese Communists last week found a bright side even to the breakdown of railroad transportation. Peking's Evening News reported that thousands of passengers had written in declaring their delight in the fact that express trains often made unscheduled stops of 15 minutes or more because the delays give them a chance to get out and perform calisthenics. "After the exercises," women of Chekiang province were quoted, "our limbs feel more relaxed and our brain more sober."