Russia: The New Gospel

In the early Moscow morning, long queues of Russians lined up at the city's newsstands to buy a copy of the big story spread over nine pages of Pravda. At home, millions huddled around TV and radio sets and presumably listened as long as their curiosity or patience lasted, as announcers droned out the news for five straight hours.

The object of all the dutiful interest was Nikita Khrushchev's new Communist Party program, hailed by the Kremlin as the hottest thing in Communist ideology in 40 years, designed to place Nikita right up there with Marx and Lenin among the philosophers of mankind. Not since 1919, when Lenin produced his own massive program, had a new draft of the party's dogma been put on paper.* Now, at vast length, all the distant promises and ambitious boasts were reaffirmed, in rhetoric that was at least somewhat more readable, if less dialectically skillful than Lenin's ( "A mighty unifying thunderstorm, marking the springtime of mankind, is raging over the earth"). Its one considerable achievement is its tone of total assurance: reading it. a dedicated Communist might easily convince himself that history was undeniably on his side, that all his sacrifices were worthwhile, all his masters humane and wise, all his enemies villainous. It was all there, from moral fervor to shrewd, selfish appeals, and there was a specious coherence to it all. But some might take a closer look at the fine print.

Brave Promises. To the Russians them selves, who already know too well the old dogmatic themes, the main eye-catcher was a gaudy catalogue of welfare benefits—free education, free school lunches, free rents, free transport, free electricity and water—that Soviet citizens are to have in 20 years. They were promised a Khrushchevian 1980, not an Orwellian 1984. Some of the promised benefits were already familiar to the West, but many a Russian family that now shares a congested small flat with one or two other families might take heart from the Kremlin's firm assurance that "during the 19705 every family, including newlyweds, will have comfortable apartments which will correspond to the demand for a hygienic and cultured life." But to reach even this minimum level, the current rate of Soviet construction would have to be trebled—an improbable feat.

There was a slice of pie in the sky for everybody. Workers, who now must moonlight on second jobs to get enough to live on, were promised a six-hour workday ("this will come within ten years"). But at the 21st Party Congress three years ago, this same starry goal was promised for 1961; it was even part of Lenin's grandiose scheme of 1919. The draft plan spoke of a "fourfold increase" in meat production during the next two decades, but discreetly did not quote Moscow's own published statistics showing the slaughter rate to be increasing at a mere 5% annually.