Economic Experimentation

Stalin’s successors placed great emphasis on improving the economic performance of the Soviet system. Much depended on this success, for if the Soviet Union could outperform the West economically, it could solidify its popular support at home, while proving abroad that communism was truly the superior system.

In the days of the “collective leadership” there were intense debates in the Kremlin about which direction and what form economic reforms should take. But there was general agreement that the chronic weak point of the Soviet economy was agriculture. A simple statistic underlined this fact: between 1949 and 1952 the output of Soviet industry rose by 230% but agricultural production improved by a mere 10%. This statistic was not only an embarrassment to the Soviets but a serious economic, political, and ideological handicap. Poor agricultural productivity meant food shortages, which obviously raised doubts (both at home and abroad) about the superiority of the Soviet system. Therefore, Khrushchev, a self-proclaimed agricultural specialist by virtue of his long years in Ukraine, made a great effort to improve the situation in the countryside. For Ukraine, the breadbasket of the USSR, these changes would be especially important, because, once again, Ukraine would serve as a laboratory for much of the agricultural experimentation. Agricultural projects

The most ambitious of Khrushchev’s experiments was the “virgin-lands” project, which involved bringing about 40 million acres of unused land in Kazakhstan and Siberia under cultivation. The project, initiated in 1954, involved a huge investment of human and material resources, and Ukraine was expected to provide a large share of it.

Another experiment involved a sudden switch, involving about 70 million acres throughout the USSR, to raising vast amounts of corn. Following American examples, it was to be used as fodder, which would help to raise the listless livestock production. Several years later, the Kremlin ordered the collective farmers to switch to a new system of crop rotation. As usual, Ukraine bore much of the burden imposed by these complex and costly innovations.

A reform that did have grass-roots support in Ukraine – indeed, in which Ukrainians took the initiative – involved the MTS, the depots providing farm machinery (and political supervision) to the collectives. Because of constant conflicts between the MTS and the collective farms about how the land should be worked, Ukrainians convinced the government to abolish the MTS and to sell their machines to the collectives.

The growing compexity of farming demanded well-educated and technologically proficient people. And these were greatly lacking in the Ukrainian countryside. In 1953, of the 15,000 collective-farm chairmen in Ukraine, less than 500 had a post-secondary education. To improve this situation, experienced technicians from the cities were encouraged to take positions on the collective farms. Those farms that lagged behind were linked with city-based industrial “brother” enterprises, which provided technical aid. As a result, a new and more-sophisticated social group, the “agricultural technocracy,” appeared in the countryside. Meanwhile, the government raised the income of the farmers and slowly the earnings gap between the industrial and agricultural workers began to narrow.

Radical changes and grandiose experiments notwithstanding, agricultural production failed to expand as rapidly as expected. The Kremlin still refused to provide the collective farmers with enough incentives to work harder, bureaucracts in far-off Moscow still decided which crops a collective farm should plant and how the planting should be done, and the peasant was penalized for working his own tiny (but exceedingly productive) plot. The disappointing performance of agriculture had major political ramifications for Ukraine’s Communists. Khrushchev counted heavily on them in helping to make his agricultural reforms a success. Meanwhile, in Kiev, dissatisfaction mounted with the disproportionately great demands that were placed on Ukraine. The warm relations between Khrushchev and the Ukrainian Communists began to cool. Changes in industry

Ukraine’s industry, like that of the Soviet Union as a whole, had performed very well in the early 1950s. In fact, this was its golden age. But by the late 1950s it began to slow down. Another problem facing the Kremlin leadership was whether to continue emphasizing heavy industry or to invest more heavily in light industry that would benefit the deprived Soviet consumer. Khrushchev opted for heavy industry but, unlike Stalin, he could not totally ignore the consumer, especially since he had promised that the Soviet Union would catch up and bypass the West economically by the 1980s. Consequently, in the early 1960s televisions, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and even cars began to appear in the government stores. However, they were exceedingly scarce and of abysmally poor quality.

To deal with the problem of dropping industrial productivity, in 1957 Khrushchev expanded the controversial sovnarkhoz (economic council) reform, one of the most radical organizational changes in the Soviet economy since the 1920s. This attempt to shift the center of economic planning and management from the ministries in Moscow to regional bodies, was meant to bypass the bureaucratic bottlenecks and top-heavy bureaucracy.

Although Khrushchev’s reforms did not live up to expectations, they did, nevertheless, bring about considerable improvements. In sharp contrast to the days of Stalin, the impressive growth of the Soviet GNP – which outpaced that of the United States until the 1970s – helped to raise the standard of living. In Ukraine, for example, between 1951 and 1958, the income of the average worker rose by 230%. And it was the long-suffering collective farmer who received the proportionately highest raises. Put differently, in the Stalin era personal consumption rose by about 1% a year; during the Khrushchev years the increase was about 4% annually.

Because millions of additional acres of land were put under cultivation, food became more available and varied. At long last, the diet of the average Soviet family, which was usually based on such staples as bread and potatoes, expanded to include, with some regularity, vegetables and meat. Even such exotic delicacies as citrus fruits appeared in the shops. Running water, electricity, and transportation reached remote villages. The daunting task of the Soviet housewife, who generally held a full-time job, was eased somewhat by the appearance of (relatively) modern appliances. And televisions, an excellent medium for propaganda as well as entertainment, became a regular household fixture. In the urban centers, housing still remained a major problem, mainly because about 2.5 million Soviet citizens poured into the cities every year. But while the standard of living was still far below Western standards, for the Soviet people, whose expectations were low and who compared their current situation with that of the recent and dreadful past, these changes were a great step forward. Certainly there was less reason to complain about the Soviet system in the Khrushchev years than during the Stalin era.