in 1954, was successful-and compensated for crop failures in the Ukraine.40

"Tselina" (accent on the a, from tselyi-whole, unhurt)—is the Russian word for the new land. For the people now working on this Tselina the Russians invented the word Tselinnik.50

The huge operation was carried out in the shortest possible time and many mistakes were made, which Khrushchev admitted. Otherwise, and officially, the campaign was proclaimed a success.

By decision of the February-March Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (1954). . . the goal was set: to add not less than thirteen million hectares of virgin and idle land to the grain-sowing areas in 1954–55. To carry out the program, a series of measures were projected: organization of new MTS's [Machine Tractor Stations] and sovkhozes, supplying them with modern machines, dispatching skilled technicians, creation of normal living and cultural conditions, organizing planned migration. A total of about 19 million hectares of virgin and idle lands were cultivated in 1954. . . . In two years (1954–1955) 33,005 thousand hectares of virgin and idle lands were ploughed.

*

By November 7, 1956, 35.5 million hectares of virgin and idle land were virtually ploughed.51

To organize the manpower necessary for work on the new virgin lands, Khrushchev turned to the Young Communist League with its millions of members. The league was instructed to recruit the necessary hundreds of thousands of workers. Quotas were set for local Komsomols of required workers and "cadres" (organizers and technicians); the operation was similar to recruitment into the army. Contrary to Soviet claims, the operation was in no way a voluntary, patriotic one. It was hard on the young men and women selected to migrate to a barren land with almost no housing accommodations, not to speak of other comforts.

... At the call of the Communist party over 350,000 persons migrated to work on the virgin and idle lands. Among them were many skilled specialists from industrial enterprises in the cities, from the MTS's and the sovkhozes of different regions of the entire country.52

I saw these Tselinniks at work and in their homes. To my question, what brought you to the Tselina, they all gave the stereotyped answer: "We followed the appeal of the Party and the Komsomol"; they tried to sound heroic. It is impossible to learn what they really thought,

40 Crankshaw, op. cit., pp. 166, 167.

60 Mehnert, op. cit., p. 183.

01 Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya (Large Soviet Encyclopedia) (2nd ed.; Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Nauchnoe Izdatelstvo "Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya" (State Scientific Publishing House "The Large Soviet Encyclopedia"), vol. XLVI (1957), pp. 487, 488.

"Ibid., p. 488.

and I can't really tell to what extent they were idealistic Tselina-volunteers. But according to the latest Soviet literature there are also many other motives in the decision to become a Tselinnik.53

Khrushchev's effort to recruit manpower through the Youth League was his substitute for Stalin's methods of forced labor of inmates of concentration camps, but the new methods were still a kind of compulsion, although of a less severe character. The persons recruited by the Komsomol were rarely in a position to refuse.

When Khrushchev sent down the orders to convert this virgin land into wheat fields, there was a frenzy of activity. The Komsomol (the Young. Communist League) moved into action and established many farms, one of them being the Komsomolsky farm at Barnaul. The director of the farm, L. J. Pyjikov, told me that all of the men and women who came there did so voluntarily. That may well be. But when I reached Moscow, I learned that labor was in effect often drafted for these new farms. For example, when the appeal was made to one government agency in Moscow for farm laborers, only thirty volunteered their services. The quota, however, was sixty. So thirty others were assigned by that agency to farm work. (I got my story from one of the latter groups).54

The actual conduct of this operation passes all imagining. A quarter of a million "volunteers" were picked up by their roots and pitch-forked into the empty steppe. . . . During all the first winter there was nowhere to live. "Pre-fabs" and tents were ordered in vast quantities, but they failed to arrive-or else the walls for a hundred pre-fabs would be sent to one location, and the roofs to another location two hundred miles away. The volunteers got through that winter somehow, living mainly in the traditional Russian dugouts-sunken pits with an earth roof over wood or iron, and a bit of stovepipe for a chimney..

Only Khrushchev knows how many people died, or suffered irreparable injury to health, in those first two winters when there was nowhere to live.55

Life on the Tselinas was hard:

But already these new settlements are succumbing to the disease of all Soviet industrial towns. The hard core of volunteers can be relied on; but the draftees, and the demobilized service-men, are causing problems. There is nothing to do after work but drink. Theatres are lacking, cinemas are lacking, clubs are lacking, even Party pep-talkers are lacking (it takes a devoted agitator to leave his family and settle down in the desert wastes of Kazakhstan). And so the young men drink and gamble and generally carry on as anyone but Mr. Khrushchev would expect them to carry on in such conditions.5 56

63

Mehnert, op. cit., p. 183.

William O. Douglas, Russian Journey (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1956), pp. 94, 95.

In the spring of 1954 I followed closely the reports of the press about the transplanting of hundreds of thousands of people from European Russia to southern Siberia. From the point of view of recruiting of manpower and transport of the masses as well as the machines necessary for their work, the operation of that year could be compared to a large-scale war operation, something like the Normandy invasion by the Allies ten years ago.

...

Of the Tselinniks of the first groups, over 10 per cent returned home the first year; 60 were mobilized into the army, but new arrivals replaced these. At the time of my visit [to a sovkhoz in the spring of 1956] the sovkhoz had a manpower force of 760. Of these, 150 were occupied with construction.57

As a result of the Tselina operation and of Khrushchev's tendency toward integrated state economy, the number and size of sovkhozes continued to grow rapidly. Their development during the period from 1940 to 1955 may be seen in the following figures:

By 1957 the state economy was further advancing, gradually supplanting both private and kolkhoz agriculture and husbandry:

In them [the sovkhozes] is concentrated over a quarter of the entire acreage under crops of the whole country and almost 30 per cent of all kinds of grain sowing. In 1957 the sovkhozes delivered to the state 21 per cent of the entire supply of meat, 32 per cent of pork, 21 per cent of milk, 27 per cent of wool and 21 per cent of eggs.

59

A personal preference of Khrushchev (many have considered it a whim) began to influence Soviet agriculture after his elevation: the

Mehnert, op. cit., pp. 182, 185.

58 Narodnoe Khozyaistvo SSSR, Statisticheskii Sbornik, pp. 134, 135, 138.

59

Ezhegodnik Bolshoi Sovetskoi Entsiklopedii 1958 (Yearbook of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia 1958) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Nauchnoe Izdatelstvo "Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya" (State Scientific Publishing House "The Large Soviet Encyclopedia"), 1958), p. 53.

cultivation of corn. According to official data, the acreage planted in corn amounted to:

The substantial decrease of areas under corn in 1957 proved that Khrushchev's directives were in this case neither expert nor wise. The corn issue is still in question.

Gradual abolition of the MTS's (machine-tractor stations serving the collective farms of their district) was another reform in the Soviet system of agriculture under Khrushchev. Having served, since its initiation in the late 1920's, as a means of Communist party control over the kolkhozes and their members, the network of MTS's appeared, in the 1950's, unnecessary; other methods had by that time become more effective. Independent political movements of the peasantry were no longer possible under the overriding power of the police, and the numbers of Communists appointed to leading posts in the collective farms had increased to such an extent that they could be entrusted with the political tasks heretofore performed by the MTS's.

At present the MTS's have ceased to play the political role assigned to them during the first stage of kolkhoz building.

The number of Communists in the kolkhozes increased by over 230,000 in the years 1954-58. With the transfer of a huge army of mechanics and specialists from the MTS's to the kolkhozes, the kolkhoz party organizations will become even stronger and their influence on all phases of kolkhoz life will increase. . . .o1

The Party has sent several thousand Communists--Party and Soviet workers, engineers from industrial enterprises, agronomists, zootechnicians 2 and other specialists-to occupy leading posts in the kolkhozes. At the beginning of 1957 over 90 per cent of kolkhoz chairmen were Communists.

While more than 20 per cent of the collective farms had no Party organizations before the Central Committee's September plenary session, almost all the collective and state farms now have full-fledged and vigorous Party organizations. The average collective-farm Party organization now has 20 Communists, or almost twice as many as five years ago. The total number of Communists in the collective-farm Party organizations is more than

03 Zootechnicians is a Soviet term which means the science of breeding, feeding and correct utilization of cattle.

Pravda, February 28, 1958.

1,350,000. This is a large and active force, with whose help the assigned tasks can be successfully accomplished."4

The transfer of machinery to the kolkhozes was in particular made possible because, in the course of the "aggrandizement" drive, the average size of a kolkhoz had increased considerably. "The number of regular workers of the MTS's amounted to over 2,000,000 in 1957." 65 It would appear that the transfer of MTS shops and machinery to the kolkhozes would strengthen and consolidate the collective farm system. But Khrushchev insisted that, in the final analysis, this reform would be only a step toward their transformation into a "higher type" of national property, the sovkhoz system.

with the rise in kolkhoz wealth, kolkhoz property will advance to reach the level of national property. The sooner we develop the productive forces of socialist agriculture, the sooner the moment will arrive when there will be practically no difference between national and kolkhoz property."

4. Competition With the United States

In the spring of 1957, Khrushchev came out with the slogan of catching up with the United States in production of meat, butter, and milk. This was more than a mere economic program; its acceptance by the Central Committee was achieved in the face of the resistance of the Malenkov-Molotov group. Khrushchev's opponents maintained that it was unrealistic to try to achieve such a level of production in the near future; they were obviously refusing to challenge the United States at its strongest point-its economy. They were skeptical as to whether all-out, bitter competition was opportune or promising. Khrushchev, however, won out. In one report, he said:

The successes achieved in agriculture and the good prospects for its development permit us to set and accomplish a task which is of great importance for the state: to catch up in the next few years with the United States of America in butter and milk, per capita.

...

. . . In 1956 the per capita production of these products [in kilograms] was as follows: