Word: benediktov
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...many nightmares: Supposing ignorant peasants in Siberia leave their shiny new tractors out in the snow? Supposing collective farmers begin to act like rugged individualists in the Ukraine? In these or many other possible cases, his probable fate will be that of a Fascist-Trotskyist wrecker. Ivan Alexandrovich Benediktov, latest to gamble his life in this advanced post, took over the Commissariat last autumn. According to the Moscow Pravda he immediately set about "eradicating" his predecessor Robert Indrikovich Eikhe's "left-overs." Comrade Eikhe, who quietly disappeared last summer, had done the same to the "accomplices" of his predecessor...
Administrative efficiency was near an all-time low when Comrade Benediktov took office. One reason: officials, lest they appear to lack revolutionary fervor, stayed at their offices 24 hours a day, were consequently too sleepy to tell a kulak from a zemstvo. Last week the Commissariat of Agriculture predicted, as a result of new good management and the good luck of fine spring weather, a bumper wheat crop of seven to eight billion poods (4,213,183,333 to 4,815,066,666 bushels). The wheat is not yet cut and threshed, and there may be a big discrepancy between...
Last May Commissar Benediktov started out to get these counter-revolutionary individualists. Thousands of commissioners, many of whom could not tell a hawk from a handsaw, are now swarming over the U. S. S. R., measuring each peasant garden. Abuses, declared Benediktov, will be rectified. All far-from-home plots will be replaced by land adjacent to villages, where officials can keep an eye on them. To millions of hard-working peasants this meant the loss of painfully wrought improvements. And some collective-farm managers, with a characteristically Russian excess of zeal, have confiscated all private plots, legal...
Meanwhile, there were signs last week that the Soviet Union's rulers at last realized that conditions in the Commissariat of Agriculture had become dangerous. I. A. Benediktov, formerly a Vice Commissar, was named as the new Commissar, equipped with the full powers to "coordinate...