Word: commune
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...crash vegetable-growing program. Kiangsi province has ordered 480,000 civil servants to the farm, Shansi province sent 400,000 "retrenched" industrial and dam workers to the countryside, and Kwangtung province promised 1,000,000 laborers who had "blindly immigrated to the cities." To remedy the fertilizer shortage, commune dwellers are being urged to raise pigs for their own profit, following the slogan: "More pigs, more fertilizer; more fertilizer, more grain; more grain, a future infinitely beautiful...
When Red China's Mao Tse-tung decided two years ago to herd his 650 million subjects into beehive-style communes, nobody professed to be more appalled than Nikita Khrushchev. It wasn't the inhumanity he objected to; it was the dogma. Communes, Nikita told visiting U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, were "oldfashioned and reactionary." But what really irked the Kremlin was Peking's implicit boast that the commune system would propel Red China into the Marxist never-never land of full Communism ahead even of Rus sia itself...
Last week, in the Soviet monthly Novy Mir, the Kremlin devised the subtlest ploy yet to put the bumptious Chinese back in their ideological place. Russia, too, wrote Veteran Soviet Economist Stanislav Strumilin, 83, plans to have agricultural communes-but not until 1980-85. And unlike Red China's jampacked, hardscrabble farms (see above), Russia's communes would be proletarian pleasure palaces whose 2,400 inhabitants would enjoy every amenity from lavish restaurants to beauty parlors for the ladies. Then, driving Nikita's stiletto deep into Mao's back, Economist Strumilin blandly opined: "Of course, such...
...militia captain sent for Lok Yeng, the commune's political boss. Lok, dressed in military boots and a well-tailored tunic, was a middle-aged woman, known locally as "Dead Devil." As if by habit, the workers obediently formed a circle around her and listened. "Go back to work or you will all be arrested," said Lok. "Since you have caused this disturbance, you will get no dinner." The crowd broke into a howl of rage. The militia began firing...