Word: commune
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...Plan. What went wrong was not the widely advertised series of "natural calamities"-though the communiqué talked gloomily of floods and droughts-but Chairman'Mao's own plans. More than two years ago, Mao launched his big push. Every peasant was to be put in a commune. He ordered a 10% cutback in acreage, accompanied by intensive cultivation that would release more manpower for industry. Mechanization and irrigation were supposed to keep the crop yields soaring. But though the new report brags that tractors have tripled, the total still comes to only...
...Peking called for a purge of what it called "landlord and bourgeois elements" who "have not yet been sufficiently remolded." Tacitly conceding that private incentives were necessary, China's planners fell back on what they call the "socialist society's principles of more income for more work." Commune workers would be allowed to raise private pigs and vegetables, were granted a reduced work week and two days off a month, and could go home for lunch instead of eating in the communal hall...
...production. There were the "Four Highs" (high speed, high production, high technique, high quality) and the "Five Too Manys" (too many meetings, too many cadres, too many organizations, too many reports and too many forms to fill out). Now the emphasis is on the "Three Loves" (love country, love commune, love labor), "Four Togethernesses" (cadres and commune workers eat together, live together, work together, consult together) and "Five Samenesses" (cadres eat the same fare as peasants, do same work, get same pay, receive same criticism and their dependents are treated the same...
...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...
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...