Word: khrushchevism
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...Utopians think that science can transform the Atlantic Ocean into lemonade," snorted Karl Marx's coworker, Friedrich Engels. Yet who should be serving up lemonade last week than that old realist Nikita Khrushchev. In the Kremlin's marble-hailed Palace of the Congresses, addressing the Communist Party Central Committee and more than 5,000 other comrades, Nikita promised that one great force would miraculously straighten out the Soviet economic mess: Big Chemistry...
Between 1964 and 1970, Khrushchev announced, the regime will spend $46 billion to expand the Soviet chemical industry-about the same amount that now goes annually into all domestic economic development. Where would the additional money come from? Khrushchev hinted at a radical reduction in military spending. More important, he admitted that Russia would need credit and supplies, including entire factories, from the West-but not, he fumed, at "fabulous profits" to the capitalists...
...about "satisfying the requirements of the people." Moreover, new products must show better design, because it is "no longer possible to tolerate" Russian consumer goods that "look less smart than foreign articles." An even more urgent task for Big Chemistry is the production of chemical fertilizer. Its output, promised Khrushchev, would be quadrupled from 20 million tons this year to 80 million tons by 1970. This would permit Russia to catch up with the U.S., for U.S. farm surpluses are not the result of any "special American wisdom," Khrushchev insisted; it is just that the U.S. uses almost twice...
...anyone was inclined to criticize this failure, or the costly palliative of buying grain from the West, Khrushchev had the standard answer: remember how bad things were under Stalin. In 1947, to earn foreign exchange, Stalin and Molotov actually sold grain abroad while in a number of areas "people had bloated stomachs or even died from lack of food." It was the first time Moscow had admitted that starvation took place in the Soviet Union since the forced collectivization of the early 1930s...
Bulging Warehouses. Following Khrushchev's 4½-hour speech, other Communist bigwigs shook the audience with a series of angry complaints. Most collective farmers do not know the first thing about using chemical fertilizer; the Ukraine is planning a crash program to educate 4,000 "skilled fertilizer appliers." Superphosphate fertilizer arrives at the farms with only 20% of the required chemical nutrients; the rest is worthless ballast that gets lumpy and heavy in the rain. Russia has an impressive 561 soil laboratories, but most of them have only one or two employees and the wrong equipment...