THE WEEK

• Mao Tse-tung, proclaims a New York Times headline, still “turns a neat furrow.” The better to plow us under, my dear.

• In a speech delivered at Minsk, Nikita Khrushchev said that it might be a good idea to liquidate the “machine tractor stations” that for twenty-five years have been the mechanical and administrative backbone of Soviet agriculture, and to distribute their equipment to the local collective farms that they now service. The proposal, which may be allowed to rest at this verbal stage, seems to be: a) another move, or at least threat, against Khrushchev’s party opponents, who are entrenched in the apparatus of the machine tractor stations as they were in the centralized industrial ministries; and b) an expression of the severe Soviet farm crisis, aggravated this past crop year by the collapse of Khrushchev’s own “virgin lands” program. It may be recalled that the American farm experts who visited the Soviet Union in 1955 criticized the machine tractor station system as a wasteful bureaucratic monstrosity. It is nice to know that somebody may benefit from the Eisenhower “people-to-people” exchange program.

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• Mao Tse-tung, proclaims a New York Times headline, still “turns a neat furrow.” The better to plow us under, my dear.

• In a speech delivered at Minsk, Nikita Khrushchev said that it might be a good idea to liquidate the “machine tractor stations” that for twenty-five years have been the mechanical and administrative backbone of Soviet agriculture, and to distribute their equipment to the local collective farms that they now service. The proposal, which may be allowed to rest at this verbal stage, seems to be: a) another move, or at least threat, against Khrushchev’s party opponents, who are entrenched in the apparatus of the machine tractor stations as they were in the centralized industrial ministries; and b) an expression of the severe Soviet farm crisis, aggravated this past crop year by the collapse of Khrushchev’s own “virgin lands” program. It may be recalled that the American farm experts who visited the Soviet Union in 1955 criticized the machine tractor station system as a wasteful bureaucratic monstrosity. It is nice to know that somebody may benefit from the Eisenhower “people-to-people” exchange program.