Volume 6, Number 7 · April 28, 1966
Farmer Khrushchev
By Peter Wiles
Conflict and Decision-Making in Soviet Russia: A Case Study of Agricultural Policy, 1953-1963
by Sidney Ploss
Princeton, 312 pp., $6.95
The Soviet Economy Since Stalin
by Harry Schwartz
Lippincott, 256 pp., $5.00
The great debate among Sovietologists is whether lust for power or divergence of policy is the main cause of the perennial quarreling in the Kremlin. Mr. Ploss's implicit answer is 'Both, equally'; and he proceeds to illustrate this with a study of Soviet agriculture, a source of contention in the USSR more intense perhaps than even defense and literature. Economic policy is an important branch of Kremlinology, but so far the economists have tended to ignore it. Mr. Ploss, although not himself an economist but a political scientist, manages to keep exactly the right balance between, say, Khrushchev's desire to oust Malenkov and their disagreements over such matters as the grain supply. Only a political scientist, one is tempted to say, can explain Soviet agriculture.
Review, 2001 words
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