412
PARTISAN REVIEW
peasant
is
no longer what he was. Good! Then you have to trust
this peasant. He's also got a mind."
"A wolf didn't eat it up," slyly confinned Tsipyshev.
"There you are! It's not enough just to teach us--you have to
listen to us. But the way things are, everything comes from above,
always from above. The plans are handed down from above, chair–
men from above, the harvest yield estimate from above. There's no
time to persuade people, and it isn't even necessary, it's easier not
to. Just hand down directives, in other words, and recommend. They
stopped cultural work-it was too much trouble. Clubs and reading
rooms function only in reports. There's no one to give lectures and
talks. What's left are campaigns for getting things ready and getting
things in; five-day, ten-day, monthly deadlines...."
Konoplev stopped for breath and Piotr Kuz'mich took advan–
tage of this to put in
aJ
word: "It happens this way, too: the wedge
won't go in, so the tree's at fault; as they say, the tree has a rotten
spot. Just try and disagree in the district committee. They give you
advice, recommendation, and it's not advice, but an order.
If
you
don't carry it out, that means you've slackened the reins.
If
the
kolkhozniks don't agree, that means, it's a political failure."
"But why a failure?" Konoplev almost shouted, "Aren't we
concerned at heart with the same cause, do we have different in–
terests?"
"Well, you know, brother, they don't p.at the district com–
mittee on the head, either, if anything goes wrong. They have to
deliver, too, and how!"
"And how, and how!" Konoplev fumed, "Next to us, in the
Gruzdikhino district, things are done differently. Shurin came here
a few days ago and he says that there the chainnen don't quake in
their shoes when the chief calls them up to the district committee.
There isn't this fear. The secretary comes to the kolkhoz infonnally,
and talks with people not as though he were carrying out a written
directive."
On the shelf in the front corner the radio started up more
audibly. It still crackled and hissed like an expiring foam fire ex–
tinguisher, but now through the crackling and hissing, instead of
music, someone's staJrnmering speech was coming through. Letters
from the virgin lands were being transmitted. Some young fellow
