K's agricultural policy was pretty dumb.His rule was also the heyday of Lysenkoism, very bad for agriculture. Nonetheless, the Soviet economy was going pretty much great guns under K, granted, it was coming back from less than nothing after the war devastation. But in the early 60s, serious observers, including hostile ones, looked at Soviet growth rates and believed that K's boast of overtaking the US economically by 1980 or thereabouts was credible, hard as it is to believe in retrospect. jks  Michael Perelman <michael@ecst.csuchico.edu> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">How about opening up the "virgin lands"? On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 07:15:35AM -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote: > > Khrushchev was great rather than competent. His tremendous domestic achievement was windind down the terror state and closing the Gulag archipelago. A technician, a nuts-and-bold guy, however, he was not. > Putin, with his colorless technocracy, reminds me of Kosygin, actually. > "ChrisD(RJ)" <CHRISD@RUSSIAJOURNAL.COM>wrote: > ---</BLOCKQUOTE> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/webhosting/mail_tagline/evt=7748/*http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/wh3/prod/">Yahoo! Web Hosting</a> - establish your business online