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Half a Century in Pursuit
The slogan proclaimed by Nikita Khrushchev exactly fifty years ago, "Catch up with and overtake America," had such a profound effect on his country's mentality that Russians today still measure everything that happens in Russia against the standards set by America.
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| A caricature on a Soviet propaganda poster of the United States oppressing other capitalist nations. |
The catchphrase "catch up with and overtake" (dognat' i peregnat' in Russian) was popular in the USSR as early as the 1920-1930s – so popular, in fact, that the traditional Russian male name Ignat was quickly joined by the derivatives Dognat and Peregnat. At the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, Joseph Stalin declared, "Lenin was right when he said as early as September 1917, before the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, that by founding a dictatorship of the proletariat, we can and should 'catch up with advanced countries and overtake them economically.' The Party's task is to speed up the tempo of the development of socialist industry and to strengthen it in the near future on the basis of the creation of the favorable conditions necessary for catching up with and overtaking the leading capitalist countries." Although Stalin compared tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union to America in terms of growth rates in his speech, on that occasion the US simply served as a typical example of a leading capitalist country (particularly since America's economic growth in the period before the stock-market crisis of 1929 was distinguished by its striking speed). The Bolsheviks were no less concerned with catching up with and overtaking Germany, France, or Great Britain, because the issue was not one of competition between the USSR and any given country but of socialism pitted against capitalism. At succeeding Bolshevik Party Congresses, the task of "catching up with and overtaking" capitalist countries chiefly in industrial manufacturing was invariably repeated as the main goal of the Soviet economy.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Cows in Russia's Krasnodar region in 2004. |
With the advent of the Second World War, the actual achievement of this goal temporarily lost much of its urgency, since the position taken by official Soviet propaganda was that the economy of the USSR had lost the equivalent of two Five-Year Plans – in other words, that the capitalist countries themselves were using military means to interfere with the Soviet Union's race to overtake them. Nevertheless, the idea of matching and surpassing the development of capitalist countries never disappeared, and the Soviet government never missed a chance to invent unusual measures by which the USSR could be shown to have pulled ahead in the race. For example, at the 19th Party Congress in 1952, Lavrenty Beria claimed, "While the USSR has increased its industrial production by 39 times in the period of Soviet rule, England needed 162 years (from 1790 to 1951) to achieve the same result, and France has increased its industrial production by only 5.5 times in the last 90 years. As for the United States of America, they have increased their manufacturing of industrial products by only 2.6 times over the last 35 years."
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| Photo: AP |
| Cowboys on horseback wind through valleys and forest land while moving cattle up from the Leonard Brooks Ranch in Jamestown, California in September 1984. |
Thus, the Soviet authorities continued to jostle for position not only with the US but also with the other capitalist countries who were allied with the Soviet Union in the coalition against Hitler. Increasingly, however, Soviet propaganda took to claiming that the spark of war was struck mainly by the United States and that the Americans, as the leaders of world imperialism and thus the USSR's chief enemies, were using other capitalist countries in pursuit of their own aggressive ends. These capitalist countries even began to enjoy something akin to sympathy from the Soviet Union: as Central Committee Secretary Georgy Malenkov said at the same Party Congress in 1952, "While pursuing imperialist policies towards England, France, and other capitalist countries, the United States of America still has the indecency, to put it lightly, to present itself as a true friend of these countries. What a good friend! It perches itself above its younger partners, it robs and enslaves them, lashing them from behind and about the ears."
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| Commemorative objects placed on the Moon by a Soviet moon lander on September 14, 1959. |
Gradually, the Bolsheviks began to lean towards the idea that it was specifically America that had to be caught and overtaken. When Soviet athletes participated in the Olympics for the first time in 1952, their task was to best not the teams of the various capitalist countries, or even the capitalist world as a whole, but the American team. Soviet propagandists noted with satisfaction afterwards that their team had succeeded, even though their figures for "top-place finishes" were questionable, to say the least: the Soviet team was reported to have won 122 top spots (versus 99 for the Americans), even though a total of only 106 medals were awarded at the Games.
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| Photo: AP, AP |
| Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, the first men to land on the moon, plant the U.S. flag on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. |
Finally, at an agriculture conference in May 1957, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev articulated the challenge specifically: "Catch up with and overtake America." At that moment, the context referred to the per-capita production of meat, butter, and milk, but Khrushchev also intended the slogan to resonate in the Soviet economy far beyond the boundaries of the agricultural sector. At an exhibition showcasing American domestic technology in Moscow's Sokolniki Park in the summer of 1959, Khrushchev got into the famous "Kitchen Debate" with Richard Nixon, who at the time was the American vice president. Nixon demonstrated that the US surpassed Russia in the production of color televisions, while Khrushchev stubbornly repeated "No, our color televisions are better!" while gurgling with laughter. It was during the discussion with Nixon at the exhibition that Khrushchev pronounced the words that would guarantee his notoriety in the US and become a symbol of the economic and political competition between the USSR and the US: "We'll get you!" (literally, "We'll show you Kuzma's mother," an idiomatic Russian expression implying a threat, which Khrushchev used again in his famous speech at the United Nations in 1960). At the exhibition, Soviet citizens at the exhibit had the opportunity to become acquainted with the preliminary results of this competition, such as free samples of Coca-Cola (or perhaps it was Pepsi – Soviet citizens were not entirely up to speed on the finer points of the American beverage market). The first fellow who made it to the head of the line and was presented with a glass of the American drink was mobbed by his fellow citizens, who all clamored to know how it tasted: "Revolting!" he cried and immediately ran to the end of the line to queue for another glass.
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| Photo: AP |
| U.S. basketball player Dwight Jones of Houston, Texas, tries to grab the ball as a Russian player goes for a score during the September 10, 1972 basketball final at the Olympic games at Munich. Russia beat the U.S. team 51-50 to win the gold medal. |
Soon after the exhibition, Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States and took the opportunity to explicate the rationale of the competition for his American hosts. In Pittsburgh on September 24, 1959, he declared: "We have a very popular slogan in our country right now – 'catch up with and overtake the United States.' This slogan has even frightened several of your fellow citizens, who see in it a threat against America. But what kind of 'threat' does this pose to you, to Americans? Our economic interests do not clash… We will stand up for ourselves, for our native land, and we are certain that we will catch up with and overtake you… We are warning you, as honest partners in competition, to gird your loins, because otherwise you might find yourselves behind us…." And in a speech broadcast on American television on September 27, the Soviet leader said, "Bear in mind that the average annual speed of industrial growth in the Soviet Union is three to five times greater than [in America]. Thus, in the next 10-12 years, we will surpass the United States both in absolute volume of industry and in per capita production. And in agriculture this goal will be achieved significantly sooner."
Khrushchev's American visit was the topic of a wide Soviet propaganda campaign, and a popular joke soon took root in the USSR that testified to the fact that Soviet citizens were starting to get fed up with the shrill and constant exhortations to catch up with and overtake America. According to the joke, US President Dwight Eisenhower suggests to Nikita Khrushchev that they see who will catch and overtake whom in a 100-meter race. The fit Eisenhower covers the distance easily, while paunchy Nikita barely manages to puff to the finish line a few minutes later. The Soviet newspaper Pravda reports on the event: "US President Eisenhower and our dear Nikita Sergeevich participated in an athletic contest; Nikita Sergeevich captured second place, while the US president finished second to last."
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| Photo: AP |
| The U.S ice hockey team rushes toward goalie Jim Craig after their upset win over the Soviet Union in the semifinal round of the XIII Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, NY on February 22, 1980. Team USA won 4-3 to advance to the final game for the Olympic gold. |
Khrushchev's visit also made a big impression on the Americans, especially since the Soviet leader constantly touted Soviet successes in space, which he openly linked to the Soviet Union's possession of a large number of intercontinental ballistic missiles of which, he told the Americans, "you still have practically none." For its part, the US set itself the task of catching up with and overtaking the USSR in space and of not losing the arms race. The US also did not neglect to compete with the USSR in sports and education.
For post-Soviet Russia's citizens and politicians, the legacy of the Khrushchev period has been a habit of both appropriately and inappropriately comparing Russia with America, though without Nikita Sergeevich's particular turns of phrase, such as "the indices for your country (America) are the highest ceiling in the capitalist world" or "you keep riding on your same old horse – we're riding a new, fresh, socialist horse, and it will be easier for us to catch up with you and overtake you."
&While in the US…
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| Photo: AP |
| Zainab Mustaffa, 2, looks at M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles owned by her father Mustaffa before he turned them over for licensing during a weapons amnesty launched on June 1, 2003 in Baghdad. The Russian-made AK-47 (left) and American-made M-16 (right) rifles continue to compete with each other in popularity around the world. |
After Nikita Khrushchev, the habit of comparing Russia with America was deeply rooted in this country, and the tendency to make such comparisons remains widespread, regardless of the speaker's position, gender, or political orientation.
Vladislav Surikov, President Putin's deputy chief of staff*, in an address before the "Business Russia" council on May 17, 2005: "I can't imagine an American television on which a politician with a 2% approval rating gabs from morning to night. That will never happen, because it's nonsense! That kind of thing is only possible here."
Sergei Ivanov, Russian first deputy prime minister in an address before journalists in the Kremlin on April 26, 2007 concerning Russia's decision to suspend its participation in a key arms-control treaty: "Why should Russia unilaterally fulfill all of the responsibilities it has taken upon itself, while other countries, on various grounds, do not take these responsibilities upon themselves? Can you imagine, for example, a situation in which the president of the United States of America, the commander-in-chief, cannot transfer, for example, one brigade from Texas to California, because there are restrictions on him that other nations aren't facing? It's the same thing."
Dmitry Oreshkin, a political scientist, in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets on April 20, 2007 concerning the violent suppression by police of protest marches in several Russian cities: "The Kremlin is making a monstrous mistake: heavy-handed suppression is going to inculcate in people not contempt for [National Bolshevik movement leader Eduard] Limonov but for the authorities. And this irritation is accumulating – just look at the results of the regional elections. If our country were democratic, like the US, no one would pay any attention to that nut Limonov."
Marat Safin, Russian tennis champion, in an interview with Argumenty I Fakty on April 11, 2007: "Understand that if I lived in the US, I would make three or four times more. But we have different values, and it's more important to us to live in peace and quiet."
Pavel Borodin, secretary of state of the United State of Russia and Belarus, in an interview with Argumenty I Fakty on May 16, 2001: "Clinton's or Bush's plane costs $1.55 billion in America. Yeltsin's or Putin's plane costs $70 million. That's a big difference. If I were given the kind of money that they get in America, I would build not just one plane, but several dozen."
Gennady Raikov, chairman of the Russian People's Party, in an interview with Vremeni Novostei on October 27, 2003: " Yukos is a large private oil company whose leadership has violated well-defined laws. The leadership of the company has been charged with nonpayment of taxes for the sum of around one billion dollars. If this had occurred in America, it would be a shorter trial and a shorter conversation."
Boris Nadezhdin, Russian State Duma deputy from the Union of Right Forces, in an address to the Duma on April 4, 2003: "If the US had adopted such a [restrictive] citizenship law, it would now be a small, irrelevant country populated by Indians."
Alexander Veshnyakov, Russian Central Elections Committee chairman, in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets on November 18, 2003: "If a presidential candidate in America refused to participate in debates watched by the entire country, he would be a political corpse."
Lyudmila Alekseeva, Moscow Helsinki Group chairwoman, in an interview with Novaya Gazeta on October 27, 2003: "Our government is not only to blame. Everywhere, even in the most democratic countries, the authorities would very much like to behave towards society in an authoritarian manner, like a dictator. I can assure you that Bush would love to start closing newspapers tomorrow morning. But in the US the authorities cannot allow themselves to act like that – civil society is very strong there. Comparing Russia with America, I often say that if an evil magician knocked out all social organizations in America while leaving everything else untouched, I assure you that within half a year the American bureaucracy would be pushing its citizens around and mistreating them just like ours does."
Alexei Mitrofanov, a Russian State Duma deputy from the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, in an address on Radio Mayak on June 19, 2000: "For example, Russia has tested the capacity to launch ballistic missiles from underwater and from satellites in near-Earth orbit. We brought a satellite down recently. And there was coverage [of the event] only in [the newspaper] Vesti. If that had happened in America, they would have been trumpeting about it for three months."
*All positions listed are at the time the comment was made
International Reserve Assets (billions of US dollars at the end of each year; as of the end of March in 2007)
| Year | Russia | USA |
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| 2007 | 338.83 | 66.551 |
| 2006 | 303.732 | 65.895 |
| 2005 | 182.24 | 86.824 |
| 2004 | 124.541 | 86.824 |
| 2003 | 76.938 | 85.938 |
| 2002 | 47.793 | 79.006 |
| 2001 | 36.622 | 68.654 |
| 2000 | 27.972 | 67.647 |
| 1999> | 12.456 | 71.516 |
| 1998 | 12.223 | 81.755 |
| 1997 | 17.784 | 69.954 |
| 1996 | 15.324 | 75.09 |
Sources: Russian Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve
Vlast columnist Sergei Minaev
All the Article in Russian as of May 14, 2007
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