This Day in History: A Communist newspaper in Russia said the quiet part out loud on this day in 1969.
The Soviet government newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, whose audience was the young Communist Party members who belonged to the Party's youth wing, the Komsomol, published an unusually frank admission that the Soviet Union lagged behind the capitalist Western nations in almost every aspect of economic development. Noting that a 1961 prediction by former party leader Nikita Khrushchev— that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States in its standard of living by 1970— was not going to happen and was not even close to occurring, the newspaper survey presented statistics that Soviet citizens had 6.75% as many automobiles, one-fourth the number of radios, less than half as much new clothing and half as much meat and dairy products as Americans. The survey noted, however, that the Soviets were ahead in the number of physicians, the amount spent per student on education, and the amount of housing construction.
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