74 SOCIAL SCIENTIST succeeded to come up with rough and ready solutions which worked. But costs mounted, and sloth set in; primitivism and waste tended to go together. The major commands got transmitted and obeyed, which is why the Soviet authorities were able to implement, even if not always altogether comfortably, the principal aspects of the Feldman schemata of economic expansion, historically the single most important factor explaining the breakneck speed of Soviet economic growth. Detailed, specific commands, on the other hand, were often messed up. The failure of Soviet agriculture is therefore not difficult to explain: for ensuring a breakthrough in farm production and productivity in a command economy, there is need for both detailed planning and transmittal and acceptance of detailed signals; this was beyond the capability of the crude communications apparatus the autocratic arrangements were heir to. Errors at the micro level multiplied, while, perhaps because of the inertia of large numbers, the macro calculations still came out right. But the mechanism has been increasingly malfunctioning in the past couple of decades. Discontent has spread in the farm sector in the wake of the failure to meet plan targets. Given the inter-dependence of sectors, what happened in agriculture soon affected the rest of the economy, including external accounts. This, then, according to Lewin is a particular irony of history: the Soviet party leadership had put their trust on a peasant model, but in course of time the model let them down the most in the working of the agrarian sector. Any snide comments, Lewin would however argue, are uncalled for. For it is still the achievements in the post-revolutionary period which have opened the floodgate of contradictions within the system. Precisely because the primitive-autocratic model succeeded in bringing about a qualitative transformation, there is now widespread perception of its limitations. Soviet society has come a long way since 1917; it has come a long way on account of what the people, under the guidance and inspiration of the communist party, have been able to attain over the decades. The advances are not just in the sphere of defence and economics; the Soviet people can rejoice not merely at the fact that they are today the second largest industrial nation in the world or that their technological success in several important spheres have outstripped the achievements of nearly every other country. The transformation is equally, if not more, remarkable in the areas of culture and education. The nation has, with unbelievable speed, stepped out of the Middle Ages. The shift of population away from the villages and the scale of industrialization have accelerated the process of urbanization, industrial and scientific-technical development, mass schooling and quality schooling, communications and arts, state policies and myriad spontaneous events changed the nation's overall social, professional, and cultural profile, and the social structure underwent a significant qualitative transformation. Workers in the national economy soared from 24 million before war to