‘To catch up and overtake’ the West

In 1957, millions of Soviet citizens heard with utmost amazement the slogan proclaimed by Nikita Khrushchev ‘to catch up and overtake the United States’ (dognat’ i peregnat’ Ameriku), which promised to achieve the construction of communism in the Soviet Union in the following twenty years. Khrushchev first used this slogan at an agriculture conference on 22 May 1957 in Leningrad, where he promised to ‘catch up and overtake America in the per-capita production of meat, milk and butter’ (‘dognat’ i peregnat’ Ameriku po proizvodstvu myasa, moloka i masla na dusu naseleniya’). However, the context was rarely mentioned in Soviet publications. The immediate propaganda use of Khrushchev’s slogan also disregarded the fact that it had not been approved by the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in June 1957. Georgy Malenkov, whose criticism of Khrushchev’s intention to overtake the US was particularly harsh in referring to the state of the Soviet Union’s agricultural production, considered the project ‘unrealistic’ and ‘wrong’. ¹ However, Malenkov was ousted from the party’s hierarchy later that month by Khrushchev himself. Many decades later, Gorbachev raised a similar criticism when he assessed Khrushchev’s project as unrealistic. ²