Friday March 31st
1933 The Evening Post
FAMINE RULES RUSSIA
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The 5-year
Plan Has Killed the
Bread Supply
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March 31st, 1933
Evening Post [London]
By GARETH JONES
Mr. Jones is one of Mr. Lloyd George’s private
secretaries. He has just returned from an extensive tour on foot in
Soviet Russia. He speaks Russian fluently and here is the terrible story
the peasants told him.
A few ago I stood in a worker’s cottage outside
Moscow. A father and a son, the father, a Russian skilled worker in a
Moscow factory and the son a member of the Young Communist League, stood
glaring at one another.
The father trembling with excitement, lost control of
himself and shouted at his Communist son. It is terrible now. We workers
are starving. Look at Chelyabinsk where I once worked. Disease there is
carrying away numbers of us workers and the little food there is
uneatable. That is what you have done to our Mother Russia.
The son cried back: “But look at the giants of industry
which we have built. Look at the new tractor works. Look at the
Dnieperstroy. That has construction has been worth suffering for.”
“Construction indeed!” Was the father's reply:
“What’s the use of construction when you have destroyed all that’s best in
Russia?”
What that worker said at least 96 per cent. of the
people of Russia are thinking. There has been construction, but, in the
act of building, all that was best in Russia has disappeared. The main
result of the Five-Year Plan has been the tragic ruin of Russian
agriculture. This ruin I saw in its grim reality. I tramped through a
number of villages in the snow of March. I saw children with swollen
bellies. I slept in peasants’ huts, sometimes nine of us in one room. I
talked to every peasant I met, and the general conclusion I draw is that
the present state of Russian agriculture is already catastrophic but that
in a year’s time its condition will have worsened tenfold.
What did the peasants say? There was one cry which
resounded everywhere I went and that was: “There is no bread.” The
other sentence, which as the leitmotiv of my Russian visit was:
“All are swollen.” Even within a few miles of Moscow there is no bread
left. As I was going through the countryside in that district I chatted
to several women who were trudging with empty sacks towards Moscow. They
all said: “It is terrible. We have no bread. We have to go all the way to
Moscow to get bread and then they will only give us four pounds, which
costs three roubles (six shillings nominally). How can a poor man live?”
"Have you potatoes?” I asked. Every peasant I asked
nodded negatively with sadness.
“What about your cows?” was the next question. To the
Russian peasant the cow means wealth, food and happiness. It is almost
the centre-point upon which his life gravitates.
“The cattle have nearly all died. How can we feed the
cattle when we have only fodder to eat ourselves?”
“And your horses?” was the question I asked in every
village I visited. The horse is now a question of life and death, for
without a horse how can one plough? And if one cannot plough, how can one
sow for the next harvest? And if one cannot sow for the next harvest,
then death is the only prospect in the future.
The reply spelled doom for most of the villages. The
peasants said: “Most of our horses have died and we have so little fodder
that the remaining ones all scraggy and ill.”
If it is grave now and if millions are dying in the
villages, as they are, for I did not visit a single village where many had
not died, what will it be like in a month’s time? The potatoes left are
being counted one by one, but in so many homes the potatoes have long run
out. The beet, once used as cattle fodder may run out in many huts before
the new food comes in June, July and August, and many have not even beet.
The situation is graver than in 1921, as all peasants
stated emphatically. In that year there was famine in several great
regions but in most parts the peasants could live. It was a localised
famine, which had many millions of victims, especially along Volga. But
today the famine is everywhere, in the formerly rich Ukraine, in Russia,
in Central Asia, in North Caucasia-everywhere.
What of the towns? Moscow as yet does not look so
stricken, and no one staying in Moscow would have an inkling of what is
going on in the countryside, unless he could talk to the peasants who have
come hundreds and hundreds of miles to the capital to look for bread. The
people in Moscow warmly clad, and many of the skilled workers, who have
their warm meal every day at the factory, are well fed. Some of those who
earn very good salaries, or who have special privileges, look even, well
dressed, but the vast majority of the unskilled workers are feeling the
pinch.
I talked to a worker who was sitting a heavy wooden
trunk. It is terrible now,” he said. “ I get two pounds a bread a day
and it is rotten bread. I get no meat, no eggs, no butter. Before the
war I used, to get a lot of meat and it was cheap. But I haven’t had meat
for a year. Eggs were only a kopeck each before the war, but now they are
a great luxury. I get a little soup, but it is not enough to live on.”
And now a new dread visits the Russian worker. That is
unemployment. In the last few months very many thousands have been
dismissed from factories in many parts of the Soviet Union. I asked one
unemployed man what happened to him. He replied: “We are treated like
cattle. We are told to get away, and we get no bread card. How can I
live? I used to get a pound of bread a day for all my family, but now
there is no bread card. I have to leave the city and make my way out into
the countryside where there is also no bread.”
The Five-Year Plan has built many fine factories. But
it is bread that makes factory wheels go round, and the Five-Year Plan has
destroyed the bread-supplier of Russia.