Friday March 31st
1933 The Evening Post
FAMINE RULES RUSSIA
---
The 5-year
Plan Has Killed the
Bread
Supply
---
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 fluentlyand 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.
|