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The Manchester Guardian, May
8th 1933.
Letter in Support of Malcolm
Muggeridge
The Peasants in Russia
Exhausted Supplies
To the Editor of the Manchester
Guardian,
Sir, - In a series of articles
published in the "Manchester Guardian" on March 25, 27 and 28, your
correspondent [Malcolm Muggeridge] described his visit to the North Caucasus
and the Ukraine and summed up his impressions as follows:- "To say that
there is famine is to say much less than the truth…The fields are neglected
and full of weeds; no cattle are to be seen anywhere; and few horses; only
the military and the G.P.U. are well fed, the rest of the population
obviously starving, obviously terrorised."
Attempts have been made in your
columns to discredit the views of your correspondent. The "Moscow Daily
News" has written on him an article entitled "When is a Lie not a Lie?" May
I as a liberal-minded man who has devoted four years of university life to
the study of the Russian language and history, and who visited about 20
different villages in the Ukraine, the Black Earth district and the Moscow
region, as recently as March of this year, fully confirm his conclusions,
and congratulate him on having been the first journalist to have informed
Britain of the true situation of Russian agriculture?
The villages which I visited
alone on foot were by no means in the hardest-hit parts of Russia, but in
almost every village, the bread supply had run out two months earlier, the
potatoes were almost exhausted, and there was not enough coarse beet, which
was formerly used as cattle fodder, but has now become a staple food of the
population, to last until the next harvest. Many cottages had not even
cattle fodder, and the peasants assured me that the occupants of those
cottages were dying of hunger. In each village I received the same
information – namely that many were dying of the famine and that about
four-fifths of the cattle and the horses had perished. One phrase was
repeated until it had a sad monotony in my mind, and that was: "Vse Pukhili"
(all are swollen, i.e. from Hunger), and one word was drummed into my memory
by every talk. That word was "golod" – i.e., "hunger" or "famine". Nor
shall I forget the swollen stomachs of the children in the cottages in which
I slept.
Communists will reply that
these conclusions are based on talks with malevolent "kulaks," who are
counter-revolutionary. If that is so, I can only say that almost every
Russian peasant must be a kulak, for the unanimity of the peasants’ hatred
of the Bolsheviks was one of the most striking features of this visit to the
Soviet Union. On previous visits to Russia I have also been deeply
impressed by the passionate opposition of the peasantry to the Communists.
Your correspondent’s views were
fully confirmed by my visits to the villages but by the most reliable
official foreign representatives in the Soviet Union. Moreover one has only
to speak to hundreds of peasant-beggars, who have been driven by hunger from
many parts of Russia into the towns, to find confirmation of your
correspondent’s statements.
As a liberal and a pacifist, I
wish that something could be done to relieve the suffering of the peasants
in Russia, which, according to foreign observers and to the peasants
themselves, is worse than in 1921. Already efforts are being made to
succour many of the German colonists, whose letters to their fellow
countrymen are tragic. These letters, some of which I have seen,
contain such passages as the following:- "We have not had for one and a half
weeks anything except salt and water in our stomachs, and our family
consists of nine souls." From the Volga district we read: "I went out
to seek him and I went out to feed him, but I couldn’t find him. One
cannot get lost on the road. It is marked by human bodies... There is
nobody left among all our friends who has anything left… Your brother’s four
children died of hunger." The Evangelical Church in Germany is
helping, and those who wish to assist are advised to write to the
committee, "Bruder in Not" (Brothers in Need), Berlin N24, Monbijouplatz 2.
I hope that fellow liberals who
boil at any injustices in Germany or Italy or Poland will express just one
word of sympathy with the millions of peasants who are victims of
persecution and famine in the Soviet Union.
Yours, &c.
Gareth Jones
Reform Club, Pall Mall, London.
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