In 1932 he wrote in The Western Mail of his reception by Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in the Commissariat of Education in Moscow.  As she was opposed to Stalin’s policies they did not discuss politics.  It was whispered in Moscow that she and the dictator had had an argument.  Stalin had lost his temper with her and shouted:  “Look here, old woman, if you do not behave yourself I’ll appoint another widow to Lenin!”  This woman of great character was enthusiastic about the educational aims of the Communists and the need to raise production. “She mentioned production in the same tone as a Welsh minister might mention God or religion.” 

The following year in his articles he dared to expose the folly of Communist Russia’s Five Year Plan of industrialisation and collectivisation.  On his last visit to Russia in 1933, he disregarded an Embassy warning, packed his rucksack with bread, cheese, butter and chocolate and travelled hard class to the Ukraine.  There he wrote:  

I walked through the country visiting villages and investigating twelve collective farms.  Everywhere I heard the cry:  “There is no bread.  We are dying!”  This cry is rising from all parts of Russia; from the Volga district; from Siberia; from White Russia; from Central Asia and from the Ukraine - “Tell them in England we are starving and we are getting swollen.”

 

Most officials deny that any famine exists, but a few minutes after one such denial in a train I chanced to throw away a stale piece of my bread.  Like a shot a peasant dived to the floor, grabbed the crust and devoured it.  The same performance was repeated later with an orange peel.  Even transport officials and O.G.P.U. [Russian police department] officers warned me against travelling over the countryside at night because of the number of starving desperate men.  A foreign expert from Kazakhstan told me that 5,000,000 of the 11,000,000 inhabitants there had died of hunger.  After the dictator Josef V. Stalin, the starving Russians most hate George Bernard Shaw for his account of their plentiful food, but there is insufficient food and most peasants are too weak to work on the land.