|
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
(PUBLISHED
LETTER TO EDITOR OF MANCHESTER GUARDIAN FROM GARETH)
The
Manchester Guardian, May
8th 1933.
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 described his visit
to the North Caucusus 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.
May
3.
|
|