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By Gareth Jones, The Western Mail, Cardiff, Wales
Monday, October 17, 1932, Article 2 of 2
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In my first article on present-day conditions in Russia in Saturday's
Western Mail, I referred to the failure of crops under the Five-Year Plan.
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One reason why the harvest of all crops, vegetables as well as grain have
failed is that a couple of million of the most energetic kulaks (the richest
peasants) have been exiled. An account of this I heard in the morning after
a night on the wooden floor of the stuffy room which I shared with the whole
of the peasant's family.
I walked along to see the Communist president of the village Soviet, a
sharp, square jawed young man in a green military cap.
"Jump into my carriage," he said and in a few minutes we were bumping over
the fields of the collective farm.
"We have had a great victory here," he said as we looked back on the several
hundred huts in the village. "We've defeated the kulaks, those peasants who
had a lot of land and employed labour. We exiled 14 families from here and
now they're cutting wood in the forests of the north or working in Siberia.
We must root them out because they are of the enemy class. We sent the last
kulak a month ago."
Counter Revolution
"What had he done?" I asked.
He was very religious and had a sect of his own. He used to collect the
peasants in his hut and tell them that the Communist wanted the peasants to
starve but that there would be a war and when there was war the Pope of
Rome would come to their village and hang all the Communists. That was
counter-revolution. So we send him away. These kulaks are terrible. It
was they that urged the peasants to massacre their cattle.
And he told me how killing the cattle and horses throughout Russia was
another reason why food was scarce. Stalin in his speech in June 1930
estimated that one-third of the cattle and at least 1/5 of the horses of
Russia had been massacred by peasants who did not wish to give up the
animals for nothing to collective farms.
Bad Transport
Some days after my conversations in this village I was seated in a slowly
moving train which six days before had left Tashkent in Central Asia and
was now carrying me from Samara to Moscow.
I glanced out of the window and suddenly saw a mass of debris-shattered
coaches torn up rails. There had been an accident and a goods train had
obviously rattled down a slope. It gave me another clue as to why food was
so short, and that is bad transport.
Under the Five-Year Plan courageous efforts of been made to improve the
railway system. Miles of new railroads have been laid, numbers of new
Soviet locomotives have been built, yet the railways are still in a most
unsatisfactory state and it hinders the carrying of the grain and
vegetables.
It was the same in old Russia of the Tsar's where there might be grave
famine in one region and abundance in another. Today the railways are
crowded and goods train are held up for days, while the food inside the
wagons gets bad.
Mismanagement
If the trains run badly, food is badly distributed. Vegetables and fruit
have to wait days for a train. On Friday October 7th Isvestia had an
example of that. I read: "Last autumn, in the town of Kaluga, mountains of
cabbages were being heaped up in the centre of the town in Lenin Square.
The green and white pyramids grew bigger and bigger every day. Then it
started raining and only when the cabbages began to go rotten was anything
done about it. It was taken as fodder for the cattle and to feed the pigs.
In a word there was a regular 'cabbage panic' in Kaluga." Such
mismanagement is a great hindrance to the fulfillment of the Five-Year Plan.
Gloomy Forecast
It is no wonder that the chief organ of the Soviet Government contains news
of the shortage of the harvest, that it reports that the grain collections
in Ukraine where there has also been a drought. North Caucasia and the
lower Volga (the chief grain areas) have been exceedingly unsatisfactory and
that only 40 percent of the July Grain Plan and 60 percent of the August
Plan was carried out.
The government paper states that instead 25,000 tons of potatoes the vast
Ukraine has only produced 9000. It gives figures showing that the
industrial plants such a sugar beet and only fulfilled a small proportion of
the plan.
It reveals the winter sowing of grain had been in a far lower scale than
last year. It shows that the amount of vegetables in the chief towns is
disastrously small. It states that shelter is lacking for 1,500,000 head of
cattle.
In short it forecasts that in this the last winter of the Five-Year Plan the
question will still be: Will there be soup? (Second of Two Articles)
http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/soviet_articles/will_there_be_soup2.htm
The www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service (ARTUIS) appreciates the
outstanding work that has been accomplished by Gareth Jones's niece, Dr.
Margaret Siriol Colley and her son Nigel Linson Colley to find, organize,
and post the very important archives of Gareth Jones on the web. ARTUIS
first connected with the Colley's in early 2002 and have been working
closely with them since that time concerning the archives. You can view
the Colley's website and the entire Gareth Jones archives at:
http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.html
For personal and academic use only.
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