SOVIET LOGIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 205, 31 August 1933, Page 21

SOVIET LOGIC.

RUSSIAN SUFFERING. JUSTIFIED BY RESULTS. LITE TO "FORGOTTEN MAN." "The wheel of revolution rolls on and breaks hearts as well as bodies," Mme. Alexandra Kollontay, Soviet Ambassador to Sweden, once said bitterly about some of her "opposition" friends in Moscow who fell suddenly from the heights of power, wrote Walter Duranty recently to the "New York Tribune" from Moscow. Mme. Kollontay, one of the most brilliant of women—the first woman ambassador in the world and a firstcladS writer—was recognised as an equal mind by Lenin, which means more than ordinary superlatives. She was thinking about herself and her fellow oppositionists when she made that remark, although she weathered the storm, but what she really meant was that in this Soviet revolution there is no pity. Farm Programme Criticised. Ice-cold, stark realism and hot fanaticism—it was those two opposite parents that bred this monstrous child. There hus been nothing like it _ since Mohammed. , '

The writer talked recently with an American agricultural expert _ who has spent three years in the Soviet Union and knows what he is talking about. He does not just take what the peasants tell him, but he knows why and how and what. He is friendly enough, but he thinks the Kremlin was mistaken in rushing collectivisation as it did. He thinks the loss of live stock and the lowered grain production might have been avoided, had been conducted more slowly. So, too, in industry, one meets equally competent foreign experts who say: "If the Bolsheviks did' not try to go so fast they would get further and it would be easier. Why can't they be more reasonable, these Bolsheviks?" Neither agricultural nor industrial experts understand two fundamental things about the Bolsheviki —first, they know their own country and the'people better than the best of foreign experts; second, they are fanatics and they do not care about the costs in blood or money. Suffering Discounted. "These Bolsheviki" have devoted their own lives to their cause. They have been imprisoned, exiled, persecuted and beaten by all the clubs that imperial autocracy could wield, and. they stuck it cut and saw it through. What do they care if others must suffer", provided their aim of building Socialism can be achieved? They say coldbloodedly: "The World War killed millions. For what? Maybe France gained by it, or Poland, or the Little Entente. And the British succeeded in sinking the German Iflpef.. But who gained really fit

"We are building a new life where the 'forgotten man,' of whom your American politicians casually talk, gets a fairer and better deal. Is that not worth sacrifices ? And, after all, those who die here are not the best and bravest and youngest, but the oldest and weakest." It ia a cruel argument, but the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is near to cruel Asia, and the proverb "One life one kopek," was a century-old expression of human values in Czarist Russia. That life in Russia to-day is hard and menaced by malnutrition and diseases that arise therefrom goes without saying, but the Kremlin believes with-fana-tic fervour that the hardships are worth while.