SOVIET FARMING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 206, 1 September 1933, Page 7

SOVIET FARMING.

INTENSIVE SCHEME. Destroying Recalcitrant Minorities. ENTIRE PEASANTRY AFFECTED (United P.A.-Eloetric Telegraph—Copyright) (Received 11 a.m.) LONDON, August 31. "The Times" Riga correspondent says that the Soviet has prepared a vast new agricultural and cattle breeding scheme designed to supplement the collective farming system, besides organising the settlement of remote regions, particularly Siberia, and bringing virgin soil into cultivation. The plan affects the entire peasantry and aims at absorbing refractory peasants banished . from their home, lands, also dispersing, or destroying, the recalcitrant national minorities that have been resisting the .socialisation of agriculture. The battel part of the plan has already been enforced against the Cossacks in the North Caucasus on a scale that is only now being revealed. Whole villages in the past year have been ejected from their homes and transported to the remote north and Siberia. Train loads of Cossack farmers, crowded in cattle trucks and scantily clothed, have been dispatched to unknown destinations. New populations have been imported into some villages, while others have simply been burned and the fugitives shot. Thousands of male Cossacks have been sent to convict camps. The convicts who constructed the canal connecting the White Sea and the Baltic have already begun digging a canal from Moscow to the Volga.