THE FIVE-YEAR FIASCO

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 264, 3 August 1932, Page 5

THE FIVE-YEAR FIASCO

Russia’s Plan a Failure

Dr. S. H. Rolierts, Challis Professor of History at Sydney University, addressing the members of the Rotary Club, said that Russia’s five-year plan having been shattered, there had followed talk of a fifteen-year plan. Now came the fifty-year plan. The plan had never been anything but a bogey, built up by first-class propaganda and American publicity. . If it had not’ been for Russia s IbOO imported technicians, proceeded Dr. Roberts, the world would have had a very different concept of the five-year plan. The plan would succeed only if the Bolsheviks could change the nature of Russia’s 160,000,000 people, and if the world would acquiesce in its own ruin. The oply alternative was to impose the plan by military force. There, too, the Bolsheviks found themselves faced by inexorable fact. Russia’s military strength had always been overestimated. The spectre of Mukden was over the country, as the Battle of Tannenberg had proved. Russia could not undertake foreign -wars, because of the fear of uprisings at home.

In ■ practice, continued Dr. Roberts, Bolshevism had gone. From the economic point of view the plan never had a hope of success. Moderately satisfactory results were obtained, on paper, during the first two years, because the couiltry had sunk so far during the war years. The year 1931 had seen less than half of the anticipated production, and there was now scarcely a field in which the Bolsheviks had not admitted failure. The country had known an unfavourable trade balance of 311,000,000 roubles in the last two years. The main exports of oil, wheat, and timber had fallen away lamentably ; yet it was on these that Russia depended for the foreign credits which alone made possible the continuance of the five-year plan. Discipline and coercion had failed, and there had been failure to evolve an efficient dictator.

The main importance of Bolshevism, said Dr. Roberts in conclusion, was not economic but political. It persisted because of the traditional immobility of 160,000,000 people, who were accustomed to be ruled from above and who were incapable of organising against tyranny.