SOVIET “GRAIN TAX”

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 December 1934, Page 9

SOVIET “GRAIN TAX”

DEATH SENTENCES FOR -EVASION MOSCOW, October 28. Ninety-eight per cent, of this year’s “tax in grain” has now been surrendered to the State by the Russian peasantry, according to official figures. This is about 1.500,00 tons more than at the same date last year. Until a fortnight ago these grain collections lagged, chiefly owing to party mismanagement and peasant passive resistance in Western Siberia and the Chelyabinsk province of the Urals, which by October 1 had only delivered respectively 40 and 58 per cent, of their quotas.

Faced by this evident reluctance to comply with the State’s requirements, the Soviet authorities decided to go for what the Moscow papers call “determined guidance,” with the result that by October 20 the deliveries of these two regions had risen to 83 and 93 per cent, of the plan. One form which this “guidance” took was making examples of presidents of collective farms who by various means had succeeded in evading the grain collections. A Cheliabinsk paper of October 23, which reached Moscow today, reports death sentences in the fifth trial in one week in those districts—none of them reported by the Moscow press. Tho Cheliabinsk Regional Court sentenced three peasants to be shot. One was President Demin of the “First of May Commune” for 15 years and a member of the Bolshevik party, for openly sabotaging threshing plans, understating the harvest, and declaring that “If we- fulfil (.he Stale’s grain-col-lecting plans, there will. he none left to share among ourselves.” Chcrnisheff, in. charge of oi’e harvesting gang, and Gnesdiloff, an inspector of quality, were also sentenced to death, while another Bolshevik member got seven years. “Stalin showed us,” the judge declared, “where to look for the class, enemy now —on the collective farms—and the number of eases passing through our I local court proves, the class enemy’s I desperate resistance.”