TWO VIEWS OF RUSSIA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXXII, Issue 2768, 28 August 1931, Page 6

TWO VIEWS OF RUSSIA.

Mr J. Baker Write, writing in the National Review, takes a rather alarmist attitude. He says:— “The Five Year Plan itself is of strategic importance. Groups of chemical factories are being constructed adjacent to the railheads of Russia’s western frontier. Other chemical groups are being constructed in invulnerable positions in the interior. Under the Five Year Plan a new military base is being constructed in the Urals. There are factories and automobiles at Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Cheliabrinsk, Yaroslav, and Nijni Novgorod. “Under the Five Year Plan many new roads and* railways and a new oil pipe line are being constructed. Their strategic value is great, their economic value in many cases small. At Tashkent, in Asiatic Russia, the seat of the School of Oriental Revolution, and as near to Peshawar as is Delhi, chemical and metallurgical groups are being built. A new railway is being constructed from Stalin-Abad to Termez on the Afghan frontier. New roads, new railways, new air services, all pointing in one direction, towards India, are being built. All the time the Soviet leaders preach the doctrine of inevitable war; all the time their agents throughout the world are busy sowing the seeds of revolution.

“Every day brings the Soviet Five Year Plan' nearer to successful completion, or to failure. This year- is the critical year. If the programme laid down is achieved by October Ist there is every possibility that the plan will be a success. “If it is, it will have a profound effect upon the whole world, for the weapon for the economic war on capitalism will be complete, backed by enormous natural resources and controlled by the hands of men whose aim is the destruction of the present system and the establishment of a world Soviet State. If, on the other hand, the plan fails, the world must be prepared to meet the last mad gamble of the revolutionary dictatorship faced with the collapse of its economic system. The gamble may

■'be war.” Mr Stuart Chase in the Atlantic Monthly says:—“The whole wheel of the Russian Five Year Plan turns on the allotment, of capital, to new enterprises. This is what balanced economy ‘ means. Just enough coal mines and iron mines to supply the steel industry; just enough blast furnaces to supply the rails, structural shapes, tractors, and pitchforks that the plan calls for, year by. year. “In five years, some thirty millions of dollars will go flooding into mills, mines, railroads, power plants., houses, schools, mechanised farms. Nearly every popeck of it has been allotted in advance. Russia, of course, has the great advantage of starting from scratch. She had no industrial structure worthy of the name to scrap or remodel; hers was a handicraft economy. “She can put her new mills where they functionally belong with an eye to raw material supply, transportation outlets, markets, as well as lab-, our. In Western civilisation we have ever jammed our mills down where labour could be most ruthlessly exploited, on the now-exploded theory that cheap men connote low costs. We have to rearrange a chaos where Russia need only build fresh and clean. “Russia is no dream