HUNGER IN RUSSIA

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3444, 12 November 1932, Page 6

HUNGER IN RUSSIA

THE NEMESIS OF COMMUNISM. ALARM IN THE KREMLIN. Official revelations indicate a serious reduction of grain and other agricultural exports, which, unless more credits are found, means cutting down purchases of machinery and other foreign equipment even more drastically than has ah-eady been done in the first six months of 1932. These are the conclusions we must draw from the number of big speeches devoted to the painful but necessary task of morally deflating the Bolshevik Party. There were, for example, those of Comrades Molotov and Kaganovich, at the Ukrainian Party Conference at Kharkov; of Comrade Jakovliev, the Commissar of Agriculture; and even of poor Comrade Nicolai Krilenko, Commissar of Justice, who i'n this general throwing out of ballast has had to jettison his class war hobbyhorse and order the "people's courts" to let ordinary citizens, especially peasants, alone, and go after the "hungar speculators"—eight of whom, managers of the giant State retail stores in Moscow and Kharkov, were shot for not resisting the temptation to steal and sell their stocks at the fabulous free market prices.

"We Didn't Know!" "We organised tens of thousands of collective farms, but we did not know how to organise the sowing or reaping," was Molotov's key phrase. He admitted grave scarcity in the Ukraine, and in spite of the famine relief measures—2,ooo,ooo tons of grain were rushed back to the Ukraine and to other belts' to save the sowings. He also admitted the failure of the cereal crops and the collapse of sugar-beet sowings in the Ukraine. "The Blackest Spot." The situation is very grave. There is a serious collapse in the Kiev and Vinnitza regions, where the real position was hidden from the central "bosses" in Kharkov until the sowings were half over. "Sugar beet failed last year, and will again fail this year," says one of the Ukrainian Conference resolutions, adding gloomily that "cattle is the blackest spot in the entire agricultural situation." The resolution orders the local party chiefs to let the peasants grow what they like, and not fool with. their crop rotations.