THE RUSSIAN JACOB

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 6 August 1931, Page 4

THE RUSSIAN JACOB

WILL A PARALLEL HOLD? "Tito Five-Year Plan was a promise that if tho Russian people would stint and starve and save, and go into tho factories and the mines and work long hours for as little as the constituted powers might dole out to them,. they would emerge at the end of that time a new people, industrialised and efficient,” says the “Saturday Evening Post.” “In essonce. tho promise dangled before the plodding masses was that a five-year-term of intensified apprenticeship would turn the country into another America, with radios in every homo and the streets of Minsk and Nijni-Novgorod black with motor cars. Despite much loud talk of results, it has already been decided that at the end of 1932, when tho first term comes to an end, another Five-Year Plan will be inaugurated. It is ovident, therefore, that the Russian Jacob is to receive far less than ho was promised for his five years of bondage and privation, and that he must submit to whatever further terms may be decreed by the Labans of Moscow. Competent observers are convinced that, after tho second Five-Year Plan has been worked out, there will be a third plan, and perhaps a fourth and a fifth; that ittakes generations and not short term stretches to remake a people; and that, finally no lasting industrial success can bo achieved by the compulsory methods of Communism. Now, it is recorded that Jacob became wroth with Laban and that he finally gathered together hi; wives and his children, his servants and his flocks, and left his scheming father-in-law, to return to the land of his own fathers. It may very well bo that the parallel will hold, and that in'due time the patient Russian, not. content to wait for such symbols of plenty as might in time be evolved out of a whole nation’s submission and unpaid toil, may turn his back on his Moscow masters.”