SOVIET AND PEASANTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19924, 18 April 1928, Page 11

SOVIET AND PEASANTS.

LOTTERY LOAN SCHEME.

SUBSCRIPTIONS EXTORTED.

DRASTIC MEASURES USED.

(Received April 17, C.15 p.m.) Times Cable LONDON, April 17

The Riga correspondent of tho Times says the Soviet has published ail extraordinary explanation of why it found it necessary to continue the agitation to persuade the peasants throughout Russia to take up its lottery loan of £10,000,000 after the Commissar of Finance, N. P. Briukhanoff, had officially announced that it had been fully subscribed. The newspaper Izvestia publishes a decree stating that the total amount of loan money now required is £15,000,000. This means that a sum of £5,000,000 has yet to be subscribed.

Briukhanoff originally calculated that the peasants' £15,000,000 would not be invested and be hoped to attract twothirds of that sum. The Soviet originally announced the first lottery in connection with the loan would be drawn in October, 1928, but when the peasants were buying the loan slowly it advanced tho date to July, 1928. It now advertises the date of the drawing as May 15, 1928. At the same time it urges its provincial agents to use every effort to make the loan a success, but it deprecates the necessity for seizing the peasants' belongings to secure tho money.

Tho extraction of money from Russian peasants is not the only method being employed by the Soviet. Their grain is also being taken from them. A recent despatch to tho Daily Telegraph from its Berlin correspondent said :— Every day tho news received from Moscow depicts the difficulties of the Bolsheviks in a gloomier light. Even the correspondent of the Berliner Tagehlatt speaks in a telegram of to-day's date about "tho considerable perturbation and friction of every kind in the rural districts." These phenomena have arisen out of the measures adopted to wrest from the wealthier peasants their hidden stores of grain,which are wanted for export as payment for indispensable foreign raw materials and plant. Extensive use is being made of a clause in the penal code which renders it illegal for a farmer to withhold from the market more than three and ahalf tons of corn. The poorer inhabitants of the villages are stimulated to betraying their neighbours by a reward of one quarter of all illegal stocks which they disclose / In Siberia, where, after brief improvements last month, the sources of grain have aqain begun to run dry, many of the "Koulaki" have been sentenced to terms of from six months' to two years' imprisonment for concealing their stocks from the Governmental agents. However, these punitive measures have not even relieved the shortage of food in the towns, where, he says, the available supplies "will have to be more energetically economised than hitherto." In Moscow during the past week or two there have been queues outside the provision shops and prices have "greatly increased." Potatoes have doubled in price since a year ago, and tea simply does not exist in many parts of the country. The wellinformed Moscow correspondent of the chief Menshevik organ published in Berlin states that, at any rate in some of the chief agricultural areas, the peasants are now forbidden to take their produce to the markets of the nearest towns, and must dispose of it, either at the Government collecting points, or to co-opera-tive societies. The latter have ceased to sell manufactures for cash, and part with them only in barter against corn, For a pound of soap they ask fourteen or fifteen pounds of rye; for a yard of cheap cotton material twenty-five pounds. The same correspondent mentions tho interesting fact that during the recent strike in a big factory of agricultural machinery at Liuberetsi, one of the outer industrial suburbs of Moscow, workmen put forward a demand that Trotzky should be recalled from banishment. According to the Rul. which sometimes gets nuick and accurate information from Russia, sugar and fats disappeared comnletely from the Moscow shops yesterday. The Moscow correspondent of the Warsaw Courier states that the problem of collecting grain to feed the towns and for export "is assuming a catastrophic character." Every day dozens of telegrams reporting serious disturbances are received in Moscow from the agricultural districts. Even some of the Bolshevik papers admit that these disorders were Hie cause of Stalin's premature return to Moscow from the Caucasus.

WAR ON RELIGION.

NEW ORDER TO PRIESTS.

AMAZING PLEDGES WANTED

(Received April 17, 6.15 p.m.) United Service. LONDON', April 17. Tho Berlin correspondent of tho Daily Mail says tho Bolsheviks havo ordered Roman Catholic clergy in Russia to sign an impossible declaration pledging them selves to accept the Soviet's anti-religious legislation. This includes tho prohibition of tho teaching of religion to children under tho ago of 16, refusing obedience to their bishops and abstaining from relations with tho Pope except through the Soviet. Priests who fail to sign the declaration will be transported to the dreaded Solovetz Island in the White Sea.